If you happened to send me an email yesterday between 2 p.m. and midnight, chances are I did not get it. Of course, the chances are slim that anyone who actually sent me an email during those 10 hours is actually reading this, unless spammers read my blog…
So what happened? My server was over quota. I have shared hosting through LiquidWeb, and while I’ve been pretty happy with them (BIT-101 has been there since its beginning in 2001), I’m not too happy with the way this was handled.
First off I definitely am to blame for the server being WAY overloaded. My account has a 1500 MB limit and I was over 2700 MBs! I had used it to temporarily back up a whole bunch of stuff at one point, and forgot to delete it, and then used it to transfer a whole bunch of stuff from my wife’s old pc and never took that off there, and I had a whole bunch of pictures that have since been moved to flickr, and beyond that just a whole bunch of stuff that I stuffed in there and forgot about. After I cleaned up everything, it’s down to something like 200 MB. That’s right, I had 2 1/2 gigs worth of crap in there.
The thing that bugs me is that it’s been more than a gig over quota for months and months. And suddenly, without warning, mail just stops. Note, it wasn’t my mailboxes that were full, so there were no bounces sent out. The mail just never arrived. Where was the warning notice, “Mr. Peters, we notice that your account is grossly over quota, young man. Clean it up or we’re going to cut off your mail priviledges…” ? I gladly would have cleaned it up. I’m not in the habit of checking my server disk usage on a regular basis. I still have no idea what caused the sudden shut down. It wasn’t like I put anything big up there in the last week or even month. Did some email come in that just pushed it one byte over some mysterious limit? The Viagra ad that broke the camel’s back? Or did someone decide to go in and clean house and say, “Whoa, this guy’s account is wicked full, dude. Shut it down!”
This reminds me a bit of Aral’s issue with Liquidweb, where they just shut down OSFlash with no warning or notice due to some big load that the site was putting on the server.
Again, I’ve been with LiquidWeb for five years and have been very happy. Service is generally good and when I do contact them with an issue, tech support responds quickly and fixes it quickly. It seems like they are just missing something in the proactive department. Anyway, I’m not in the mood to go through switching providers right now, so I’ll play it by ear.