September 5th 2008 – Techpp.com was born. I bought Shared web hosting plan from Lunarpages at dirt cheap price of less than $5 a month with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space along with the free domain.
September 11th 2008 – One of my posts hit front page of stumble-upon and I get my first ever warning message from the tech support. Within few minutes, my site is taken down, even without moving to stabilization server from production server.
September 12th 2008 – Tech Support from Lunarpages replies back saying my site is up and running, but it takes another day for me to access the site.
October 9th 2008 – I get a mail from the tech support saying “we have found that your account is utilizing excessive amounts of system resources.” I find that one of the plugins I had installed recently was causing the issue. I remove it and inform them about the changes made, don’t get a response back. Since site is up and running I don’t bother to mail them again
October 19th 2008 – I get a mail again “Your account’s resource usage is still high for a shared production server. However, we have noticed that you are running a WordPress based blog. WordPress generally consumes large amounts of resources on the server, and that is why we recommend using the WordPress Caching Script to reduce the resource consumption for your account and avoid causing any issues to the server.” I make appropriate changes as suggested by them and revert back to them informing the steps taken. In return to my response, I don’t hear back anything from them, instead I find my website to be inaccessible on October 21st 2008. They reply back saying its working fine, I finally see my website up on the morning of 22nd October. So far so good!
October 22nd 2008 – Again the same mail saying my resource usage is still high. I try to recheck if any other script is causing the issue. But this time the whole account is locked out. I drop a strong mail to them asking how they expect me to make changes after locking me out. They unlock my account and I take out every possible plugin, site looks like a mere skeleton of what once it was.
November 15th 2008 – I get the same mail again, this time asking me to update my scripts or UPGRADE to VPS or dedicated hosting. I reply back to requesting them to help me find the script causing the issue (if any). Some other person replies back repeating the same stuff asking me to upgrade to VPS. this time he gives the links and rates of VPS and dedicated hosting.
November 16th 2008 – I make some more changes and ask them to check the resource usage, they get back to me saying “Please note that the acceptable usage range for shared plans is 1.0% average %CPU or less, 1.0% average %Memory or less 0.2% average %Mysql and Top Processes below 20%.
You can upgrade to a business plans but your usage is still high even for this plan. You can benefit of more resources than on a shared environment , we would suggest to upgrade to one of our VPS http://www.lunarpages.com/virtual-private-server/. ”
November 17th 2008 – All this while they were mentioning some or the other plugin resource as the top process. This time they mention index.php to be topping the resource usage. They move the site to stabilization server. I ask for the stats. Stats shows the average usage is well within limits, but top process is more than 20% CPU usage. I make more changes and ask them to check and let me know if everything is fine. I don’t get to hear from them. I make a huge mistake of not mailing them back assuming everything is fine now.
December 6th 2008 – Techpp gets a makeover. Many readers find the improvement in loading time.
December 7th 2008 – Shocking mail delivered “Your Lunarpages web hosting account (techpp.com) has been
suspended. You need to contact support to have it unsuspended.” I try to call them, make an international call to their support desk. After 20 mins or so, I get to hear someone from the help desk. He bluntly replies back saying he cannot do anything but I need to mail them and the sys-admins can only unsuspend my account. Still waiting to hear back from them, keeping my fingers crossed.
Update:
December 8th 2008 - Its been more than 12 hours now, am still waiting for a reply back from them. The log they have sent indicates that the average usage of resources is within the limits, but only that the top process is above the 20% limit.
Top Process %CPU 74.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /home/techpp0/public_html/wp-admin/theme-editor.php
Top Process %CPU 68.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /home/techpp0/public_html/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
theme-editor.php & admin-ajax.php are used when changing the theme. It is obvious that I won’t be changing my theme day-in and day-out. I used the theme-editor so much, just to make sure the site is optimized. Ironically, it has resulted in getting the account suspended 
I have sent a mail explaining this to them, hopefully someone there is wise enough to understand this.
Update 2:
18 hours have passed by, still no reply from anyone. Tech Support guy says he can’t do anything and i need to contact the system admin, who can be contacted by email alone. Where the hell is that email?
Update 3:
More than 24 hours now, don’t have anything to update. How true Silky was when she said the worst thing with the Lunarpages is the apathy shown towards site owners during crunch situations like this. Can’t think of whether I need to move to VPS or not, I just want the control of my website once.
It cannot get worse than this. I tried contacting the Billing department and the lady was so rude in her replies. All she had to say was I MUST wait for the reply from system admins and she just cannot do anything else. I don’t understand why the hell they put up an error message asking to “contact Billing/Support department immediately”.
Update 4: MAJOR UPDATE
December 9th 2008 – I got a mail reply from system admin of Lunarpages 2 hours back which said
Thank you for your udpates. I have unsuspended your account an we will check your account usage in 24 hours to determine how the modifications have helped.
Amazingly enough, neither my website is accessible nor I can login to my account page in lunarpages.com!
Almost 2am now, I better go to sleep 
Honestly, not hoping to see the website up even tomorrow morning!
Final Update:
December 12th 2008 – I signed up for Knownhost VPS and got my whole website transferred within hours with ZERO downtime! I am amazed by their professionalism and technical knowledge. Replies are quick and to-the-point. Amazing!
I thank each and everyone of you who helped me in one way or the other. I surely would have panicked if not for you wonderful people. Thanks again!
Raju PP is the founder-editor of Technically Personal. He holds an Engineering degree in Electronics & Communication, and has previously worked as a Technical Specialist in Banking Software domain.
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