Two weeks ago today my hosting company took this blog off its usual shared-platform server and put it on an inaccessible backroom scripting server for the third time in 14 months. – This meant that kkomp.com took ages to load on anyone’s computer if it managed to do so at all.

The reason for this was that the site was using too many resources on the shared server. Being a British host; they don’t have the decency to email first and inform you that they are about to do so, thus giving you a chance to do something about it. Rather they plonk the domain on a server with a number of other sites that are also using too many resources; and the server’s resources max out and it’s hardly possible to get through to your site for testing purposes. – Although the ftp server is still fully responsive, and, late at night, the main web server becomes partially responsive when the load on it decreases.

Anyway after they’d done it a third time there was only one decent solution: get it on a dedicated server.

The reason too many resources were being used this time was because of the universal translator plugin I’d installed caching all of the translations it made to disc and referencing them when an identical translation was required. According to Fasthosts, (A Google of the phrase”Fasthosts are shit” will reveal several rather frightening horror-stories about the UK’s most incompetent hosting company.) I was utilising over 50% of the CPU at times.

Having got this domain onto a dedicated server I found that nothing except for the home page worked; every link I clicked and every URL I typed in resulted in an error 404.

Read “August 29, 2009 – I Turned 404 into 200 With a Tiny Bit of php – Part 1”, and part 2, and you’ll see how I put things right.

”Whatever did happen to shazzalive.com anyway?”

Well it’s on my server, and it has something on it; basically just a bare WordPress framework with a default theme currently. I was going to go live with it in January 2010; bit that’s now cancelled for the foreseeable future. I’m sticking to this blog, and, having debugged it, I’ll be developing it further.

I apologise for the recent downtime; but as you’ll clearly understand, it was due to circumstances beyond my control mainly.

After I’d got the blog partially functional I started to panic when the techs at Fasthosts told me that; while the engineers maintained the shared-platform servers, they didn’t do anything at all to the dedicated servers: It was all down to me to sort out any problems, despite having very little knowledge of servers or Linux.

Fasthosts supply a dedicated server with seemingly all of the basic functions, including

mod_rewrite, switched off for security purposes, and won’t help with anything more than less-than-complete basic advice, unless you pay them £60 + VAT per half-hour.

In my panic I put out a call for help from the online Linux community: –