Tag ix webhosting issues

So my weekend had no outside obligations so I decided to fill it up with internal things.  I woke up Saturday morning with a spring in my step.  The bright sun and cool, crisp temperatures seemed like an ideal scenario to get stuff done.  I was outside and weeding by 7:30.

I decided I wanted to get the rest of the landscape beds mulched on Saturday.  After weeding was done I pulled out in the truck.  I made a pit stop on my way to Home Depot at mom’s place.  She was at work but had asked me if I could take a look at her noisy toilet.  I also dropped off a bunch of stuff I harvested from the garden for her.

From my years of yard maintenance I know that the back of the Tacoma will hold about 30 bags of mulch. I also knew I would need more than 30 bags to finish the job which included the orchard, the border around the pool and the two raised areas around the palms in the front yard.

I also made a pit stop at the pool store.  When I went to flip on the pump Saturday morning to run the pool vacuum I got nothing, the pump acted like it was dead.  I smelled an electrical burn that concerned me.  The last thing I needed was to have to replace the pool pump after all of the money I have spent on other home repairs/improvements the last few weeks.

Well after verifying that there was power going to the pump I jumped on the internet to get some guidance.  Maybe it is something I can fix easily myself.  Thankfully it was.  There is a large capacitor that can go bad on a pool pump.  The only thing I had to verify was that the motor was not seized up.  Luckily on this Pentair pool pump that was easy to do.  There is a plastic cap that covers the shaft of the motor. After removing the cap, a quick grab and twist verified the motor itself was spinning freely.

The local Pinch a Penny had replacement capacitors as this is a pretty common failure.  I was a bit surprised that it cost $43 but I was still way ahead of the $500 I would have potentially spent if I didn’t do any homework and just replaced the pump.  The replacement of the cap was easy.  I was quite relieved when I threw the switch and the pump came roaring back to life.   I taped the process just in case there are others on the internet looking into replacing their own pool pump caps.

So as I was spreading my first 30 bags of mulch I found myself kind of enjoying it.  The labor was steady but not brutal, the sky was bright blue, humidity low and the temperatures perfect for working outside.  I could hardly believe the orchard consumed almost the entire 30 bags of red mulch.  I knew I would be heading back out for another load.

I decided to grab another 30 bags although the rough estimation in my head told me I probably could get away with only 25.  I figure it is better to figure a little high than go low and wind up having to go back out once again.

By the time I was almost done spreading the mulch the lustre had worn off the joys of yard work.  Ironically, the sky by that time had become overcast and looked like rain could be looming around the corner.  Just as I was in the homestretch of ripping open the 30 additional mulch mulch bags I was startled by the sound of a voice behind me saying “Excuse me, sir”..

I jumped a little bit as I spun around.  It was a young guy, a younger looking guy and a young girl.  They were people that lived up the street that said they were interested in the garage fridge I was giving away for free.  I had posted it on the community Yahoo groups email list I started several years ago.

In the ad I said that if needed, I could help deliver the fridge in my truck although I was hoping to not have to follow up on that offer.  When I saw their mid-size sedan in the driveway I knew I would be put to work.  I backed the truck up to the garage and with the help of the two young guys hoisted the original fridge that came with the house into the bed of the Tacoma.

I haphazardly used one of my ratcheting straps to keep the fridge from rolling anywhere.  Luckily I only had to go a few streets up the road.

The house the young couple lived at was at the very end of the street.  The house was WAY off the street and required traversing a twisty, bumpy sand driveway to get there.

The house was interesting.  You could tell that when it was built there was some real thought and effort put into it.  However it looks like at one point it probably became when of the many foreclosure casualties in my area.  The young couple obviously didn’t have the means to keep the place well maintained.

We guided the fridge inside using my hand truck.  It felt kind of weird leaving it at a strangers place after being under my roof for over a dozen years.  Oh well, it freed up room in the garage and hopefully will serve it’s new family well.  The young couple thanked me for my efforts.  I headed home and resumed my labor.

In addition to the mulching, I grabbed some additional stuff at Home Depot as improvements to the yard and garden.  For the garden I grabbed a tray of a different kale variety and cauliflower.  Both will be great home grown food additions if they flourish.

For the yard I bought an avocado tree and a coconut palm.  The avocado tree was planted up front in the spot the remains of the frost murdered plumeria resided.  In the past year I discovered that I like avocado.  It just happens to be a GREAT super food.  It would be awesome to be able to eventually grow my own.

The coconut palm was planted where the palmetto used to be.  The coconut palm that is planted off the corner of the pool cage is probably my favorite tree on my land.  That actually started as a tree of roughly the same size as what I bought.  It’s now probably 30 feet high and has fronds that are 12 feet long.

I just happened to have enough castle wall stone left to make a small border around the palm tree. I weed blocked and mulched the area for aesthetics.  I am crossing my fingers it takes hold and flourishes.

By the time the last tool was put away I was thoroughly spent.  I had managed to fill pretty much the entire day with various work although I did like the fruits of my labor.  The landscaped areas look much better with their new thick coat of mulch.  You can see all the pictures from the day here.

Saturday night I made the mistake of downing a couple Bud Light Platinums on an empty stomach compounded with a dehydrated body, I hardly drank any water all day long.  The end result was my getting buzzed extremely quick.  While buzzed I went on a Facebook posting spree, throwing up a bunch of random, mostly stupid things.  Moral of the story, don’t drink and post to Facebook.

On Sunday morning I got off to a late start thanks to the clocks jumping forward this weekend.  My planned brick at the waterpark didn’t get started until shortly before 11.  I had a surprisingly decent bike ride, averaging  18.5 mph on the 12.5 mile ride.

Ali showed up to join me for the swim portion of the brick.  I put in 800 meters at the pool, the last 400 were at a fast (for me)  8 minutes.  It was really surprising because my swimming endurance felt pretty damn awful.  I felt gassed after the first 200.

The was my first brick of 2013.  Hell it was my first swimming since last September and I don’t think I have done any fast biking in almost as long.  It felt good to get out there. I hope to reestablish Sunday bricks as part of my normal fitness routine.   I just need get them done earlier in the day.

On my way home I stopped at Ali’s place (she was not home) to get a book case she no longer needed since the Ikea additions to her place.  Once verifying it was the correct width to fit in the vacated fridge wall space, I loaded it into the truck.  Doing this myself was tricky.  I carefully slid the shelf down the carpeted stairs which include a 180 degree turn and then awkwardly hoisted it on to the tailgate.

It fit the wall perfectly although a finished wood shelf may not look very stylish in a garage setting.  It gave me a lot of functional storage space over the fridge, which had become a one shelf storage area in the past year.

The SSR got a needed bath Sunday afternoon.  It has had a bug facial since the SSR meet up.  I never get tired of washing the truck.  I love the way it looks when I am done.

Sunday night Ali and I went to go see the Great and Powerful Oz.  Since neither of us had plans we figured we might as well go together.  Ali is a huge Wizard of Oz fan so the idea of a prequel to one of her favorite films of all time was appealing to her.  I went to get out of the house, I don’t share Alison’s love of OZ.

The movie wasn’t bad although I was fighting a severe case of drowsiness throughout.  Ali thought it was really good which isn’t surprising since she loves the story so much.  Personally I’d give it a B or B+ but if you love OZ you will be into this film for sure.

So once again I had IX Webhosting turn off the Bar-barians web site.  I am finding myself thoroughly annoyed at the way they have been handling the issue of CPU utilization.  When the new BB site first launched in early February I had no idea it would get as much traffic as it has.  In 30 days it got somewhere around 2 million hits.  Hits are page views, not 2 million unique visitors.  That is a lot.

I have been really working hard at getting the site as optimized as possible by doing things like utilizing W3 Total Cache, implementing a CDN via Amazon Cloudfront and making dozens of little tweaks to minimize the load on the shared server.  My efforts have gotten CPU usage down significantly but IX still says it is too high.  Ok fine, I understand the need to keep utilization down.  What I don’t understand is how poorly IX is at handling the situation professionally.

Each time they turn off the domain I have to call them, let them know I was going to do additional tweaking and then they would turn the domain back on.  In the support ticket it always says they will check usage again in 48-72 hours to see if my changes helped.  Well what has happened each time is this recheck date passes, the domain is still online, so I assume what I did worked.

Well instead what happens is a random amount of days after the stated recheck someone actually does it.  When they do, instead of notifying me of the new usage numbers, they just shut the domain off again without notifying me first, requiring me to start the process all over again.

There are several problems I have with the support I have gotten on IX on the problem.  First, nobody “owns” my ticket.  Each and every time this happens I have dealt with a different person, none of which has a grasp on what has been going on.  It’s very annoying that they don’t assign tickets to individuals so they work with customers to resolve them completely.

Second their repeated pattern of letting their own recheck dates pass seems crazy and piles on to the frustration.  In this latest incident, I was told the domain was going to be rechecked on March 6th.  It actually wasn’t checked until FOUR DAYS LATER.  Since I had not been contacted on the 6th I assumed I was in the clear.  BAM, nope, you are dead, again.

Third, IX does not give their customers a way to check their cpu utilization themselves.  It requires one of their network administrators to pull a report.  This means there is no real time way for me to know how much of an impact the changes I am making are helping.  I make a tweak and then basically know it didn’t work when they turn off the domain again.  It is VERY inefficient.

So I am done trying to shoehorn the Bar-barians web site into my current hosting account.  I have several options.  The cpu usage on my account looks like if I split the BB web site onto it’s own shared hosting account it would fall under the CPU threshold at IX.  However after all the aggravation with the way IX has handled the issue I don’t really feel like rewarding them with more of my business.

I could move the site to shared hosting with a different provider, one that has a reputation of being more friendly to WordPress hosting and has better tolerance of the demands WordPress hosting can put on a server.

Finally I could look again at moving the site back to the Amazon cloud.  However I am not sure what size instance I would need to run the site efficiently.  Depending on the size I would settle on (a micro instance was woefully underpowered) I could wind up with a sizable hosting charge.   I am also not sure how keen I am taking on the responsibility of administering the virtual Linux server from floor to ceiling since I only have very limited knowledge of the environment.

So anyway, this week I will be looking in earnest at new home for the Bar-barians site, I need this Groundhog Day scenario to come to an end.