When I moved from Yahoo Hosting to LunarPages (LP) in 2001 it was a dramatic change for the better; much more storages and features for less, and support you could actually speak to (at the time it was impossible to contact Yahoo support by phone). The service was good, even excellent. But nothing remains the same. This is sort of a rant.

Fast forward to May 2006. The Korea Liberator – a now inactive team blog I participated in with James J. Na and Joshua Stanton – had been hosted on LP for about four months when suddenly our account was suspended for exceeding CPU usage. Whatever the issue was, support soon told us that, “Everything seems to be resolved as of now according to your account information… your site is back in running order.”

This happened a few times at the end of May as seemed to be related to a comment spam storm. We were moved to a “non-production” (read; older and slower) server, but continued to function.

A month later it happened again, but this time we were down for a couple of days. They did give warning; a message in the middle of the night (EST) about three hours in advance of shutting us down. The obvious question we posed to LP support was “what’s causing the excessive CPU usage?” Their answer:

I suggest you update your scripts to the latest version. Scripts like Blogs, Image Galleries and message boards could take quite a lot of resources. You might want to try disabling one of them and check if that helps. Please get back with us after you’ve taken the necessary steps so that we can give you an update of your site’s usage. Thank you.

At the time I was in Rome on business, but luckily had already purchased a weeks worth of wireless internet. So I spent a couple of days doing everything humanly possible to reduce any drag TKL might’ve had on the CPU. Updated WordPress, all the plug-ins that I didn’t just uninstall, installed WP-Cache, etc. Nothing worked. I made sure support knew exactly what I did and asked if any of it seemed to help, as they had access to CPU usage but we did not:

Because stats only update once per day, the most recent changes you have made will not be reflected in these numbers. Please allow 24 hours for this to happen.

I fantasized about LP support techs in black SS uniforms on trail, “we were only following orders.”

I even called LP support in California from Rome, Italy, to try to get someone with greater expertise to take a look and find out what specifically was causing the CPU load so that I could reinstall or remove that software. I was told repeatedly to update scripts, etc., but no real help. Then it began to look a bit like a scam:

You have now been on this server well past the usual 7 day grace period. I realize that you have been attempting to make reasonable changes. However, I regret to say that your usage is still far to high for our shared environments. I will send information about our dedicated hosting to follow.

And:

I have spoken with our server admins, and it has ben stated that you will need to remove wordpress altogether to remain on our shared servers. Again you do have the option of upgrading to our dedicated plan… Unfortunately we cannot continue to risk this affecting the server, and all the users on this server. (emphasis added)

Why would a relatively small WordPress blog getting less than 1,000 unique visitors a day need a dedicated host? How the hell were all the other WordPress blogs functioning? Cash for LP was about all I could think of. Perhaps they’d use to hire more competent techs?

At that time we decided to move to Bluehost (BH). True to form, LP screwed up our request to transfer the TKL domain several times with an incorrect authorization code. But finally we were moved over and got this message from support (remember these two quotes for later):

As you have decided to move to another hosting company, we have terminated your account from our shared servers. Below is a link to a full backup of your site, which will be available for 72 hours. (emphasis added)

And later:

I have issued and mailed out a check in the amount of $57.24

When I backed up the MySQL database I found the problem; the db was ~200MB. Each page request resulted in a query of that enormous db file, thus very high CPU usage. And it was equally obvious that a plug-in – the BDP Referral Tracker – had added about ~185MB to the db.

If a support tech had just said, “hey, look at your SQL database,” it would have been fixed in less than an hour. But even after multiple requests from me, all they could say was look at your scripts, and uninstall WordPress.

The referral tracker is a great plug-in, BTW, but it adds a lot of information to the MySQL db. After about three months, several weeks of which included a spam storm and excessive hits from Google, the db was huge. I now empty (not delete, just empty) those tables from the db once a month or so, and continue to use that plug-in.

Fast forward again to October 2006; James, Joshua, and I blogged our separate ways, and I go back to DPRK Studies, which was still (since 2001) hosted at LP.

A few days later, while I was FTPing, I started getting an, “Internal Server Error” and the site went down. I spent an hour on the phone with LP support, the focus was of course, “what did you change?” I had been uploading files after all.

I spend hours and hours trying to undo whatever it was that I did, even though neither I nor support knew what that was. While try removing some plug-ins and the entire MySQL db disappeared. I had to pull my old posts off the TKL db.

And after support was telling me I’d done something to hose up the account for an hour on the phone and in email, I get this:

The issue with your wordpress site should now be resolved. PHP on the server was unable to communicate with mySQL and this error was the result.

Also, because Mars was moved to a new server (same name, just newer server), some cPanel settings may be slightly different.

So THEY made changes, did NOT notify users (like me, FTPing away at the time), and had blamed me for making a change that had affected my site. When I pointed that out:

I apologize for the inconviniences. Glad to hear that the issue has been resolved though.

Luckily they’re on the other coast, so I’m not in prison for doing something bad at the LP support center.

Then in January 2007 – six months after our LP account was closed and the refund check cashed – we received a “it’s time to renew your account” message from LP billing. When it was explained to them, in detail, that our account had actually been closed in June 2006, we got this reply:

My name is Shaun and I’m with the Quality Assurance Department at Lunarpages Web Hosting. I’m in contact regarding your recent cancellation request and to ensure that while you were hosting with Lunarpages you had a positive experience.

If you could provide any feedback about our services and your reasons for closing the account, it would be greatly appreciated…

Meanwhile, to get your cancellation processed, can you please provide us with the last 4 digits of the credit card on file for verification purposes… (emphasis added)

The several emails already sent to LP had clearly detailed that we had closed the account months earlier, and even included links to LP tickets that were still accessible and contained the entire account history. This is another reply:

I understand how you can be confused. Let me clarify the reasoning for this a little bit better. We have not received any prior notices regarding your cancellation of account. This is the reason why your site is still up and running, your account has not been officially deleted and terminated from our servers.

We will need to verify you are the account owner before we can make any changes. For security purposes to confirm you are the account holder, please provide your account user name, and the last 4 digits of the credit card… (emphasis added)

The person who obviously didn’t read past the subject line of the email or bother to follow the links to prior tickets detailing the account closure months before was going to “clarify” things for me. Priceless.

Finally someone read it and replied:

My apologies for the confusion.

I have cancelled your account and it is set to delete and close today.

And:

I cannot confirm that the account was closed in June 2006 because it was not. You were issued a refund at that time but the account was not closed until 01-13-07.

I then emailed that person the link to the ticket from June, along with a cut and paste of the name of the person who did it, the amount of the check, etc. I told them that if the account was not closed, then someone in either billing or support or both was incompetent for sending out a check and leaving access open. Their final reply:

As you have been refunded and your account canceled I will go ahead and close this ticket. I can assure your account is terminated and will not be renewed.

It was a pissing contest, pure and simple.

At that point I’d had enough and move my domains to Bluehost. I’m in the process of cancelling LP service right now, and fully expect to be emailing with LP support about it in a few months as they attempt to renew my account.

At one point in time I told people LP was great. Then I said it was more than sufficient if you didn’t have a lot of traffic or install very many scripts. My final recommendation is avoid LP like the plague; the support is now (mostly) incompetent and incapable of reading basic emails explaining problems. Over half of the replies from support did not relate to the actual problem they were being contacted about. Billing is equally incompetent. Go to BH and you’ll be better off.