Cisco Fatty

GoDaddy Says: Oh Noes!

Be careful not to get too much traffic to your GoDaddy hosting account. This morning they were crippled with traffic from all the hits to CiscoFatty.com. Normally traffic spikes would be a good thing for a webmaster, something we would welcome. This is not the case if you are hosted on GoDaddy’s Shared Hosting platform.

Their solution to the problem was simple: shut it down.

They could have easily sold a dedicated or virtual server today, or at least billed us for more CPU ticks. We’re good customers and have been for many years. We are fine with paying more for upgraded hosting, but weren’t given that option.

Instead they chose to first shut down the website, and then later send us this mean warning email:

It has come to our attention that your website is causing an overload of the shared resources on this server. This, in turn, affects the server performance for other customers. Unfortunately, we are not able to troubleshoot custom scripting and therefore, we are not able to provide specific solutions. However, the following directory was seeing large amounts of traffic, and has been disabled:

/ciscofatty

Additionally, other causes of this issue can include, but are not limited to, non-optimized scripts, high traffic, form spamming, etc.

Continued over-utilization of the shared resources of the server may result in action including, but not limited to, the disabling of the offending services/processes or the suspension of services for that domain. If you have questions about this matter, you may contact us by replying to this email or by calling 480-505-8871.

We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

Please contact us with any questions regarding this matter.
Regards
Amanda W.
Hosting Support

There are no custom scripts or link spamming.. it’s a vanilla wordpress install with less than 32k of text, and it even has the WP super cache plugin installed. Yet, they’re “overloaded”.

What are they hosting on, 1980’s hardware? Where in that email is the option to purchase better hosting? Is GoDaddy looking out for us?

I understand that there are a finite amount of resources on a shared server, and when sites ‘hog them up’ with traffic spikes it’s a problem. The solution is sell the customer better hosting, and not disable the site completely during a temporary homepage feature on MSNBC.

Thanks a lot, Godaddy! You guys are clearly not looking out for this customer, and your business practices have left us less than impressed.

We’ve since moved to a dedicated server elsewhere, and the lulz go on..