Looks like one of our WordPress plugins were generating excessive load on our 1and1 DB. The culprit appears to be Recently Popular, which was doing some sophisticated SQL queries. I’ve since disabled that and switched to WordPress.com Stats Helper, which stores the visitor data on their end.

Let’s hope this resolves the issue and that we’ll be seeing less 500 Internal Server Error. Maybe it’s time to look into dedicated servers or co-location hosting. If so, I’m definitely not going with 1and1 given how unhappy I was on how they dealt with this situation.

I sent the following email to them:

Thanks for clarifying the issue. I’ve disabled the plugin that generates the queries below and hopefully will resolve the issue.

However, there are several questions/expectations I have, which I feel 1and1 could have done a lot better at.

1. The T&C’s are very vague about “excessive load”. Is there a way for me to see what type of load I’m generating and if there is, what defines excessive load? If there isn’t a way, how does a customer even know when he’s generating excessive load?

2. When a customer is putting excessive load on shared resources, I would’ve expected warnings or at minimal a notification that my database was going to be shut down. I found out several hours later my website was no longer able to connect to the database. I then had to call in inquiring about why my database was “closed” and the customer service on the other end was not able to give me a reason because the department in charge of this was closed. I’m extremely unhappy with how this situation was dealt with.

Given this, what’s the next step in restoring the database which you have shut down.

Their reply:

It appeared as if you were using MySQL for logging, so we would suggest not using that. Depending on the severity of the load, we do send out warnings before stopping connectivity, but in your case our System Admins in Germany acted as they did because your database was already affecting our other customers on the server.

I like how their reply hardly answered any of my questions…