I logged onto KevinMuldoon.com this Monday to see the website was down. My hosting company Servint had emailed me recently advising me that my website would be down for ten minutes whilst they upgrade something on my server, however that was not the problem. The problem was with KevinMuldoon.com exceeding bandwidth.
My natural reaction was to get angry with ServInt. Downtime is always horrible as it loses you revenue and visitors who could potentially become long term followers. “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded” is an error message I should never see as I can control how much bandwidth each of my websites are allocated through the WebHostManager (WHM). I soon realised that the blame for this issue laid with me, not ServInt.
ServInt confirmed this and advised that KevinMuldoon.com had been set up with a package with only 500MB of bandwidth. They were correct. It was not really my fault though. I transferred all of my websites to ServInt from a dedicated server on WiredTree a few years ago. The WHM allows you to create different hosting packages for accounts. I always create an unlimited package for my own websites however I used to create limited packages for hosting websites of friends (e.g. limited disk space to 250MB). Unfortunately, these packages did not transfer over to ServInt. Despite this, the WHM still reported certain accounts as using limited plans.
The accounts that were not assigned packages on my old server were automatically assigned a default unlimited plan. Therefore the only websites which had limited bandwidth were the ones which had a limited package.
All of the websites which were assigned limited packages were websites that I previously hosted for friends. All except one: KevinMuldoon.com. I do not know why this website was ever assigned a limited hosting package, however it caused this site to go down on Monday.
If you ever transfer your server from one company to another, it is worth going through each account after transferring and checking that each website has the correct amount of disk space and bandwidth allocated to it. Sadly, that is not something I did. On the bright side, the site was only down for an hour or so. :)
Kevin