Last night Juliana woke up at 2 am and I nursed her back to sleep. While nursing, I browsed emails on my Blackberry and noticed one that caused my heart to race and sweat to bead from my forehead. As soon as she fell asleep, I crept out of our room and rushed to my computer. My host suspended my account, forcing French Mamma to go offline.
No warning email or notice that my account was reaching the resource limit, or opportunity to correct the situation before being knocked offline. Instead, they shut me down, and then sent me an email at 12 am. I called support immediately and as soon as the tech explained the situation, my account was reactivated and I was given two days to fix it. My question to him was if this was not a dire emergency, why not let me know of the problem and give me 24 hours to fix it before shutting me down? Even four or eight hours? Yeah, he sidestepped the question and never answered it. Nice.
My account has unlimited bandwidth and disk space. However, I do not have unlimited memory and CPU usage. If I want this, I need to upgrade to a VPN or dedicated server for a hefty price. The best part is that there is no way of knowing that I reach these limits. I’m not provided with a tool to monitor these and they don’t give warnings before shutting you down. So the only way to know when you have exceeded the limit is by receiving an email in middle of the night after it was knocked offline.
I spent all morning trying to fix the problem. I have many websites but I’ve several that I stopped working on. This was the only blog that I had caching turned on (the others are so small, I never really thought it was necessary), but I turned it on for all of the others and adjusted the settings for this blog. One of the plugins for security was reported to me as spiking my CPU, so I deactivated it. I contacted the host to see if the changes I made fixed the problem, and hopefully they did. If not, I am really at a lost on what to do. I have not made any large changes in the past few weeks, but since traffic has been increasing steadily, it caused a small issue to become large.
During my deleting stage, I deleted old websites I know I will never get around to finishing. And of course, I accidentally deleted my forums!!
I contacted tech support to restore the backup…. and guess what, they stopped doing backups on all my sites since the end of July! Again, no warning or notice that backups would no longer be available to me. It is in the process of being restored right now, but that means we have lost all posts since the grand opening of the forums. So I guess we will have to do a Grand Grand Opening… and sorry about those of you who have been posting to it. They are working now to restore it… it looks like the restored the files and now I’m waiting on the database.
All of this would not be so frustrating if I did not contact them about two weeks ago because my site was getting knocked down several times a day. I was told that it was probably another site taking up resources, and it would be temporary. After days of seeing my site go down several times during the day for about 30 min to an hour each time, I contacted them again and was told that their server was blocking my IP because too many requests were being made. This was confusing to me, but somehow everything seemed to be working again so I didn’t second guess it.
What do you think, time for a new host? Or are all of them like this?
What a day! Mamma needs a nap…
Tallulah@Bilingual Babes says
What a nightmare and so frustrating given that you had already asked them about this issue! I hope you do get everything restored. You certainly deserve that nap!
French Mamma says
Looks like the forums are completely gone… I will have to create it from scratch. It took me so long to do, so this is a little disheartening. Hopefully we can solve the problem of overusage, and if I get my account to under 10 gb they will start doing the automated backups again. Lots of work to do!
Anne says
Hi there, I found your blog while doing a search for prams…. i know this is off subject but i have just read your reveiw on the 3 in 1 Travelsystem CITY DRIVER pram and accessories. I found your report interesting and i am tempted to buy this for my daughter who is expecting her first baby. It looks a fab and chunky ride for a little one but I wondered if your oppinion, negative/positive of the pram has changed now you have had it for a while. thank You 🙂
French Mamma says
Hi Anne, great question! I really need to update that post. I am very happy with this pram overall, however, there are some gripes.
– It’s very large and heavy, so gets annoying loading it in and out of the car or walking uphill when traveling. Since we don’t drive often (I walk to most places), it is not too much of an inconvenience for my lifestyle. If your daughter will need to load it into the car often, she may get annoyed really quickly.
– The wheels don’t turn, so it’s harder to navigate through crowds or busy streets. However, this is also an advantage because of where our house is located… will explain in a moment.
– It’s not stylish. It’s cute when you have the attachments, but when the child is larger, it’s ugly as a stroller. Now that my daughter is too big for the attachments, we use a cheap stroller from Target that we found when in the US. So basically, she stopped using this pram after she was about eight months old.
– I’m not sure if this is the same for most strollers, but the car seat feels very cheap. We ended up buying a new carseat because I didn’t feel confident in its construction, it was as if the manufacturer did the bare minimum. I use a Britex carseat and it is not only more comfortable, but more solid. I’d use the one with the pram for her around the house or picnics, but not in the car.
– Definitely need a mattress for bed attachment. I bought one in advance because I anticipated such. After getting it, I realized that I can’t imagine anyone putting their kid in it without one.
I highly recommend this stroller if your daughter plans on using it a lot outdoors (and doesn’t use the carseat within a car), especially on rough terrain. The house we live at now has a very long driveway of small rocks and bumps, and this pram gives her an amazingly smooth ride with its large tires and springs! She falls asleep instantly. The wheels of our new stroller twist and turn in every direction, making it extremely bumpy for her and hard to push. The pram also has so many features, that it makes long walks very comfortable for the both of us. I especially like how you can change the handle so you can push her from in front or behind, so if the sun is in her face, you can change the direction she is in.
So for the house we live at now, I would definitely still buy this pram knowing what I know now… function over style. However, if I was living in the city then I would prefer something a little more up-to-date. I feel like such a country girl when I take her around places like Marseille and Avignon.
Anne says
Thank you for your detailed reply 🙂 With all the different styles and ranges out there, looking for a reliable and reasonably priced set of wheels for our little arrival is starting to get abit overwhelming. I’m so glad i’ve found your blog, I love the way you write and i will be returning often! Thank you once again.