here-comes-the-jessrage

Ok. So, I spent ALL day yesterday finding new hosting, getting royally screwed by 2 companies, finally finding one, and moving my site. Why? Because the host I have been with for the last 3 years was threatening to suspend lady-jess.com. I hadn’t been checking one of my email accounts, but did on Saturday. There was a notice that my WoW blog was moved to a “stabilization” server because it was using too much CPU. Not bandwidth mind you, and not storage those are both “unlimited”.  I was passing their 1% CPU limit. Frankly I didn’t even know there WAS one. You see, where dreamhost mentions this limit, Lunarpages does not. And they didn’t even tell me WHICH file was the problem until the 3rd day of tickets back and forth. I understand shared hosting has these limits no matter where you go but 1% is pretty extreme, and the ones i looked at did mention it.

No matter what I did, disabling my Featured Content Gallery on the front page (after they finally said that was the file), turning on WP Supercache as per their suggestion, it was still over their limit.  I did some googling this issue and found alot of angry Lunarpages customers with the same problem. The common complaint being sure you get unlimited bandwidth and storage, but if you have any real traffic you won’t get to use it before your CPU use passes 1%. Mind you this blog gets on average 200 unique visits a day. That isn’t much really. And I was passing that limit.

Here comes my next problem. I am paid through October with them. Because my passing their CPU limit breaks the agreement, if they shut me down, no refund.  That’s not good. So I decided to move JUST lady-jess, and leave my other two sites there. Since only this one was causing the problems. Cue the host shopping.

The first choice I made was justhost. That was a mistake. I ordered my package, paid for it, the transaction was completed according to paypal. I got no username and password. I got another email with my receipt, and one mentioning I should have my welcome letter. I responded that I didn’t. I received an email back saying my order wasn’t completed, but hey, I could click this link for 50% off and try again! Ok, thought I…they misunderstood, I tried explaining it again…same reply. Repeat that process 6 times.  They bounced me up to tech support, who then said I’d have a reply in the hour, but for faster service click this link for only $19.99 I could have faster support. /facepalm. I told THEM the same thing, and got bounced back to billing just to start ALL over again. I filed a complaint through paypal. Now I wait for a refund.

Then, I went to my second choice. Dreamhost. I had a promo code thanks to Siha (right column of her blog if your looking) for 50% off. Which made 1 year cost the same as the 1 month+activation I was looking at. Sign me up! Oh look INSTANTLY I have my ftp and log in info, access to my admin panel! Good first step right there. So, I set my domain to point there, I install wordpress. I drive myself and everyone in BA chat crazy trying to get this blog moved. Most of the time I couldn’t SEE my main page without a redirect to lunarpages. Til Fim told me how to dump my DNS cache from my computer. That helped for a while. At least I could see my dashboard for wp. Then came moving the database in. I used this fine tutorial for Bigdump but got caught in a horribad error that I couldn’t figure out. I don’t know SQL past “this is where my posts end up”. Matt asked me if I compressed it…which, I did not. So, I removed some unneccessary tables (twittertools, and an old gallery install), exported it again gzipped, and poof!  It imported. YES! now to set up my config to point at it. Done. WHY isn’t it working!!!! This is where I learned, that there’s an important line in there saying “prefix” The prefix for the tables in my new installation are different from the old. Fixed that, and my blog posts appeared.

Today…I got another message from the tech at lunarpages.

Hello,

We have noticed that your account’s average resource usage is now within the acceptable limits for a shared hosting package. We will observe your usage for next 24 hours and if usage is ok, we will move it back to production server.

Best regards,

Disha Kaur
System administrator team

Really? Might that have something to do with the fact that IT IS NOT THERE ANYMORE!!!?? I also ordered dreamhosts $15/month virtual private server, just to cover my butt. I’m happy to say everything worked once I figured it out, and once maintenance ends by Elune, I am playing WoW!