Blacknight Bloggers Beware
January 28th, 2008
Any Irish bloggers hosted on Blacknight, be warned that they have decided to clamp down on the issue of servers getting overloaded by popularity surges on Wordpress-based sites.
As far as I can tell, Blacknight have always been good on traffic spikes, and whenever some guy gets dugg or stumbled it was well handled. Michele recommends using a different blogging platform like Movable Type, or else installing a cache plugin. One thing to note - I had Wordpress wp-cache plugin enabled in my installation for a long time, even upgraded it when there were new versions. Didn’t realise that this isn’t enough, and I had to edit a line in the wp-config.php to actually activate the caching.
As per our Acceptable-Usage Policy, we might have to suspend any site that causes issues like this. Putting it simply - if you’re not being a considerate neighbour we might have to shut you down until you behave.
This is definitely a fair policy, but Michele, I hope I don’t need to point out what is wrong with this sentence from a “how to win friends an influence customers” perspective.
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January 28th, 2008 at 16:33 pm
James
I’m not sure I follow you. We get criticised by users / clients if the servers are slow, so I think it’s only reasonable that we enforce measures to help alleviate load on the servers.
Other providers would simply cut people off.
Michele
January 28th, 2008 at 16:56 pm
As I said, I agree with the policy - it is very fair. The bit that I was pointing out at the end is the wording of the quoted section. The issue of awareness rather than bad behaviour. In my case for example, I had wp-cache enabled as a plugin and assumed all along that it was working. It is often better to resist the temptation to “put it simply”.
January 28th, 2008 at 17:23 pm
Ah fair enough
It might be worded a bit bluntly, but I keep finding issues with people “interpreting” subtle wording to suit their tastes ie. if it wasn’t blunt people would miss the point entirely…
I’ve asked one of our technical staff to post a followup with some more details of the issues we keep seeing with WP.
Michele
January 28th, 2008 at 17:26 pm
I’m one of those guys who interprets things in the possible way
For the record the email that was sent out was very well written.
January 28th, 2008 at 18:10 pm
Heh. I think that’s a fair-enough interpretation!
But you have to love Blacknight for just being real and cutting to the chase. There’s so much legalise and, if you’ll excuse my language, bullshit to wade through these days; it’s a breath of fresh air to hear a large company like Blacknight just speaking English!
January 28th, 2008 at 22:18 pm
Eoghan
We try to remain honest and and clear when we can. It’s not always possible unfortunately, but nothing in life is ever as simple as we’d like
Michele
January 28th, 2008 at 22:18 pm
@James - your blog’s timestamp is out by an hour by the way
January 28th, 2008 at 22:35 pm
Hmm… well spotted
January 28th, 2008 at 22:42 pm
I’m the one with jetlag