The reason I went with Lunar Pages last year was because it had a high rating on a site like your site.

But Lunar Pages turned out to suck.

And since seeing the video below, I will never trust a review site again, which is why I made this post in the first place. Now I want to go through word of mouth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8PidNJLrek

Sure, a lot of hosting companies suck. But there are a few of them that do a great job and provide good service. You just have to do your due dillegence and select a good one.

Hosting companies that depend on affiliate programmes (and thus pay much to affiliates!) usually provide such a bad service that no customer will recommend the service to their friends. Also much customers will not stick to this poor service. Both result in a high customer turnover rate, meaning the hosting company needs to spend a large amount of money in affiliate programmes and other promotional activities to acquire new customers.

Conclusion:
“Affiliate programme” means “hosting that sucks”!

CPU usage is just the computer processor that runs the server, just like your home computer. In every ‘shared hosting’ environment you have maybe 200 people sharing the same computer. So imagine 200 people on your home computer all trying to play Sims. lol Not gonna work.

Shared hosting is perfect for little sites (like most of mine) but if you’re growing or have a lot of databases and stuff (like I’d imagine yours is), you’ll run into this problem with or outside of Lunar pages. That’s the risk of shared hosting. And it does suck. But as far as I know, the VPS stuff is the only ‘between’ area from shared to your own private server. I think vpses only run 30 people at most on one machine.

Good luck tho. Switching to a new host is no fun!

I finally figured out how to deal with Lunarpages. Here is the secret Carlos:

1) Do NOT under any circumstances assume they know more about the technical issues than the homeless guy living under the I-595 overpass. They are nitwits and only reading from cue cards that they pull randomly from a hat.

2) Respond briefly, and professionally by reporting that you have upgraded all your syntax, fluffed out your caches, neutered your VPS, and reinstalled all your php scripts. (No I have no clue that means, but neither do they.) It makes them think you resolved whatever the problem is, because they don’t actually know what the problem is themselves!

3) Whatever they say the problem is, tell them you appreciate the info and you have resolved the issue, now get the freaking blog back online!

75% of the time the problem, whatever it is, is short lived, and not on your end.

Hey, good luck with the anger management classes. I took them once. Flunked out.
Oh well.

SCG

There’s not much you can do about it short of checking for updates for wordpress, as you said; there might be bugs with whatever version you have that cause intensive processor usage for some reason.

Essentially, you’re slated to get 1% of their processor power, bandwidth, and memory, up to 20% of resources at any one time. You’re using more, so they’re trying to move you on to a machine with less people on it.

If you can actually get ahold of them on monday, ask what your bandwidth usage for this year has been so far (january to july)… that will help you pick another provider, as sites like aplus.net(which i’ve used for various clients in the past 7 years) now charge per bandwidth use, as opposed to space use… thanks to podcasts. Goddamned podcasts ruining rate structures on the internet.

Anyhow, if you can get the info about your bandwidth usage, i can help you find a reputable hosting company with a competitive price structure. No charge, of course!

–genewitch