A hosting malfunction.

If you’re reading this article, it means the website is up and running as it’s supposed to.

I should put a notice like this everywhere, but why would I need to in the first place? If you’re a regular on my website, then you might have noticed some changes in the past week.

A new design, some tweaks here and there but the most important thing of all is the fact that I have changed the hosting provider. Why would I need to do this?

The time has come! Switching hosting providers! *sigh*

— Stefan Cosma (@stefanbc) April 24, 2014

By the time I posted the above tweet, my website was down and my hosting account suspended because of one issue.

It all started with an email I got. I received one of those automated emails, notifying me that CPU quota limit has been exceed. Weird! After some investigating, plugin disabling, cache enabling and some server monitoring I came to the conclusion that everything was good to go. I was so wrong!

Two days later, boom, another similar email. Investigated the issue and tried optimizing the website even more than before.
All was good until one day when I was doing a random visiting on my website that I found out what happened. I have Port Monitor set up to notify me when something happens. I noticed something was different when I only got one email from Port Monitor telling me that the website was down. Usually I get 2 of them, one that says it’s down and another that says it’s up.

It was a dreadful 403, a developers nightmare! Alright it was time to take action.
Opened up a support ticket on the hosting provider’s website and 5 hours later got a response. I should mention that I had only an old local backup of my website and I asked them to activate my account so I can at least backup it up properly. I managed to back it up properly and after 20 mins it was suspended again.

I knew I had to do something about this so I started looking for a different hosting provider. After many hours of searching and reading reviews I found one.

I immediately started moving everything to the new hosting but there was a problem. The old account was suspended so I could not access it and remove it so I could register the domain to the new hosting. Ticket time again. They fixed the issue and 1 hour later all was set up on the new hosting. But…

DNS propagation, I loathe thy! :(

— Stefan Cosma (@stefanbc) April 24, 2014

It was 1am when everything was back to normal. After almost 24 hours of inactivity it was then and there I decided it was time for a new look, a new start.

So what can we learn from this story? For starters, choose your hosting provider carefully. Chose one that can resolve your issues quickly without any hassle, that can provide easy solutions and best of all on that suits your needs, and if all else fails you can always set up your own VPS!

I hope you won’t have to go through all the stuff that I went through to get my website up and running properly but if you already did I would love to hear your story. Just drop a line down below!

Until next time, code long and prosper!

Stefan