Website Downtime
Last Thursday, I received an email from my web hosting company saying that my websites were causing undue load on the server CPU, and that my account had been shut down until the problem was resolved. It was obviously an automated message sent after an automated reaction, but it applied to all of the sites under my account, not just Burnsland.com.
Needless to say, I was quite surprised. After all, I hadn’t made any significant changes lately. I hadn’t noticed any big surge in traffic lately. And as far as I knew, everything had been going along quite well for some time. I guess I didn’t know everything after all.
The automated email did have a list of scripts that could possibly be the problem, but it really didn’t help all that much. Had a virus infected one of my sites, causing some sort of malicious activity in the background? Was one of my sites under attack? Because most of the scripts in the list were WordPress related, had one of the WordPress plugins gone awry? I was stumped.
So on Friday morning, I was finally able to chat online with a service person from the host company. She said that robots were hitting the Burnsland.com site pretty hard. Robots are automated scripts used by search engines and other sites to scan your site for information, if you aren’t aware. She said that in particular, robots from Google and Bing were very active at the time. So I took some steps to get those under control, and my account has been on probation since that time, so that they can monitor the traffic for a few days. Hopefully, everything is back to normal now.
So while it was brief, it was a strange feeling knowing that websites that are usually available 24/7 weren’t there. Not that anyone’s life depends on what is on my website or anything, but still, it wasn’t like it should be.
One of my friends was nice enough to send me a Facebook message letting me know that my site was down. I did know that by the time I got the message, but it was nice to know that someone out there bothers to look at my stuff online to begin with. And also nice that he took the time to write.
So what do you do when a website is down? Here are some suggestions:
- Visit another website.
- Sleep.
- Go for a walk.
- Watch television.
- Read a book.
- Actually talk to someone.
Hmm, that list gets better as it goes on. Maybe more websites should be down more often. Then we might actually relearn how to talk to people. It’s a lost art.
