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Say you are a landlord, and you rent out apartments.

One day you walk by the building you own and you see that one of your tenants has left on a 1000 watt light bulb in one of his rooms, consuming an extraordinary amount of electricity, dimming the lights in all other appartments.

Now, would you turn of the electricity to his whole apartment, knowing that this action will also turn of his fridge, aquarium etc., or would you try to notify the tenant first and let that tenant turn the light off himself but risking that it might take a while before that tenant responds?

I guess you probably would try to control the damage and just turn the electricity to that apartment off altogether, right?

Now, what if you – as a landlord – would have to power to just turn off that one light bulb in that one room- remotely – altogether? Thus leaving the fridge and aquarium on and just leaving one room in the apartment in the dark?

I think common sense will prevail here and you would just turn that one light bulb off, not risking the fridge to defrost and the fish in the aquarium to die by lack of oxygen. Right?

Well, essentially (in my opinion) this is what happened to me this Friday, when I received an email from my trusty webhost, Site5.com in which they told me they turned of my web account all together due to a problem (details further on).

Now, Site5 is the company where I host this and another website.  I also have been a Site5 customer for some years now (I think at least 4), and I have had a mostly positive experience with them.

In fact: I have referred many friends to Site5 – not always taking credit for it (unfortunately; as they have an excellent partner program that can earn you money for each referrer.).

Let me tell you straight out that on the whole, Site5 is very cost effective and – in regards to what you pay – their service is outstanding. They have helped on many occasions and have gone all the way for me when I experienced other problems in the past.

But back to my last experience: as  companies know: you’re always as good/bad as the last experience your customer has.

Well, Friday night I received an email in which I was told that during some monitoring, Site5 noticed that one of my scripts was slowing down the database.  As I am on a shared host (i.e.: it’s an apartment building full of individual apartments that can consist of more than 1 room), you do not want that to happen, because the other tenants would have a problem with that.

Now, even though their tech guys could pinpoint exactly which one of my scripts was hogging the database, they just turned my complete website off. I.e.: turning off the fridge and my aquarium as well.

A pretty drastic measure.

After I inspected the database they had mentioned as being the culprit, I could not find a problem.

The only thing I saw, was that the referrer table that keeps track of visitors, had grown to about 31mb (I guess too large to handle). Apparently that hogged the MySQL database (the 1000 watt light bulb in my analogy). So I emptied the table and that was it.

Site5 turned back on my electricity and all was well.

However: still baffled by the fact that Site5 could pinpoint the problem exactly (what database etc.), but opted to turn everything off, I  asked the tech guys “why?”.

This triggered a very long thread of emailing back and forth, in which Site5 – in my opinion – just avoided a straight answer to why they didn’t just turn off that one database (as I am 100% sure they can – if they would want to).

Long story short: my interpretation is, that although Site5 can pinpoint the problem, they rather not spend  time on it altogether and just take the simplest action of all: disabling an account altogether.

However, the time they spend in avoiding my questions about why they didn’t just turn off the one database, they could instead have easily spend on – well – turning of that 1 database. And leaving all my other sites/scripts just running – as they where running perfectly.

So in the end their initial action wasn’t cost-effective anyway (as I kept bugging them for a few hours for an explanation).

Bottom line: although on the whole I am pleased with Site5, this is the kind of experience that kinda spoils it.

Anyway: I just wanted to vent my most recent Site5 experience and will try (hard) to not let this cloud my overall judgment (as 99% goes well).

And to be fair: Site5 did take ample time to explain their actions.

But sometimes no matter how good the explanation is, it still doesn’t make it feel right. Right?