SuperJared.com on SliceHost

At some point last week, an administrator at TextDrive was troubleshooting one of their servers, Cardero. The server had been having lots of trouble staying alive—it seemed about once a day that it needed to be rebooted. Performance had been erratic and spotty for months.

This particular administrator is a diligent fellow, not one to make common mistakes. As a matter of fact I have a great deal of respect for his technical ability.

Anyway, while he was figuring out ways to reduce server load he decided to recompile Python without threads. In theory, it makes perfect sense. And running Python afterward seemed fine.

On Friday, I decided to make some minor updates to my website. After testing my code on my local box I deployed the new code and restarted the FastCGI service. Unfortunately, it didn't work. For a while I couldn't figure out what had changed or what had gone wrong. Eventually I found out that importing the MySQLdb module failed with this error:

>>> import MySQLdb
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages/MySQLdb/__init__.py", line 27, in ?
import _mysql
ImportError: /usr/local/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient_r.so.14: Undefined symbol "pthread_getschedparam"

On February 10 07:29 UTC I submitted a support ticket with all the necessary details about the issue. Unfortunately I didn't receive an immediate response though I had marked my ticket "urgent" (which seemed fair sinced the entire site was down).

After a couple hours I decided that I couldn't wait any longer. I decided to move SuperJared.com to SliceHost, a VPS host. I had signed up an account with them a couple months previous, planning on using the account for a larger-scale site than my personal blog. The decision to purchase the account was made on the grounds that a) I needed something better than "Shared Hosting", b) I love full control, and c) TextDrive's Accelerators are too expensive for me for now.

Additionally, the SliceHost staff, while they're a small group, they're smart, responsive and thorough. While TextDrive hires quality admins, they just don't have enough to keep up with the issues they have with shared hosting.

The previously-mentioned TextDrive admin finally got back to me about 23 hours later. He had restarted MySQL, he said he really didn't think it was the culprit but he'd try it anyway. It didn't work so he eventually re-recompiled Python with threads. Finally, nearly 24 hours and 813 missed hits to the site, the site was able to restart on Cardero.

But it was already too late: the DNS was already resolving to my Slice. Thanks Matt, Jason and the rest of the SliceHost crew. Yours is a fantastic product and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for an inexpensive VPS.