Site Suspension: A Webmaster’s Nightmare

When I was just starting to blog, I feared of two things: not being able to generate blog traffic and site suspension. I had managed to work on the first one since I am now getting a satisfying number of page views per day. The latter was my worry before I switched to paid hosting from WebHostingBuzz.com. I’ve had several site suspension before, and termination at some point when I was still hosted by free hosts. I’ve had several site migration. Somehow, I blame this mishaps why my main blog (jammedph.com) is not visible now in search engine rankings and Google bot stopped crawling it.

But when I switched to paid host, I thought site suspension will no longer be a problem. But imagine to my disappointment and nightmare when I saw my site last night with a suspension notice. According to the technical staff, some scripts I am running in my website was responsible for a resource abuse. Unexpectedly, the plugins installed in this blog caused all the problem. Problems like this is common in shared hosting where you share IP address with other hosted members.

I immediately contacted the billing department and I was grateful because of their prompt reply and unsuspended my account.

What did I learn from this incident?

1. Always do a blog backup. It was only these days that I always forget to backup my account. I was relying to much on my webhost to do all the backups for me which should not have been the case.

2. Always have a clean WordPress install. Do not install every plugin you meet. Deactivate or delete all unnecessary plugins. The MaxBlogPress ad stripe, No Old Spam Links and Views Counter plugins caused this resource abuse so I deleted them. I also deactivated the unused plugins.

3. Always look for a reliable host. In this incident, I have appreciated the billing and sales department in really helping me out.

4. Upgrade to a higher plan. I am thinking of upgrading my budget hosting to a reseller one.

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