OK, this site was down for nearly 12 hours due to “extremely massive server resource abuse” by one of my WordPress scripts. The useful but problematic script that is always abusing the server resource is “Translator“. The plugin provides automatic machine translation of my blog in different languages. This has happened a few times and frankly I am sick of it! I’ve transferred my domain to a more powerful server but it’s still not strong enough to handle all requests.

I have no choice but to upgrade my server to a Dedicated Server. The migration will be carried out within these few days. It is not the most powerful dedicated server but it should be able to support my website for quite a while.

One thing I am really worried about huge down time is, will it mess up any rankings(keywords, PR) for my site? After a little searching, I found out from Berghausen, a Google Webmaster Central representative that we should consider returning a ’503 Service Unavailable’ with a ‘Retry-After’ header indicating when we expect our site to be back up. This is a more by-the-books way of explaining that your site is down for maintenance, and you can still send along a page explaining the error. Under most situations, Googlebot will not index your error page, and will come back looking for updates some time after the date specified in the ‘Return-After’ header.


Please refer to BlogStorm on how to return a 503 service unavailable with a retry-after header. I was too busy trying to get the website up and totally forgotten to do this. I will remember to do this IF there is a downtime in future.

By the way, this downtime happened around 1AM +0800 when I was asleep. If I was awake, I would stay awake to try to get the website up as soon as possible. To prevent this from happening in future, I’ve signed up for Pingdom, a service that monitors website EVERY MINUTE.

If there’s a downtime, Pingdom will automatically send me a SMS alert and also email me.

I really hope that there will be no more such long downtime in future after migrating this blog to a dedicated server and having Pingdom to monitor every minute. Do leave a comment if you have any suggestion on what can be done to avoid site from going offonline.

I do have some great articles coming up. So stay tune and sorry for the downtime!

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