Yesterday, our site went down here at Blippitt for about an hour. Visitors saw a 404 error message stating that they didn’t have “permission to view file index.php.”
As we did some digging, at first I wondered if we were being hit with a DDOS attack – nope.
I did a little more digging. Ah, it’s a file permission error. For some reason the properties on file index.php were changed to “000.”
For those who aren’t technical, that is known as a “bad thing.”
We went into our cPanel and tried to change them. Oops, we don’t have permission? To change our own files? Then we went in through our FTP client to CHMOD the index.php file. No luck there either. Access denied.
I decided to get on live chat with Hostgator support. No sooner did I explain our problem, when the rep said, “Check your e-mail.”
Interesting. So I checked my e-mail, only to find this lovely message from Hostgator.
“Hello,
We have been forced to disable the file ‘blippitt/index.php’ on your account due to excessive cpu usage. You should be able to install the ‘wp-super-cache‘ plug-in which will help in decreasing the server load caused by users accessing the site. Please update this ticket as soon as possible so that we can work to resolve this issue.”
This is the most inept customer service I have ever experienced. Hostgator decided I was using too much CPU, so their solution was to instantly shut down my site?
Granted, we’re no Google here or anything but that is atrocious. You know, it’s kind of NICE for the site owner when heavy amounts of traffic start to pour in. If I’m Hostgator, maybe I’m prepared for such things since I’m, well, a HOSTING company after all.
We quickly got the plug-in and install it. To their credit, Hostgator had us back up almost instantly.
Still, that plug-in conflicts with some others that we’re running and it’s going to take a while to straighten it all out.
We have promoted Hostgator for a long time here on this site, simply because our experience with them has been great.
But yanking a site down with no warning is tantamount to disaster. Google bans sites very quickly when they go down, even for short periods of time.
Hostgator, get your act together ASAP.
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