I’ve been working on a site called Popvine for the past few months and everything was going great until the other night. Monday night I pulled down the htaccess authentication and I immediately started receiving timeout and 500 server errors. I built Popvine on a shared hosting box at Godaddy on top of a Wordpress installation. Last night I spent three hours on the phone with Godaddy (Not to mention their horrible customer service and turn around time) and was told that I was using to many CPU resources and that I could not run a particular script on their box. Unfortunately, the script they told me not to run is the engine of Popvine. I have a script called WP-o-Matic that runs a cron job every fifteen minutes and harvests feeds. Godaddy disabled my site by overwriting my root index file and moved files around, which I was told they don’t do on the phone while watching them do it in a FTP application. Here is a response I received from Godaddy:
Our administrators have alerted us to a problem with your site. It appears that your site was calling a wp-o-matic script that is filling up the apache error log. e have disabled the /wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cron.php script, as well as disabled the cron job running against your database. We are requesting that your remove the wp-o-matic script from the account. Please note, if the script should be re-enabled, and this issue returns, your account would be subject to suspension. If you should have any questions, please feel free to either reply to this message, or you can call us directly…
I have a question Godaddy! Why are there 743 other sites hosted on the same box as Popvine, and why did you overwrite and move my files around? With the dissatisfaction I have with Godaddy I’ve decided to move my site to another host and get a virtual dedicated box that can withstand feed harvesting.
Goodbye Godaddy!
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8 Comments
On Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 3:35:pm
Godaddy has always battled with providing decent customer service. You definitely get what you pay for. In this case, not much.
You should check out Slicehost
On Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 10:13:pm
I ended up going with a DV server at Media Temple - which I really like! This site is currently on a Grid box and I’ve been using MT for several years now without any problems. I’ve heard good things about Slicehost.
On Wednesday, July 16, 2008 at 8:58:pm
What causes the stuttering styling when scrolling down the page in Popvine?
Turn on task manager or resource manager then scroll down Popvine, as opposed to scrolling down this site, you get 5-10% CPU resources used and it looks like the styling is trying to re-render in the page’s text.
Is it a javascript or css issue?
On Wednesday, July 16, 2008 at 11:50:pm
tn999, thanks for checking out Popvine! Unfortunately I can’t reproduce the problem you’ve mentioned. After doing some research I discovered that people are having problems with high CPU usage in Firefox 3. High CPU Usage FF3 even in safemode
Have you tried Popvine in other browsers? Have you experienced this issue on other sites? Have you tried disabling JavaScript on Popvine to see if the problem still occurs?
Thanks again!
On Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 12:56:pm
Hi. Popvine is pretty cool. I like what you’ve done with it - gives me some ideas to think about.
Question. I’ve been using Feedwordpress for a few blogs without any issues. But, there are a couple things wp-o-matic does that I’d like to try (the SimplePie code is awesome).
So, how stable is wp-o-matic now? I tried using it at one point in time, but it was doing things like looping an reporting the same exact feed hundreds of times, odd things like that. If the current release is stable, and works on WP2.5+ installs, I’d like to give it another shot.
So, what’s your experience with it currently?
Thanks
On Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 1:06:pm
@3dogs - I’ve had to make several tweaks to the wp-o-matic script to make it work properly. It is indeed buggy! For the duplicate post problem I found a fix here. I also had to modify the cron job to get it to work.
On Monday, September 1, 2008 at 7:39:pm
I had similar problems with Go Daddy. I don’t expect a shared host to stand up to huge server spikes but the least they could to is let you attempt to fix it. They shut off my site without even an email or phone call to warn me and even disabled my FTP access. So despite telling me that a script was using too many resources, they gave me absolutely no way to rectify it. You’re basically in a no-win situation. Their tech support were next to useless and didn’t seem to grasp the concept that they were preventing me from fixing the problem they were blaming me for. I moved to Media Temple as well, at least they just charge you for high usage, instead of taking you off line.
On Tuesday, December 16, 2008 at 10:36:pm
I hve a wordpress setup, running latest version with WP o’matic,
How many Campaigns do you think a person could have before godaddy steps in?
right now I have less than 10 campaigns/feeds and fetch them manually (I would like to setup a cron for every hour, but I do not want my site removed/stopped)
Any advise you could give would be great
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