Lunarpages complaining about CPU usage again

More of this crap–

Ticket Ref : 8728-RAJB-9771
Ticket Subject : Account Moved to Sputnik – Excessive Resources

Reply:
Hello,

We have not recieved a response from you regarding your move to our Quantz
abuse server. Please respond as soon as possible to avoid permanent account
disable. Below is a copy of site usage as of 7/27/06

mutant2 mutantfrog.com 1.02 0.35 0.1
Top Process %CPU 67.0 /usr/bin/php
Top Process %CPU 34.0 /usr/bin/php
Top Process %CPU 28.0 /usr/bin/php

Thank you for your time and prompt response.

—
Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions

Victor Lerma
support@lunarpages.com
Phone: 1-877-LUNARPAGES/1-877-586-2772 (U.S. & Canada – Toll-free)
Phone: 0800-072-9150 (U.K – Toll-free)
Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (International)

I switched from the Mutantfrog theme (which was a barely modified default theme, just different graphics and colors) to the totally untouched default just in case there IS some bug in there causing excessive usage.

I can’t understand how a simple install of WordPress on a fairly low traffic blog could be causing such enormous spikes, but I clearly can’t tell them that their own server has something odd with it.

Does anyone have a good host to suggest, that is friendly to running PHP based blogs, and does not sell unrealisticly cheap storage plans to lure you in, and then threaten to cancel the contract and keep your money for excessive CPU usage?

9 thoughts on “Lunarpages complaining about CPU usage again”

  1. mediatemple.net says i… powweb.com is however cheaper and seems to give you more space and bandwidth. but i prefer media temple personally.

  2. We at The Korea Liberator had the same problem with LP, with the same useless support, and can tell you that upgrading all your scripts, etc., won’t help.

    We ended up moving to Bluehost.com, which is where the Marmot went after the same issues with LP.

    During the process of the move I think I found the issue, which LP “support” did not; our SQL DB was about 180 MB due to the stats plug-in we were using, BDP Referral Tracker. If you are using this, take a look at your SQL DB size, which can be seen from the cPanel page on the left-hand side. If it’s more than 10-20 MB, something is probably amiss.

    The solution was to delete the large stats tables within the SQL DB, which needed to be done to export/import the DB to Bluehost anyway.

    We still use the plug-in, but keep an eye on the DB size and will delete that stats tables when they get to large.

    Our stats ‘hits’ DB went well over 100 MB during a) a spam storm, and b) massive amounts of google-bot hits. Each time anything was requested from the SQL DB, the CPU had to wrestle the humongous DB, which tended to kill their servers.

    Any competent support would have recognized this. If you have a tiny website with no traffic, LP is perfect. If not you’re in for trouble.

  3. I think you’re gonna need to more clearly define “cheap” … ’cause there’s cheap hosting, and then there’s cheap hosting. At any rate, I’m using 1&1 to host my site, my web comic, my brother’s site, my brother’s WiFi mapping project, and our new family tree site … all on one account. We’ve gotten no complaints about CPU time, storage, or bandwidth. Only hitch is that you’re limited to 100 MB per MySQL database … which shouldn’t be a problem unless wordpress is putting your images into the database as BLOB objects. Here is a listing of the different plans they offer. Also, their tech support rocks… they gave us real answers to our questions … especially when we had like a week of pseudo-downtime because our old host wouldn’t relinquish our DNS entry.

  4. By cheap I mean inexpensive, but supposedly still good quality. But again, I use MediaTemple and will never switch. I think of it as the Mac of web hosting. If your a Mac user(/lover?) you’ll understand what I mean.

  5. I used godaddy.com for my hosting and domain registration at $7 a month. I`ve never had any problems with them

  6. I keep telling people to go with http://www.powweb.com, but no one ever listens to the Occidentalism guy :). Seriously, I get about a thousand people a day (not hits) reading my site, and I have never had any complaints from my host. They are offering 20gb of space, and 400gb a month of bandwidth.

    Let ’em know who sent ya.

  7. I recently switched from ipowerweb to DreamHost. I used a discount ticket I found online and got 2 years hosting for about $100. Besides about 15 minutes of downtime every couple of weeks, I have no complaints, and I use MovableType which is much more resource intensive than WP. I don’t know if it matters to you or not, but the coolest thing about DreamHost is that they allow shell access on ALL their accounts. Their bandwidth and storage allotments are more than I can ever use with just a blog, and the allotments actually grow a bit each month. Online support is solid. Some people complain about their proprietary control panel, but I find nothing wrong with it.

  8. I dont know of any webhosts that will trouble shoot your website for you.

    That comes under the heading of “webmaster’s duties” not “support”.

    once you understand this, you shouldn’t have a problem getting along with any reputable host such as lunarpages.

  9. I’m not saying you should trouble shoot it- I’m just saying that you need to give users a way to monitor realtime CPU usage themselves. I don’t see how it’s possible to find the source of excessive CPU usage when the only information I get is an email from tech support giving some vague numbers from the previous days.

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