the website is down

At 3.26pm this afternoon i received the following email;

Hi,
Your script [smemon/index.php] was causing extremely high processing on [servername]
As such, the script has been renamed from /smemon/index.php to /smemon/index.php.disabled. Please let us know what changes you will be making to correct this issue
We appreciate your understanding in this matter.
Thanks.

I was in college at the time, so i wasn’t online until about 3.50pm. As my index.php had been disabled, my directory was left wide open for viewing which is never a good thing. So the first thing i did was to create a quick html page in notepad and get it uploaded ASAP. There are a few reasons why i did this;

• to let people know the site was down
• to let people know i knew about it and was working on it
• protect my directories from being seen
• send people elsewhere whilst i scrambled to get it back online (i directed them to my twitter page)

Anyway, after a quick check around, i didn’t see anything out of the ordinary and put the site back online. I suspect the problem was caused by syncing disqus comments earlier in the day which may have stressed out my shared server.

photo credit: spaceninja

Usually whenever this site goes down it’s because of a traffic spike which is a good thing in many ways 🙂 So my initial reaction was to check out google analytics and see if there had been a surge in traffic. There hadn’t.

However, whilst on analytics i noticed that this blog has now past 100,000 unique visits for 2009. I’ve also included the stats so far in 2009 to the same period in 2008 and 2007…

So it’s a mini landmark for this blog… 100,000+ unique visits in a year for the first time. Next up will be the 250,000 mark Sticking with statistics, it seems this blog has also gotten it’s pagerank back. Pagerank is so 2007, but it’s nice to see google trying to get it to do it’s job again – measure the quality of a website on a scale of 0-10.