Hot PNG | Portable Network Graphics

This is an account of events happened to my client’s wordpress blog website hosted at dreamhost.com, although I am a little angry at dreamhost for taking down my client’s site, twice. I would still recommend dreamhost to those with VERY light traffic but require rich features, control, good management and customer support. Dreamhost is pretty good at hosting light traffic sites, but for busy sites with lots of visitors and surges of traffic, dreamhost definitely will not work for you, they will simply disable your site, which sucks very much.

December 22nd:

Someone submitted one of my client’s blog postings to digg, it was made popular at late night on the 22nd.

It was this article:
Seven Deadly Sins Portrayed by Women

December 23rd:

I woke up in the morning, checked my email, and was bombarded with my client’s numerous emails complaining that his site picvault.org was down. I quickly fired up google analytics and saw that there was over 2000 visitors in a hour from digg.com. My client’s site picvault.org was disabled by dreamhost within a hour of digg fame.

(A little background story: This site, picvault.org, was disabled by dreamhost 1 week ago, for high traffic, because one of the post was featured on brainblog and uniquedaily, this brought over 8k visitors in one day and dreamhost disabled the site after about 10 hours, saying that apache was constantly overloaded with over 200 connections)

I quickly wrote a support ticket to dreamhost asking why my client’s site was disabled. Dreamhost replied that, once again their apache server overloaded with over 200 connections and the flood of traffic coming from digg. I am not very good with apache, but I believe 200 connections isn’t a terribly high number. I didn’t argue with the CSR but simply asked how can I take my client’s site back online. CSR recommended signing up for their private server service. I said, ok let’s do it. Then I was quickly moved to a new VPS and my site was re-enabled.

Nope, that didn’t work. DreamHost allow adjustment of CPU/Memory on the fly, so I turned it to the highest possible value 2300 Mhz CPU / 2300 MB RAM, it did not help at all. The site loads, but extremely slowly, and all my other sites (over 15) are loading VERY slowly as well. So I had to disabled the site picvault.org to save my other sites.

By now, it is clear that nothing on dreamhost’s service list can help my situation. I quickly saved a html version of my client’s blog page and put the html plus the images on another hosting company’s server (websitesource.com). Now nothing will be loaded from dreamhost’s server, except the redirect file. I always disliked websitesource’s server because it is often mis-configured and gave me many problems, but this was the only other hosting account I had. So I set it up, so all traffic to picvault.org was redirected to a html page on websitesource’s server. I knew websitesource was pretty good at handling static traffic.

This worked. Digg traffic kept increasing, by the end of day, the static page i set up on websitesource’s server had over 40,000 page views AND it was still loading fast for me. It was getting late and I had to finish the moving on the next day.

December 24th:

I woke up in the morning and quickly went to check on the static mirror page on websitesource’s server, it was still up and loading fast. I started to move the entire website picvault.org to websitesource and changed the dns to point to websitesource’s name server. In a few hours, the moving was complete. Now the entire site is up and loading fast on websitesource’s server. Digg traffic was still flooding in at this point, by noon the site had over 24,000 page views.

I was amazed. I always knew websitesource was good with serving static content. I never expected it to survive a full frontal attack of the digg effect and this was no longer static content, the site was wordpress powered, dynamic content generating, script and image heavy, fully functional website.

Now if websitesource ever manage to configure their server correctly and offer more features, I might even consider keeping my account there. (I was planing to leave after my prepaid 2 year contract is over).

I guess the moral of the story is:

Dreamhost is no doubt the best choice for VERY light traffic sites that NEVER have traffic surges. But don’t expect to survive a digg, it won’t work, your site WILL be down. If you only have light traffic sites, I recommend dreamhost for its great features, control, customer service and nicely configured servers. They know technology, but they don’t know how to survive traffic (or their hardware sucks).

Websitesouce is very good for serving huge amount of static content and non-complex scripts, but be aware that their server software is mostly misconfigured and often change configuration without notice that will make your script stop working. (I had this happen to me several times over the years with them)

I am signing up for media temple right now, for their $20/month grid server. I filled out the application with my cc info on the 23rd, they still has not opened my account yet (today is 24th), this is pretty slow response time. Most other hosting companies can set up my account almost instantly. I already sent 2 emails to their support, with no reply. Ok I know it’s Christmas time, but I am seriously considering canceling my application with mediatemple.net and take my business else where.