I upgraded The Cafes yesterday. The automatic upgrade failed, but manual upgrade seems to have succeeded.

OK. Seems like the upgrade completed successfully. Holler if you notice any problems. I think I’ll spend the rest of the morning straightening out the old computer mess as part of my general effort to simplify, clean up, and declutter my apartment.

Oops. Forgot to reenable the plugins including Akismet so there’s already a lot of spam. Bleach. Fixed.

• WordPress support (i.e. I can install it; they don’t have to provide it though it’s cool if they do).
• Full root access to WordPress: I can install my own themes and plugins and do my own database dumps.
• No fixed bandwidth, storage, transfer, or CPU time quotas (I’m willing to pay for more as I go up in usage, but I need to be able to handle spikes without the ISP turning off my site.)
• Hosted under my own domain name.
• Regular, reliable backups

The more I think about it, the more I suspect I don’t even want a shell account. I really want a managed WordPress account, preferably hosted in at least three data centers on different continents with hot switching. (Is that even possible? ) Who offers this?

Larry Aronson recommended BlueHost. They’re cheaper than Pair, but they still have CPU quotas, and I couldn’t find out what those were. (I asked but either they wouldn’t tell me or their chat system logged me off before I read the answer.)

MediaTemple advertises “Hosting that’s ready for traffic spikes. Start your new blog on a clustered hosting platform that’s ready for you to hit the big time. Whether you reach the front page of Digg or get an unexpected shout-out on Oprah, your blog will always be available. Get started right-away with our WordPress one-click installer and enough high-speed storage and bandwidth to run a blogging empire.” Their grid service sounds pretty spot on, though pricing for overages is somewhat opaque. That sounds about right. Has anyone used them?

Another possibility is running WordPress on top of Amazon EC2+S3/RDS. That’s a little bleeding edge, and may involve more server administration than I want to do, but it’s at least plausible and it does give me a really efficient model for spiky traffic and easy scalability.

Due to problems it was causing on the server, we were forced to disable the
following script located in your account:

/usr/www/users/elharo/cafe

For future reference, please take a look at our script usage policies:

http://www.pair.com/pair/policies/resource.html

http://www.pair.com/pair/policies/cgiresource.html

Please take a few moments to look over your script for any obvious problems
before using “chmod 755″ (via ssh) or using your FTP client to reenable
the executable permissions of the script.

If you have any questions about this script, please contact our friendly
support specialists at support@pair.com or 412-381-7247 (option 2).

The message is inaccurate. /usr/www/users/elharo/cafe isn’t a script. It’s the complete web site.

I’ve turned the site back on, but since they didn’t tell me what the problem actually was, I have no way of knowing if the problem is still there or not. I posted a new article on Friday, and it hit Hacker News yesterday, so there’s been a spike in traffic but still in the 10,000 hits a day range, nothing serious.

Update: according to Garrett H.

Your site was simply receiving too much traffic today. It is a WordPress site, which tend to be more resource-intensive. It was causing problems on the server, and since it is a shared hosting environment, we need to allow other customers on the server to also have fair access to the
servers’ resources.

Here’s my response:

This is absolutely unacceptable. I will be looking elsewhere for hosting immediately, and recommending others do the same. That I posted an article people are actually interested in reading is no reason to turn off the site. If your servers can’t handle the trivial load of 10,000 page views a day, you need to upgrade your servers. If a hosted site sees a spike in traffic significant enough to affect other sites, then you need to allocate more resources to the site, not turn it off. The control center shows my bandwidth at less than 20% of what I’m paying for. Clearly Pair has dramatically oversubscribed its resources, and is not suitable for any marginally professional site.

Anyone have a recommendation for a new host? Perhaps I should just turn off the ads and move it all to IBiblio. Despite charging me absolutely nothing, they’ve still managed to provide vastly more reliable service for the last 15 years than any ISP or web host I’ve ever worked with.

All done. Automatic upgrade failed, but manual upgrade seems to have succeeded. Holler if you notice any problems.

Yep, it worked. I inserted the photo with an alt attribute but no caption. Turning off captions really should be a global option in WordPress rather than requiring theme hacking. An alt attribute is not the same thing as a caption, nor is the same text appropriate.

P.S. That’s a jumping spider that visited me at my desk for a few days, one of the Salticidae, the world’s largest family of spiders. Beyond that I haven’t yet ID’d it.

This has required some changes to the feeds (they are now redirected through FeedBurner) so holler if anything looks awry. If it borks up, I’ll just kill the feed ads. The only real money this site makes is from the Amazon affiliate sales anyway. (Hmm, I wonder if I can sneak those into the feeds somehow?)

If this works, soon the feeds too will contain adds for “American Touch Painting”, “Top O.C. Divorce Attorney (Aggressive & Caring Representation)”, “Internet Dispute with a Free Telephone Consultation with Aggressive Lawyers”, and “Tummy Tuck Orange County”. Hmm, Maybe this wsn’t such a good idea after all. I wonder if AdBlock Plus works for feeds?

I can see no alternative but to go through and manually recategorize all 730 posts on this site as time permits. If I do 10 a day I’ll be finished in three months. Bleah.

I am increasingly unpleased with WordPress. I’m going to stop recommending it to others, and will seriously consider any alternatives that come along.