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For those who don't know, I'm a systems admin for a major shared web hosting company. I worked my way up from level 1 phone tech. For a while, I ran our "Scripting" department as a tier 2 tech. While I was in scripting, I had a customer call in demanding I let him use more than 1GB of RAM. We offer a very basic shared hosting package for very cheap, and it's a great basic service. It is NOT a high end dedicated hosting account, or anything better than a $4 a month cheap hosting account.
That said, here's the conversation I had with him:
SC: Why can't I use 1GB of RAM? There's 18GB free right now.
Me: Because that's way too much RAM for a PHP process in shared hosting.
SC: Yet you give me access to the memory_limit variable?
Me: Yes, to a point. If you exceed 256MB of RAM, an admin can and will shut you down for excessive resources. It's in the Terms of Service you agreed to when you signed up.
SC: I didn't read that drivel.
Me: Doesn't matter to us. You agreed to it, meaning you agree to adhere, or be told to find different hosting.
SC: YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! *hangs up on me*
After watching the account, I notice he set his memory limit to 1GB, then 5GB. This is where I go BOFH. His site ate the 5GB, and was still throwing out of memory errors. This means that someone has some REALLY badly programmed code he's trying to run here. This also means that EACH time someone loads his site, his php script will allocate 5GB of RAM before dying.
...So I load up 5 firefox tabs with this site, and load his page each twice before I get the "This account has been suspended" notice. Amazing what a php script trying to allocate a combined 25GB of RAM will do to get an admin's attention. The admin's note specified that he'd been suspended a few times before for general asshattery on our servers, and now must go find new hosting.
That said, here's the conversation I had with him:
SC: Why can't I use 1GB of RAM? There's 18GB free right now.
Me: Because that's way too much RAM for a PHP process in shared hosting.
SC: Yet you give me access to the memory_limit variable?
Me: Yes, to a point. If you exceed 256MB of RAM, an admin can and will shut you down for excessive resources. It's in the Terms of Service you agreed to when you signed up.
SC: I didn't read that drivel.
Me: Doesn't matter to us. You agreed to it, meaning you agree to adhere, or be told to find different hosting.
SC: YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! *hangs up on me*
After watching the account, I notice he set his memory limit to 1GB, then 5GB. This is where I go BOFH. His site ate the 5GB, and was still throwing out of memory errors. This means that someone has some REALLY badly programmed code he's trying to run here. This also means that EACH time someone loads his site, his php script will allocate 5GB of RAM before dying.
...So I load up 5 firefox tabs with this site, and load his page each twice before I get the "This account has been suspended" notice. Amazing what a php script trying to allocate a combined 25GB of RAM will do to get an admin's attention. The admin's note specified that he'd been suspended a few times before for general asshattery on our servers, and now must go find new hosting.
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