The site was down for roughly 50hrs, due to an attack on my trackback system. I have since disabled this feature. Once I've upgraded my MT publishing engine, I will again activate this feature.
// Begin Rant:
While we're on the subject of site management, I have not had very many outages, nonetheless, they are very frustrating. I suppose the rub is the idea of zero notification of an issue.. As it often said, communication is paramount. It would be nice if the datacenter admins would communicate directly with the patron or at least alert the third-party reseller of a potential server load issue before simply suspending an account.
After the twenty-four hours, and chasing down a third-party below is the rationale for account suspension. While I know that when you manage several accounts on a disk whose server hosts several virtual domains, you can ill-afford a rogue process consuming precious resources. Obviously, it could bring the server to its knees. All I would ask is a courtesy msg, to empower the user to take the appropriate action to resolve the matter.
End Rant //
At the time of suspension our servers load average was a very unstable: 20.0. After suspending the account the servers load average dropped quickly to its normal, stable range of 1.0-4.0.Please work with the script providers and/or website developers to make the scripts more shared-resource server friendly. Until then the site will continue to have its web access disabled.
Processes snippet:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
31375 x 16 0 17976 14m 1912 D 99.9 0.4 0:01.57 /usr/bin/perl -w mt-tb.cgi
31376 x 18 0 17032 13m 1780 R 99.9 0.3 0:01.58 /usr/bin/perl -w mt-tb.cgi
31377 x 18 0 17700 13m 1812 R 99.9 0.3 0:01.56 /usr/bin/perl -w mt-tb.cgi
First, let me thank you for coming by my blog (viperteq.speaks). You're the first person to comment since I re-launched it and your comment was insightful. Please stop through anytime. And I do have another blog that's more Tech oriented so feel free to pop by there as well. The link for it is 7andacrescent.com;
As far as what you went through? Sh%t sucks rocks. I'm running my own server so I know how precarious things can be in server land. I have to admit though that I've never heard of a malicious attack by way of the trackback system. If anything, I would say that that is a flaw within the Movable Type software. I know that Six Apart pioneered the whole trackback thing in the first place, but from what I hear around the 'Net, they haven't really been too keen on keeping Movable Type updated and cutting edge. In fact, I hear that a lot of folk that use Movable Type/Live Journal are jumping ship and starting to use Wordpress (which is what I use incidentaly). You may want to look into Wordpress: it is a phenomonal piece of software, with active, steady development. There are lots of plugins and themes available for it and you can use it as a blog engine or as a Content Management System. It's great! If you want to check it out in action, check out the 9rules.com site: the whole thing is powered by Wordpress. Oh yeah, there is an import function so you can set up WP and still have access to all of your posts and comments that were done in Movable Type. So just give it a shot!!!
One more thing: If you're thinking about switching Host companies, Dreamhost.com is pretty cool. Their L3 Plan (Code Monster) is 60GB of storage, 1.6TB (yes, Terabytes, lol!) of bandwidth, unlimited MySQL, unlimited Domains/Subdomains, 12,000 email accounts and various other goodies all for 19.95 a month. Oh and if you don't have a domain registered you can get one registered through them or just point the domain that you use now to use the Dreamhost nameservers for free. And if you use the promo code DEAL90, it'll take $60 off of the first payment which would bring it from $69.95 to $9.95 for your first payment and then you just pay $19.95 a month and you're golden. Check 'em out, they do that whole "phone call when sh%t goes wrong and the servers mess up" thing, lol!!!
yeah, a few people I know have jumped off the MT wagon onto WP. Ironically, everyone seems to cut their teeth with bloggine using MT. I have heard good things about WP, but I do like MT. Actually, in fairness to Six Apart, they really do take care of their core product. I've been using MT since 2003, and I have only had two major issues with server load. These problems were very public and were addressed immediately. Once I upgrade, the problem should go away.