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Over the past few days, if you’ve tried to reach this blog and were unable to, I apologize. First of all, let me state that the reason behind the mysterious “Suspension” of my HostGator account, was simply a surge of traffic thanks to StumbleUpon. You’ve got to love it, you post a few pictures of topless chicks, and a small child humping a woman and you get enough traffic to get your account suspended.

I believe it was Saturday that I made the first Stumble Of The Day post, and within about 20 minutes, my adsense impressions jumped from about 20 to 150. Thanks to Adsense Notifier for Firefox for making it possible for me to simply look down at the bottom of my browser and see my stats. Shortly after submitting the post to Digg, I noticed that it received about 10 Diggs, almost instantaneously, and then all hell broke loose.

A notification of an email popped up in the lower corner of my screen, and the subject was “HostGator : Abuse”. I quickly went to my homepage, only to see that my site was no more, and it had instead, been replaced by a rather ugly page stating that I needed to contact support. This is where the real headache came in.

Upon reaching my inbox, I opened the new message from HostGator. Here’s a link to the emails.

Now note, that all I was told was that my website was using up too much of the server’s CPU. I wrote back, and simply asked them what I needed to do to fix the problem and get my site back up quickly as possible. (This was not the first time this had happened)

Long story short, for the rest of Saturday, and Sunday, and even through part of Monday, this blog was offline, and I was still bantering back and forth with HostGator. I originally chose HostGator because I had heard about the “Excellent” customer support! Not the case here. In the emails, (Links are at the bottom of this post) over the course of three days, several things took place.

HostGator suggested:

  1. Upgrade to a dedicated server (They wanted me to pay them $160+/month after all of this shit?)
  2. Move to another host (Which I did)

HostGator was:

  1. Very, VERY rude to me. (So much for that “Excellent” support)
  2. Nonchalant about the whole issue at times, and didn’t seem to care if my site ever got back online!
  3. UNINFORMATIVE! (It took three days before they told me what the actual problem was)
  4. Lying to me over the phone (I asked to speak with a supervisor, and received the support rep. I had talked to earlier that day)

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Finally, on Monday, when shifts changed I guess, I received an email from a very nice support representative, who explained to me that it wasn’t the total amount of traffic that caused me to need a dedicated server, but, the surges of traffic all at the same time. Basically, (And this representative explained it very clearly to me) since my site only gets about 150-200 visits per day, the daily traffic is no problem, and doesn’t require a dedicated server, but when 125 of those visitors all visit at the same time, that’s where the problem comes in. Beforehand I hadn’t thought of it that way, and didn’t actually take into account that might have been a problem. I was just so angry that my site was down and they weren’t telling me what to do to fix it, that when they told me I needed a dedicated server, I simply couldn’t understand why my low traffic blog needed a dedicated server.

Now, I am switched over to MediaLayer, who was very helpful in the transfer of my site, and also, who offers “Application Hosting” which is ideal for Wordpress Blogs. Also, upon signing up, I noticed in the package description, that MediaLayer’s Application Hosting is able to withstand surges in traffic, from Digg, StumbleUpon, Etc., where as with other hosting companies, your account will get suspended at the slightest surge. This seemed to fix my problem and I’m happy now. Hosting at MediaLayer is about the same price as HostGator, and the support is a whole hell of a lot nicer. I sure hope MediaLayer is able to handle my site’s “surges” without suspending me. I was told that with the installation of WP-SuperCache, that I shouldn’t have a problem. We’ll just have to try it out I guess.

All in all, I would have to suggest that if you’re looking for a hosting company, choose any one you want, as long as it’s not HostGator. In these emails, you can further grasp an understanding of how I was treated. At times, it seemed to me as if they were just messing with me just because they could.

Don’t agree with this post? Leave a comment, we’ll go back and forth too.
“If you stay too long inside my memory, I’ll trap you in a song tied to a melody, and I’ll keep you there so you can’t bother me”

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