The problem with shared hosting is that hosting companies have to set very certain limits in order to prevent runaway queries from taking over the server. If a user has a query that examines an exorbitant number of rows from their database (I’ve seen 1.32E47 rows examined before from an EXPLAIN command), the query will take forever and never end, in theory. All the while, that query is likely trying to sort the records in a temporary table. Temp tables are stored in memory. Huge queries like that take up all the free memory and then all the swap space (physical storage space used as memory) on the server and there is literally NO memory left on the server. I have seen a single user use up all 48 GB of memory on a server before because of one bad query.

At that point, what is a hosting company to do? Yes they can kill the query, but how can you prevent that query from coming back? They have to protect their best interests. So does that mean shutting down and upsetting 1 user, or does it mean letting it go and letting the other 1,000, 2,000, or more customers on that same server suffer because of the 1 negligent user? It’s pretty obvious what they need to do. In order to prevent pissing off 2,000+ customers, they piss off the one and shut them down. They realistically can not keep that database running while they notify the problem user as they have to get the server back to a working state immediately for the sake of the thousands of other customers on the same hardware.

It’s unfortunate that you were the one customer in this instance, but if they let it go, they’d have thousands of angry customers sending tickets and calling and complaining about poor server performance. They’d rather risk have 1 customer jump ship as opposed to potentially thousands. It’s pretty much a lose-lose situation for everyone involved, and it sucks, but every hosting provider will do the exact same thing, as the other posters mentioned.

The best solution, as others mentioned, is remove yourself from that situation and go with a virtual dedicated or dedicated server. Although I’ve seen single users crash VPS’s before since obviously there are certain shared resources there still.

I hope this can shed a little light on why hosting providers do some of the things they do that may piss us off and I hope everything works out for the best for you.

P.S. I will say that from a design standpoint, StatPress is a crappy plugin. It provides very useful information, but it causes nothing but problems for site owners. Do a quick google search on it and you’ll see a plethora of people complaining about poor site performance due to StatPress.

I have no problem buying my domains from godaddy but hosting….never!
.-= Gabriella Mckee´s last undefined ..If you register your site for free at =-.

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