Forum Moderators: phranque
My question is this: is this kind of error really unacceptable from a professional hosting company? I'm not an expert on server administration, but it seems they should have safeguards in place to prevent this sort of thing, or alarms should ring if it does occur. Also, I assume this error message means whoever tried to access the site couldn't, so if Googlebot paid a visit while the site was down they could be dropped out of the index.
I'm going to recommend that the client switch hosts, but I also wanted to get more informed opinion about whether this is an honest mistake or simple incompetence. The site is a small one (no db) running on Windows. No clue when the problem might be resolved.
Does the host offer "unlimited space" to customers? If so,
that might be what the cause is. I would guess some host
simply put X number of "unlimited space" accounts on a
shared server and not worry too much if some folks get
crowded out. Sad, but no "minimum standards" are required
of hosting companies.
This is of course why one would not want to host with any
company offering unlimited space, since there is no such
thing an an unlimited space hard drive. The host is just
hoping the fact that most folks don't use too much space
will result in things working out for them.
The same applies to hosting offers of "unlimited bandwidth".
Bandwidth is not free. They just hope nobody uses too much.
To me, offering "unlimited" space or bandwith is unethical,
since in reality space and bandwidth are not unlimited/free.
There also is the aspect of host "overselling" their space
and bandwidth resources. As noted above, host realize
most customers don't use up all the space and bandwidth
their hosting account permits, so some oversell the same
space multiple times, hoping not too many people use up
too much of their space all at once. That may be what
happened in your case -- and now they are moving accounts
around to compensate, sicne they said to "check back to
see when the problem has been eliminated".
My understanding is that due to the hyper-competitive nature
of the shared hosting industry today, many, many host do in
fact oversell. They feel they have to in order to present
a competitive offer to the public as far as the amount of
space and bandwith they offer for X dollars a month. They
basically play an actuarial game of balancing space and
bandwidth overall use between their customers.
While some host don't oversell, it's still essential for a
host to monitor server resource usage and spread their
customer accounts over their servers to balance the load.
A host that does this and does it well -- regardless of if
they oversell or not -- is one thing to look for in a host.
Heck, a single shared hosting customer with a forum or poorly
written scripts/programs can bog down the server even if
they aren't using up much space. That's why it's important
that host are good at monitoring server resource useage --
and are proactive in minimizing the impact of a resource
hogging client upon everyone else.
HTH,
Louis
Just a thought.
I'll look into the htaccess idea. One thing this incident reminds me of is how hard it is to monitor server issues. I don't want to pay for monitoring services, but sure would like to know when there are problems.
basically it uses the ErrorDocument directive to route the output to its reporting script, which is a great idea
there are other services (some even free) that will ping your server or request the http header on regular intervals to make sure it up
