I wanted to see if one of you hosting experts could offer your thoughts on something that happened this morning.
I received a call from my hosting provider saying that some process that ran on my site caused their server to crash. The site is currently not being hosted on a VPS, just a shared server (that may change later). I have no clue what that process could have been. I didn't even do much of anything on the site this morning... I edited a blog.
I know there are possibly a billion things that could potentially go wrong at any given time. I would like to make sure I'm not at fault. If I have set my site up in a way that is problematic PERIOD, then I want to do it right. If I did nothing wrong and they are trying to make me the scapegoat, I want to make sure I am covered.
My site's URL is www.scvbj.com
Thank you very much.
Joe
Comments
Did you get any additional
Did you get any additional information from the webhost? Do you have access to any logs?
Drupal Logs
Neat website!
Do you have Drupal Watchdog/Logs enabled? What was the last Log entry? The last entries could give you a good cue as to what could have caused the problem. Yes Getting Server logs would also help.
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
Did Your Hosting Company Provide You ...
Did you hosting company provide you with any evidence to prove your site was the cause of the crash? The problem with a shared environment is that it can be very difficult to track down the cause of the crash. There are just too many moving parts with all the other sites hosted on that server. Without seeing any log files showing clearly it was code from your site that was the cause, I wouldn't worry about it too much. I would highly recommend to move out of shared hosting and into a VPS, or if your traffic/budget allows, to a dedicated server. That way you can control what's running on your server and no other site can impact yours.
The first concern I have is - how was the server restarted? I'm guessing you're using MySQL, was the Drupal database checked at all for corruption? Your site may be running fine now, but if there's any table corruption, especially if you're using MYISAM tables, it may not show right away. MySQL really doesn't like being shutdown uncleanly.
HTH
Mark Schoonover
http://www.thetajoin.com
High Performance Drupal Hosting & IT Services
Cron
I'd check the site Cron and see if its running okay. If you are pulling in a lot of RSS feeds, I'd stagger them at least a few minutes apart. Also, take note of what people are saying above.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
not enough info
based on your post with a vague problem and a link to your website... we don't even have enough to speculate what "some process" on your site may be or if it was indeed the culprit of a server crash.
a drupal website in itself will not cause a server to crash. period.
you do seem aware that there are things you can do that could lead to performance degradation, security issues that could allow bad things to happen, etc. yes, lots of moving parts, especially on a server with high levels of traffic.
However, and this is big, to counter the bad things you (or any of their clients) could do, there are numerous measures the host could, and should take, to prevent out of control processes or potential threats to take down a server.
--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
Thank you for all your
Thank you for all your input.
The host company rep told me that he would look into the logs and get back to me.
I don't know if the logs I have available to me are adequate to tell me what happened. I'll look into what was suggested here... "Drupal Watchdog/Logs"
Yes, right now, the main decision to go with shared hosting is budget, but when the site has more traffic and becomes more self-sustaining revenue-wise, I will definitely move it over to something more safe.
Yes, I was going to re-check my cron setup.
In regards to the MySQL database corruption, what do I need to do to look into that?
Thank you all again!