Steady on, little server

An historic moment for any new domain: the first site outage. Visitors were greeted by a generic 500 ISE page from around 5 in the morning till a few minutes ago, when I fixed things up again. Dreamhost responded to my support request by telling me to fuck off and die twice, forever*, so I was left to rely on my own devices to heal the wheezing site. I had a hunch that a wordpress plugin was to blame, and sure enough, StatPress, a stat-gathering plugin for the terminally vain (guilty!) was the culprit.

If I could figure out how to give them a one-star rating, I would. Catastrophic failover modes are not acceptable, web developers. Please make a note of it. Other similarly blighted webmasters might find this set of hacks useful.

* This wasn’t Dreamhost’s fault, in any way. But besides confirming that fact for me, they provided exactly zero help. Having worked a fair amount of technical support myself, I know a thing or three about good customer service. It often involves troubleshooting things that aren’t your fault, not just passing the buck and calling it a day. I had the experience to enable me to fix this issue on my own, but I kind of doubt that the average one-click wordpress user hosted by them does.