We were recommended Hostgator by for our drupal built site and have deployed the live site there. Our site is a Drupal 7 site with Ubercart for ecommerce. It's kept up to date and has all the latest drupal updates, and all modules are also kept up to date.
We delete all products once a week and upload a new cvs file. We average about 6500 products (we deal in rare books so each product/book is unique). We import via a Feeds importer. We have done this for about 2 years now and it's worked fine with no hiccups.
However, last Thursday when accessing the site via the backend, it seemed to run very slow; just going from one admin page to another took sometimes more than 10 seconds! The delete of the products was also exceedingly slow but worked. I was also able to upload the cvs file but I was unable to import the products! The whole web browser window literally jumped up and down and flickered before it even reached 2%! I deleted and tried several times but no go.
I then went into the Cpanel at Hostgator after having looked through the site via Transmit ftp and not been able to find anything untoward. The Cpanel had a ""Site Status" link and I clicked that. I saw a warning button at the top that said the a script of mine was hogging CPU and I could click another button to release the hold on the site. I did click that and tried again to upload but same thing happened.
When I had been able to click through so I could see the Site Status, there were two red warnings and one yellow; one red warning was for my "home" folder and said 91%, the other red was 93% and the yellow about 81%-all for home folders. I also saw a log of "current sites requests" and it showed the last 1,000 - well over 975 of those said "72.46.139.154 randallhouserarebooks.com /image_captcha?sid=866690&ts=1420751330" which suggested that something was really wrong to me - but Hostgator, when I did speak to them, refused to even listed or look at that screen.
I called Hostgator and they were horrible. First they assumed that I know nothing, second they immediately said they don't support Drupal issues, and refused to do anything about it. I got in touch with our Drupal expert who has helped build and maintain the site and asked for help. I had to go on a trip and have been gone since Friday. I just learned that our site is off line with "Service Unavailable. Server currently undergoing maintenance. Webmaster: please contact support." when you go to our URL <http://www.randallhouserarebooks.com" and I have no message(s) from Hostgator.
I also had an email from our Drupal expert saying "I logged in into your hostgator cpanel and also contacted hostgator support chat. but their answer was not satisfactory. I am unable to access your site."
If someone could give me some clue as to what might be going on, I wold appreciate it, and also feedback on Hostgator. I find it unconscionable that a commercial hosting company takes my business website offline! If I am wrong I also want to know. I need to understand what is happening with our site and what to do to get it back online, and also what to expect from a hosting company.
thank you,
Pia