WordPress 2.6 Upgrade Woe

My site was suspended for about an hour yesterday and you might wonder what’s going on. Let me tell you what happened.

WordPress 2.6 came out on 7/14. When I logged on to my site’s WP control panel, I was notified about the upgrade. My site was originally installed using SimpleScripts and I have used it to upgrade my WP installation before. The process was very smooth without any problems.

I logged on to my hosting company’s control panel and invoked SimpleScripts’ tool to upgrade my installation. It didn’t work the first time. The process stuck on creating backup and failed. I also noticed that it used a lot of server CPU time.

I then tried about two other times and they all failed. I wondered what’s wrong with it and used ssh to log on to the server. I found that some huge tar files got generated and I deleted those files and tried again. Guess what, it failed again.

When I was about to contact the technical support of BlueHost. My account got de-activated. They thought that someone has compromised my site and decided to shut it down, and they did it without notifying me first!!

For the next hour, I tried to call BlueHost’s abuse department several times and explained to them that my site was not compromised. The server performance was due to a bug in SimpleScripts. They wanted me to upgrade my WP to 2.6 and warned me that if this happens again, they will shut me down forever! That’s really not nice, because the problem was cause by the tool provided by them.

Anyway, I finally got my site up and running and I used the WordPress automatic ugrade plugin to do the upgrade. After this incident, I am very upset about BlueHost’s team. Maybe it’s time to look for a new home for my sites again. 🙁