So, I haven’t posted in 9 months apparently (this is mainly due to being busy buying/renovating a house). Just before christmas I realised that my website wasn’t working (I don’t often check it to be honest), and when I looked into this, 000webhost had disabled my hosting account due to “for violating 20%+ CPU usage limit for more than 1000 times”. It gave me the option to re-enable my account by upgrading my hosting to a paid account (which I didn’t really want to do), so I contacted them to ask if I was able to get my account re-enabled (as I wasn’t even sure what had caused this issue of excessive CPU usage), but the answer was no. This meant I could either pay or potentially lose my WordPress site (all posts/pics/database), which part of me wasn’t bothered about (It’s not like I have a lot on here), but then again I was annoyed by the principle that my account had been suspended for an unknown reason and I had to pay to get my files back (I’m not the first to be in this situation according to google) – it felt all bit like my data was being held for ransom. I realise that 000webhost offers a free service, and it’s probably in their T&C’s (who really reads them?) that they can do as they please with my data, but I really don’t think this is the way to go about it. A warning when I’d hit 300/500/600/700… excess CPU violations would have been simple and probably have stopped this happening as I could have looked at the logs and seen what was using all this CPU bandwidth. Anyway, luckily enough I had installed this great little plugin “WordPress backup to Dropbox“, and so I had a backup of everything and was able to restore it all from dropbox within half an hour (I did have to modify the config for my new hosting etc, but this was fairly painless). The ironic thing is, I’ve got a funny feeling the same plugin which backed up my wordpress site to dropbox, may have been causing the excess CPU. Moral of the story is.. backup your data!

I’m now using 5QuidHost, who I’ve actually held a joint hosting account with a friend for years now. We used to use the hosting for various PHP based projects we worked on, but as we’ve not been doing much with it recently, I thought I may as well put it to use. I’d highly recommend 5QuidHost, they offer some great packages and their support has been great when I’ve needed them. The only negative I could pick with them is that they don’t support SFTP (although perpetual SSH access can be setup with a static IP on request, which is secure, but a PITA if you don’t have a static IP (and no, dyndns cannot be used)).

I hope to post an album soon of work I’ve (with the help from my friend I bought the house with) done on the house.