I’ve gone through a nightmare in the last few days!
I got a message from my web host on Thursday evening stating that my sites/ domains were using too much of the web hosts resources on the server that they were on and that they had moved my sites to a non-production server until I could either figure out what was causing the drain on resources or until I decided to upgrade to a VPS hosting plan or a dedicated servers hosting plan.
Well, both of those options are more expensive and while I know my traffic has gone up recently and continues to rise I’m certain that it’s not high enough to warrant upgrading my hosting account just yet.
So I stayed up Thursday night and worked on my sites. Looking over all the stats to see if I could figure out which files were being used too often or if there were any files or folders in my domain directories that shouldn’t be there.
I didn’t find anything abnormal but I did deactivate a few plugins that I thought might use more of the servers resources than the others. That’s all I could think to do.
I’ve also upgraded the Google Sitemap plugin that I was using to the newest beta version as that one is said to go easier on CPU resources than the last stable version.
So today … well today is Canada Day. We had a friend over for the weekend so I left my sites alone briefly last night and earlier today. We’d been supposed to go out of town, but that wasn’t going to happen when there was the possibility of me losing my sites or of them going down. You see I was still waiting to hear back from my web host. I’d written to them twice since I got their message on Thursday evening and didn’t end up hearing from them until today! Grrrr.
Unfortunately the message that I got from them today was that my sites CPU usage had increased! Aaaah! It shouldn’t have increased! What the heck????
They also told me that they’d disabled the index.php file for this site because:
We have been forced to disable your script(index.php) located in
(/home/thewe22/public_html/feverishthoughts/index.php) as they appear to have
been exploited.
Well what does that mean? Was my site hacked? Did someone try to access my site with a script?
I have no idea, but the result was that Tricia’s Musings was down for the count.
I was advised to again search for any scripts of files in my directories that didn’t belong (didn’t find any) and to upgrade my software.
So I’ve upgraded Tricia’s Musings to the most recent version of WordPress. As I said earlier I also upgraded the Google Sitemap plugin. I’ve turned off Bad Behavior (now I’ll be hit with spam!) and I’ve installed WP-Cache.
I still have a number of plugins running. I’ve turned off a number of them, but I do still have several activated.
If CPU usage is still high I’ll turn off all but Akismet and see how that goes.
If you have any ideas for me as to what else I might be able to do to limit the CPU usage on my sites I’d love to hear it.
Wow…I wish I knew something to help you, but you know how I am about these things. I hope you figure it out.
I use Peter’s Anti Spam plug in for my sites. It’s fun because you can customize your own AS words. Maybe that would use less resources than what you have now?
Hey Tricia–
This can’t be good! I’m sorry to hear of this, and obviously I’m such a novice I do not have any suggestion for you.
I’ll keep my thinking cap on to see if there is someone who might know and send a referral.
Its Monday! I am making the rounds reminding people to Click & Comment on blogs today.
All I can suggest is to look and see what you added before the bandwidth increased.
If you are not sure, start with the 3rd party ads and services, like Auction Ads, Flickr,
Do you think it is because of that new network, GLAM?
Work back and delete things you have recently added. Or, delete them all and add back one at a time.
Hurray! I can see your site now instead of your directory list. Does this mean your site is fixed?
I ran into problems yesterday upgrading my WordPress to 2.2.1. If your host is Bluehost, I discovered that “Fast CGI” option in my account had to be disabled. I don’t know if this applies to you.
I use “NoScript” add-on in my Firefox. This lets me control whether a site’s script will run or not. As I’m visiting your site now, NoScripts shows 24 listed. The only ones that I’m not familiar with are “Glam.com” and “truthlaidbear.com”. As a result I have them blocked. Do you know about them?
Finally, when I upgrade my site, I put a file that will show up when someone visits. That way they can’t get to my blog during my upgrade. Had I been thinking yesterday, I should have recommended this to you so that no one could have see your directories. I apologize. This is what it would have looked yesterday if you had visited my site during its outage: http://rdesgr.com/WhatsAllThisThen/iron.html
Anyway, if I come across something, I let you know, ok?
Hope all is well!
Ron
I was having a problem like that a year ago and it got so bad that at one point I had to shut down my site. The server load was so high it was bogging everyone else’s site down, and I was the ONLY one on the server taking the hit.
The problem with me was the referrer spam. There were a couple of other things coupled with that, but the referrer spam just cranked it up so bad that the server load went off the charts.
Let me check with my tech support guru and I’ll see if we can come up with anything to help you out, as he did wonders for my site and everything’s good now!
I suppose the biggest problem is that you’re just too popular. Have you tried implementing a caching script yet? Check out:
http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/posts/2007/01/31/963/
Which web host are you using? Is it a reputable company? Could they be trying to push you into upgrading just to get more of your money? They certainly don’t seem to be trying to help you out with the problem, just telling you ‘fix it or else’.
After I installed WP-cache, things got better for me too. People like you and I can’t help it if others love our beauty…ha ha…
Hope you get it cleared up though!
(email me for the plugin link if you need it)
I’ve seen this three or four times on blogs this morning just traveling the do follow sites. It’s either quite a coincidence or a technical issue a lot of people have suffered from.
This must be sooo very frustrating and at least you’ve got some advice and tips already. Sorry to say, I can’t help that much since i have no experience after migrating to WP a few days ago:-(
I do hope you’ll fine after a while though and will follow this case closely as at least I can learn something from it!
Btw: Belated Happy Canada Day and if you get hungry, your welcome over to my new (wp) blog home for some Spare Ribs:-)