I found out about a major flaw in the calendar plugin for blosxom. after my website was suspended again. I started to wonder if there could really be a problem, since that happened with my previous provider too so I called up Bluehost‘s support team and asked about the problem. First of all, I have to say thanks to their support: contrary to my previous provider, they had a Call Center, which made things much smoother. Additionally, they were able to provide accurate information about the name of the process, the time, the amount of CPU usage, etc.
Thanks to those details and after a quick search in Google, I found an interesting page, where the problem was mentioned. Basically, if you input a bad month in the URL, the plugin will get into an infinite loop, which may use up all resources on the server.
The fix proposed in the page is quite simple: just run a test on the month, and if it’s greater than 12 or lower than 1, just force its value to 12 (for example). Assuming there may be other problems, I’ve just got rid of this plugin and replaced it by the flat archives plugin, visible on the right hand side of this page.
Damn it! Maybe that stupid provider was right about the high CPU usage after all, but I still feel no regret having switched to Bluehost, for I know that they are more reliable and at least, they can speak proper English!
Be careful of Bluehost!
I thought Bluehost was pretty OK at first too. The problems started almost right away though and escalated into a full time headache. You may want to save yourself some grief and look into another provider than Bluehost. I wrote up some of my experiences at http://bluehost.blogspot.com if you are interested.
Thanks for the comment. I’ve had quite a bad experience with my previous webhosts (RCTHost, zighost). So far bluehost does the job for me and their service is rather good, so is their uptime. My guess is that all webhosts have more or less problems sooner or later. If you’re lucky enough, you will probably never notice the issues. I will stay with bluehost until they really start showing serious problems; at that stage, I may look at other webhosts, like I did in the past…