Dreamhost pulled my site and I don’t know why.

This is driving me crazy.

I had 2.0 installed. Activated Akismet. Put in a plugin for push-button backups. That was it. Hadn’t even tweaked the theme yet. Total Kubrick. Archives were ported over from MT after some difficulty. 800-some-odd posts. Couple thousand comments. 300 – 400 unique visitors a day.

Worked fine from December through Sunday 21 January. Site went down; I reported it; they fixed it. Monday: site went down; I reported it; they fixed it; site went down again; they fixed it again. Here’s what they said:

Your server had a problem with one of its file servers. This problem has been resolved and the server is responding quickly again.

Okay.

Site went down again Tuesday. Here’s what they said:

Actually I’m finding that your site, longstoryshortpier.com, is taking down the server somehow. I made sure there were no processes owned by your “kiplet” user then I browsed to your site and pretty much immediately these php.cgi procs started stacking up, making the server slow to a crawl:

kiplet 19333 0.0 0.1 14420 4944 ? DN 13:44 0:00 php.cgi
kiplet 22401 0.0 0.1 14608 5460 ? DN 13:44 0:00 php.cgi
kiplet 31484 0.0 0.1 14428 4948 ? DN 13:44 0:00 php.cgi

The list of numbers went on for a bit. I can reproduce it if someone would like to see it for whatever reason. Anyway. They pulled the site, by which I mean I guess they set longstoryshortpier.com so it wouldn’t resolve there so no one could make WordPress do anything. I have two other domains that point to the same server. They put longstoryshortpier.com back up later, and all seemed to be well.

Then it went down again today. Here’s what they said:

Just to continue this super fun ongoing saga about [the server]’s load and your scripts, you definitely got some bum info this morning…the high loads and crashiness on [the server] is definitely being caused by your user.

Basically, we’re periodically seeing a few hundred PHP procs owned by kiplet spawning in a few seconds.

It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what is causing the freakouts. We’ve been taking long looks at your access.log as the machine goes down the tube, but even that is difficult, because WP by default shows every request as successful (return code 200) due to its permalink/mod_rewrite stuff.

But from what we can see, it’s a bunch of hits for feeds from RSS aggregators and web crawlers and the like.

Again, I know you didn’t write WordPress, but we don’t have much of a choice but to disable your domain when this stuff pops up. It’s not fair to the other people on the machine.

If you have further clues or ideas, please let us know, but we can’t keep letting [the server] crash!

And that’s it. They’ve pulled the domain, I can’t get at it to try something else, I don’t know what’s wrong, and there’s nothing I can do to try something else since they’ve pulled the domain. And they haven’t answered any emails for over 8 hours now. But apparently, they seem to be saying an out-of-the-box install of WordPress with two perfectly standard plugins and a minimal amount of traffic is screwing them up.

But–even though they’ve pulled longstoryshortpier.com, I still can’t get at my other two domains on the same server. They’re down just like before. Nor can I get at my database through the MySQL panel. Nor can I FTP in; it keeps timing out.

So maybe it isn’t WordPress. But again, I can’t tell.

This is mostly a rant. I’m actively looking for a new host. But I don’t want to move again, goddammit. And SOMEthing is going on. Does any of this ring a bell for anyone? Is there any sense to be found here?