We have customer who is on one of our normal Cpanel shared server accounts. We do NOT overload our servers and, normally, they run as expected.

This customer has a Blog site, with PHP scripts, graphics, the whole nine yards. It was featured on the main page of Slashdot.com yesterday. Guess what happened? ;)

The customer is sincerely not understanding that his site literally brought the server to its knees and we had to temporarily disable him - because of the huge increase in traffic to his site.

He says that he knows many "rinky-dink" hosts that can handle this type of a load and that our servers should be able to also. I've explained the difference between bandwidth and resources...not sure if it made a difference though. I genuinely feel bad. :(

Question...would you agree to host this account for $8 per month on an average/standard shared Cpanel server (not semi-private)? Any advice as to how to make this situation better?

--Tina

I'm not a host, and not experienced with these type of decisions you guys have to make.

But you hear all of the time (nearly everytime /. lists someone? :) that hosts have to temporarily freeze accounts.

I would continue to advise him that the best route for him to go now that he is having a large increase in traffic/readerbase/whatever is that he should either be upgrading to a larger account, vds or dedicated server and then go from there.

At 8/month... kind of tough to cripple a server over. The even better idea may even be to just explain to him thuroughly that at that price you are no longer able to offer him the ability to take something like that on and advise him to look elsewhere.

Good luck with it, very tough call.

if this site is constantly getting /.'d or getting high traffic some other way, then it definitely isn't supposed to belong on a shared account. i wouldn't allow a site to get constantly /.'d, it'd kill that box.

if this is a one time occurance, i'd let it slide.

Yeah, I have no problem working towards a solution - but the problem is he seems to think its OUR problem. :(

--Tina

Well, he is being slashdotted on a daily basis; is he?

But, if you have terms against resouce abuse and he is violating those terms, you have to protect the other accounts on the server.

Do you think it unreasonable that a php driven site, listed on the main page of Slashdot, would bring down an average (not semi-private) shared Cpanel server?

--Tina

yup, one of our dedicated servers had just 1 site on it. only about 30% dynamic, got /.'d and all php scripts slowed to a crawl...

Yeah slashdotting is an effect that is hard on a server. The people over there always laugh about the /. effect. Some hosts have told the client that is getting /.'ed that are running PHP scripts or a dynamic site if they can make the content for now static. Just an HTML page with the information that people are looking for.

But a /. effect will most likely bring a shared server to its knees, and I have seen some dedicated servers with dynamic content, with only the one site on it, be taken down faster then KLEZ sweeping through them.

But see if you can convert their content to a static page for the time it is being /. I believe /. gets 2.4 million page views a day.

Shows you just how good getting /.'d is for traffic ;)

Well, if it kills the server...there isn't going to be ANY traffic! haha.

True enough ;)

I ought to try getting /.'d once we get the server working...

You could always point him to this thread. I think there was another thread to about a domain that had a similar increase in traffic. Something like, http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com as well.

However, yes... you could be running a dual xeon with 2 gigs of RAM and a dynamic site like that would get killed if it was to appear on /.

Originally posted by Coach
However, yes... you could be running a dual xeon with 2 gigs of RAM and a dynamic site like that would get killed if it was to appear on /.

A properly tweaked and configured dual xeon can handle 2.4mill.. I'm pretty sure... Also the site would need to be optimized, but thats nothing..

About 5 years ago, I helped on a site that got 100,000 uniques a day and it was just a 600mhz as I remember, and it was even running a bloated ubb :D

I would do everything possible to keep their site up for that one day, if it was just that one day. I'd move them to their own server if necessary (which sounds like it was). It's probably pretty valuable to them not to lose the thousands of hits for that rare opportunity.

I'd be happy to bill them for bandwidth overages if needed.

If it kept up, of course we'd have to get them to upgrade to a dedicated server.

Of course they might have to be on the phone with me explaining the situation for this to happen. Otherwise, if I just saw a site taking down a server, it gets resource limits slammed down on it and I start trying to contact the user.

But that's just me.