Hosting Providers: Love 'em or Leave 'em

2-3 Weeks ago, the hosting provider would suddenly stop working. For no reason. I mean the whole site would go down -- all 10 or so applications. Just dissapear.

After wrestling with tech support for a day or two, it turns out my applications were exceeding the 100MB limit on the virtual server. And where did they tell me about the 100MB limit? Beats me. And just how much were they going over? Beats me. Beats them. And how can I tell how much memory each applicaiton is using? Beats me. Beats them.

So that's a fun bug -- no indication except for everything stops working randomly for 4-5 minutes. I came up with a strategy, however. I started turning off caching and started watching my internal logs to check on the availability of the apps. I had gotten to a 4-5 minute stoppage every hour or so, which wasn't too bad.

Then last night the logs simply stopped recording. If you look, you'll see that the sidebar is not loading, nor are the vote results. I checked some of the internal function calls just now, and I'm getting a "hashtable insert failed. Load Factor Too High" error message.

My best guess is that my friendly server administrators decided that instead of rebotting the entire system (which sucked) they would start tossing out individual applications. That may or may not be a great idea, but it sure as heck would have been nice to know! So now I submit ANOTHER help desk ticket. Perhaps there are two sides to this "Are Hosting Providers Great?" question.

The other bug I am working is that on Blogger blogs, using a FireFox Browser, the title of the article gets saved into the database using illegal characters which hose up the JavaScript on the way back out. Easy enough to fix with my little buddy RegEx, so that's a freebie. It's good to have some easy bugs! I wish they were all like that.