ixWebhosting – Or how to tank your site in 2.5 days
Though I have overall been pretty happy with my experience at ixWebhosting, this is in regards to their middle of the road 15 IP address package. IXWebhosting actually has been pretty snappy for me with various smaller sites I had over there. Since I still had around 5 open IPs, decided for SEO purposes, to move my MAIN site, http://lizardwebs.net/, over there. How’d that go? Not too good. The functionality actually was still great. However – and this is the big one – Google decided it would be good to go ahead and reindex my pages. Not unexpected – they always do when they detect an IP change. This occurred on Friday Sept 30, 2012. So for the next two and a half days, Google beat the crap out of that server tracking down pages, posts, archives, categories, tags, etc.. I knocked off the caching during the move and all that so I would be able to troubleshoot and keep an eye on things.
Apparently the fine folks over at IX noticed the higher usage and it was impacting the server. We had sucked up 2 hrs of processor time on their server on Saturday, then again Sunday and now into Monday. They also said something about the number, 60. Apparently 60 is the magic number for their admins to take notice on. No idea what the 60 actually is – maybe it IS minutes of proc time. Yeah, actually that WAS it – and I had used 127 minutes or something along those lines. Lizardwebs has about 300 pages so the ixWebhosting server WAS doing some work to get everything reindexed.
I got an email (while I was busy talking to one of my techs and NOT sitting right on top of my Outlook) around 2:30 pm on Monday that my account was using too many resources and please contact them. 45 minutes later – due to me NOT sitting right on top of my Outlook and answering them promptly – they cut access to my account. That was the second email around 3:15pm. Thus taking my main website offline along with the other 10 or so sites I had over there. I finally noticed the email about 4:30ish or so and contacted them after discovering the email. And sure as heck, all my sites were down.
How about some warning – particularly when you’re screwing with someone’s livelihood..
So, you at IXwebhosting had noticed this for 2.5 days as indicated in your email and then gave me 45 minutes to contact you before you cut service? Really? Color me unimpressed. For me, honestly, the service has BEEN good – nice server response and usually helpful whenever I’ve needed to contact them. This seems like a bit of a shortcoming on their part though. How about possibly generating an email automatically if usage goes high or some other violation of the TOS agreement? At least a little ahead of time? Maybe if it doesn’t get answered in some sort of timely fashion, THEN cut service. But 45 minutes? Really?
I moved my main site BACK to Rackspace and have been happy with it since – should have left well enough alone – but that’s just NOT in the spirit of SEO – always want one more position up. My rankings did take a hit with the confusion, the back and forth, and probably a few other things that were part of the move – an htaccess issue among other things. But, we’ll get ’em back no doubt. Word to the wise, IX is fine for little sites. Don’t put your livelihood on it though if you have anything more than a small website. Or get their VPS. I have used that before and it pretty well handled some action! Regarding their shared hosting though – until they can treat you like a business and NOT some hobbyist, ixWebhosting is best for small sites.
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