Three years on ASO. Two sites on ASO. Several outages in the last few months. Every time I waited with patience, while they told me "we are working on that, apologies". Today, another outage, another ticket. The problem is not sorted, no one is returning to my questions. Two hours ago, my site has been suspended, without a reason. No one is still responding to my inquiries.
The first I will do when my database will be restored (since it is my property), will be to move to another hosting provider.
Asmallorange is not a reliable hosting provider. Be advised if and when you decide to subscribe here, you could have some very bad surprise, like the one I'm having right now.

I posted this in the other thread about Gerald, but ASO must have a reason to suspend your account whether it's regarding server performance ( they think it's your fault ) or for other ToS breaches. If they just went around suspending accounts for the fun of it they would not be in business.

Wait for their explanation.

I replied in the other thread to your thoughts. Two hours, no one is answering. I repeat, I will move away from this site as soon as possibile.

Tim replied, at last:

I've unsuspended the account now. There was an issue yesterday with your site that necessitated this action. You were getting far too much traffic to handle, and as your site was inaccessible anyways, we had to suspend access to the site to restore service for everyone else on the server now. It looks like this issue was temporary, so service shouldn't be interrupted in the future.


So, I did absolutely nothing, Amanda tell me a few minutes ago that my account was suspended because of a "resource abuse", something I'm absolutely unaware of, and now I get this reply. It would have been much easier to tell me "well, we have to investigate a trouble, most likely with your site". No, it was too easy to cut down the site. There are no words.

It seems you have your answer now. ASO suspended you temporarily because of a traffic burst on your site that brought the server to it's knees. Most shared hosts would do the same.

And the words for it are "they prevented everyone from suffering at the hands of your site" - a lack of communication for two hours whilst this message was relayed internally to the correct people and then to you is not large.

Of course, if this is unacceptable to you, then you must do what you see fit. I believe you should have full access to your resources now.

The site still loads slowly, I did absolutely nothing, and the result is two hour and a half complete lack of communication without addressing the probelm, whatever. But if for you is right that way of manage things, okay: we have different standards, I guess.

You are going to be receiving this from other hosts as well, maybe even worse when you get a traffic burst that disrupts a server. You should keep in mind if you are using a lot of resources and are having a lot of traffic to your site, then you should think about moving over to a VPS anyways.

They've let you know your site was having traffic surges, and from the sounds of it other issues as well. Instead of complaining about it, why aren't you instead identifying the surge of traffic to see what was the cause, and trying to figure out why your site was malfunctioning? That seems to be the key to solving the problem. If you can't figure it out, submit a ticket and ask for more information, or ask for help here tracking it down.

A very interesting suggestion from you, thnks a lot, I could never figure out! Do you think I didn't do that? Right now, for instance, Gerald is down again , fourth time in four days. I submit a ticket, they restart the service, they come back to me telling "it should be corrected now, apologies". I asked to check whether the problem could be with my site, the replied: "no, the problem is not from your side". So what? You talk about a problem from my site? Nope, there's no problem from my side, and I run on karl server another site that is almost identical to the one on Gerald: same theme, same plugins, same ads.

Quick update. Three days ago, after several outages from Gerald, I asked the technical support to let me know whether troubles were somehow related to my site, or to move to another site. They moved me to Aldo. Result: today two outages, more than 40 minutes downtime. And counting.

Just going on the information you provided in the thread initially, all we can go on is what you post here. I've never had trouble getting a reply from tech support within 10-20 minutes of submitting a ticket, and subsequent replies are generally even faster unless the tech has to pass it along to someone higher up the chain.

I would suggest continuing the dialog with tech support until you can figure out what the issue is. Getting angry rarely solves anything, particularly online. Be respectful, you're still talking to a human being on the other end and the person you're talking to in tech support isn't trying to sabotage you.

I've had a couple periods of spotty service now and again in the past few years, it's inevitable when your uptime is co-dependant on the actions of the other users of that server. Overall it's been quite good. If your troubles continue to follow you across servers it can only be a few things..

-really bad luck with neighbors
-something in your setup/scripts causing trouble
-server settings not agreeing with your scripts

Keep in mind the shared server configurations here are not identical, and differences in applications installed, the php.ini files, all sorts of seemingly minor things can sometimes have adverse affects on your site(s).

Good luck, hope you get it sorted out.

harley, I'm not talking about the staff readiness in replying to my tickets. That is always an excellent feature of ASO. I'm getting frustrated (not angry) because I have repeatedly asked the technical staff whether the problem was from my site. They said it wasn't. Yesterday, in order to fix the last trouble, they re-initialize the RAID array. A necessary measure, I guess, with 2h 30' downtime. But that is not the point. The fact is that I still don't know what is the real probem, and what can we do in order to fix it once for all. My site is a very normal one: no scripts, very few pics, usual security plugins. Last month I added the wp-spam and wp-security plugin. No sign of hacking. My database is 8,5 megs: not so small, but not huge: there are about 1200 posts, 5 years of blogging. Nothing special, nothing exceptional. That is puzzling.

The RAID issue was an isolated hardware issue.

Aldo has been briefly down. Just one hiccup.

And right now the site doesn't load.

You know, I'm beginning to wonder if all these frequent periods of brief outages are not server glitches, but some network bottleneck somewhere in a router or switch ir security appliance that is limiting access briefly at various times due to overloading, misconfiguration or general gremlins.

Nope, we've got more than enough capacity. If it was something central, everyone would be complaining at the same time.

Right now (and about one hour ago) the site is not reachable. I'm getting timeouts. Below is the result wit my monitoring tool (5 minute-checks)

I am on aldo, a happy 54 days uptime until...... well you got moved to aldo.

Na, joke.. but aldo is down now but it isn't being shown as down here

http://status.asmallorange.com/

I'm not on Aldo any longer.