Apologies to anyone who tried to visit Via Negativa or one of its six sister sites last night and saw only a page that read THIS ACCOUNT HAS BEEN SUSPENDED. Believe me, I was as confused as you were! This morning, I learned that the suspension was triggered by one of my sites — presumably this one — overloading the host server’s CPU, and so I’ve spent an unhappy day axing plugins and tidying things up in an effort to keep the server from being overloaded by requests. You’ll notice the absence of things like auto-generated “similar posts” links, social media buttons, the fuller “recent comments” sidebar widget, and other features. Further cuts may be in the offing; we’ll see. I think I heard the president say last night that this is a time of shared national sacrifice. When you’re blogging on a cheap shared hosting plan, you quickly learn all about sacrifice.
Oh, and as long as I’m dealing in political platitudes: if you’re currently blogging on WordPress.com and chafing at some of the restrictions, don’t be too quick to rush into self-hosting thinking you’ll have more freedom across the board. In some areas — e.g. bandwidth and other usage caps, never an issue at WP.com — you’ll have less. And in any case, this kind of freedom definitely isn’t free.
glad to see it was nothing that couldn’t be handled with a little ingenuity and psychic elbow grease
Well, let’s hope! My hosting plan is coming up for renewal on February 7, so I’ll have to decide very soon whether to stay or go.
Blogging seems so complicated with infrastructure variations, rules and regs and general technical challenges I know I’m not up to. Reading this, I feel stupid or at the very least, ignorant.
If it’s any consolation, I barely understand this stuff myself. If I were starting blogging today, I’d probably be on Typepad or WordPress.com. Not sure being self-hosted like this is really worth the hassle and the risk of getting hacked.