Problems with hosted accounts

if you have a website then that site is almost certainly using a hosted account, which is where a hosting company has your site on one of it's servers. When starting out your site will probably use what is called "Shared Hosting" with several users (of which you are one) sharing the resources of a server. The hosting company will allow you to use upto 25% of the available cpu time and if you exceed this they will suspend your site .. something that has happened several times during development to Infoloko!

The initial cause of the problem is code that needs caching or that overuses the database manager (this will be the subject of a future blog post), but what if you've done all this caching/database work and you still have an overuse problem? Infoloko has been suspended several times due to outside agents (Baidu and Bing 'spiders' or 'bots') excessively using the site over a short period of time. They are simply collecting data for search engine use, Baidu is the chinese equivalent of Google, Bing is Microsofts own search engine. These are big users that we need to keep but their own flawed design causes problems. What you need to do is firstly advise your Hosting Company (always, always, always keep them on board), secondly, temporarily prevent access from the guilty spider (your host company can do this if you don't know how), thirdly log in to the offending search engine and lower it's crawl rate, and finally keep on monitoring your websites cpu usage,

good luck!