aso-abuse.md

After 7 years of being a customer of A Small Orange, I plan on switching this week.

Earlier last week, I was emailed by A Small Orange. See email.txt in this gist.

What's was going was that on here is that my account is experiencing a huge spike in activity. The script in question is my Mint analytics.

What I believe is happening is that someone has copy/pasted some code from the Isotope, Packery, or Masonry site, and deployed it in a site with huge scale. That, or, my own sites are experiencing a huge spike in traffic.

My account has been suspended. I have no access to my sites -- FTP, SSH, or control panel. All my sites display this page:

After requesting my account be unsuspended so I can at least mitigate the problem, I have not received access.

I am tasked with fixing this spike in server load. I am not sure how exactly to do that. Here's my exchange with A Small Orange's support staff

Dave DeSandro: Hi. Looks like my analytics is being pinged a lot. What can I do?

ASO Support: You may need to utilize caching, database optimization or other means in order to prevent this from causing a high server load. Please let us know when you are ready so that we may unsuspend your account.

---

This my the second incident of this type with A Small Orange. A month ago, I managed to bring down my server by hosting the Masonry site on the ASO server, rather than through GitHub Pages. As it turned out, so many Tumblr pages were hot-linking to the Masonry JS, it easily brought down my service once it was on my server.

My Tweet on June 12:

Turns out a bunch of Tumblrs were hot linking to jquery.masonry.js, which brought down my subdomain. Not sure how to resolve this

I was able to resolve this issue by switching back to GitHub Pages. I can understand why this "abuse matter" occurred and I was at least given an opportunity to resolve it.

---

I feel like A Small Orange's handling of this matter is offensive and careless. I admit I am responsible for ensuring activity and server loads are kept in check. But I feel like am being treated as the "offending party," rather than a loyal customer of 7 years.

email.md

The email below has been modified. All username and detailed URLs have been removed or changed.

---

Hello David DeSandro,

This is an abuse report concerning your Shared Hosting account with A Small Orange:

Domain: desandro.com Abuse Type: CPU/Memory/Resource Abuse

YOU MUST RESPOND TO THIS NOTICE - Even if the offending account has already been suspended or terminated! If A Small Orange does not hear back from you within 0 hours to confirm receipt of this message and your actions taken to prevent further abuse from occurring on your account, your ENTIRE ACCOUNT or SERVER will be subject to suspension or termination at our discretion. Some abuse reports may direct you towards third-party sites to handle, please reply to A Small Orange as well as the third-party site.

This is an abuse matter that is handled ONLY by our Abuse Department and requires your immediate attention and cooperation. Our Abuse Department is available only via email and our ticket system. This is not a support matter, and therefore our support agents CANNOT ASSIST YOU. We cannot provide any information or assistance via our phone system or live chat service. If you attempt to call or chat regarding an abuse issue you will be instructed to send an email. Repeated attempts to call or chat regarding abuse issues will result in your access to these systems being revoked.

If you are a reseller, cloud, or dedicated server customer, it is your responsibility to reasonably monitor your clients' activities and to respond to our notices in a timely fashion. If you fail to properly act or respond to our notice, or we receive repeated and continuous complaints regarding your accounts, we reserve the right to suspend or terminate your entire reseller and/or dedicated server without further warning.

16474 20 0 189m 17m 9300 R 7.9 0.1 0:00.24 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16487 20 0 189m 17m 9300 R 7.9 0.1 0:00.24 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16444 20 0 253m 69m 61m R 7.5 0.4 0:00.23 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16447 20 0 189m 17m 9300 R 7.5 0.1 0:00.23 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16481 20 0 253m 70m 62m R 7.5 0.4 0:00.23 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16482 20 0 253m 79m 70m R 7.5 0.5 0:00.23 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16502 20 0 253m 73m 64m R 7.5 0.5 0:00.23 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16512 20 0 189m 17m 9300 R 7.5 0.1 0:00.23 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16485 20 0 253m 70m 61m R 7.2 0.4 0:00.22 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16496 20 0 253m 79m 70m R 7.2 0.5 0:00.22 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16498 20 0 253m 72m 64m R 7.2 0.5 0:00.22 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16466 20 0 253m 57m 49m R 6.9 0.4 0:00.21 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16473 20 0 253m 61m 52m R 6.9 0.4 0:00.21 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16480 20 0 253m 59m 50m R 6.9 0.4 0:00.21 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16493 20 0 253m 61m 52m R 6.9 0.4 0:00.21 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16499 20 0 253m 66m 57m R 6.9 0.4 0:00.21 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16509 20 0 253m 68m 60m R 6.9 0.4 0:00.21 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16514 20 0 253m 67m 58m R 6.9 0.4 0:00.21 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16503 20 0 253m 60m 52m R 6.5 0.4 0:00.20 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16504 20 0 253m 54m 46m R 6.5 0.3 0:00.20 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16507 20 0 253m 53m 44m R 6.5 0.3 0:00.20 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16513 20 0 253m 62m 54m R 6.5 0.4 0:00.20 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16518 20 0 253m 58m 50m R 6.5 0.4 0:00.20 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16489 20 0 253m 49m 40m R 6.2 0.3 0:00.19 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16491 20 0 253m 48m 39m R 6.2 0.3 0:00.19 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16494 20 0 253m 45m 36m R 6.2 0.3 0:00.19 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php
16497 20 0 253m 52m 43m R 6.2 0.3 0:00.19 /usr/bin/php /.../mint/index.php

That sucks. Similar thing happened to me with http://dummyimage.com. It's a PHP script that serves images but it was getting used so much that it was too much for Dreamhost's shared plan. Upgraded to a VPS plan with the lowest memory option possible ($13 extra a month or something like that). Adjusted the headers sent with each image request to ensure it was being cached locally as much as possible to reduce the load on the server.

You can try running your site through CloudFlare to cache your static assets for free -> http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/cloudflare-can-boost-sites-performance-for-free/

I don't know what to tell you about Mint for analytics. That PHP file is supposed to run on every request so there's nothing you can do to cache it. Google Analytics?