The Server is Overloaded

This has got to be my favorite type of ticket we get because it never makes any sense.  I don’t know if it’s all the “non overselling” hosts spewing servers are overloaded if you sell more than 250MB space on a $10/month hosting account or what.  But we have had an increasing number of tickets titled this where it has nothing to do with a machine being overloaded at all.  Apparently no matter what the problem is the server is overloaded is the cause.  Here are some examples of recent tickets, chats and calls I’ve seen with regards to the servers being supposedly overloaded.

• The user is experiencing a PHP syntax error they open a ticket saying our servers are overloaded causing it and that’s the only explanation.  It has nothing to do with the missing semicolon on line 275.
• We do not have available cPanel generated backups for users to download on the fly.  Well of course we do not we don’t use the inefficient cPanel backup system but R1Soft but the brainwashing of some forums made the user believe the lack of daily downloadable cPanel generated backups were a sign of the host overloading the server.  We keep daily backups using R1Soft with 7 days retention making the cPanel system seem inefficient in comparison
• cPanel will not let them login this is a sure sign of servers being overloaded.  In actuality they provided the wrong login information numerous times until the system blocked them for an hour from cPanel for login failures
• Their web site takes 15 seconds to load.  This one was a little more unclear for the user but they had a nasty query with an incorrect join on every page resulting in 3.5million rows to be generated then dropped to display 1 or 0 rows.  Even the fastest server is going to take quite a while to run that sort of query unless there are specific optimizations to handle a temporary table that is 3.5 million rows in size.
• There are not stats links within their cPanel upon their account being created.  The actual cause was stats runs are once every 24 hours so there had not been any stats ran yet against their account
• The users account has been suspended we must be overloading our servers.  The actual issue was they forgot to pay their bill and apparently our 5+ emails over 14 days in total about an invoice being made, invoice due and all the overdue notices were not a clue into that being the cause.
• The users account was suspended we must be overloading our servers.  The actual cause was after sending numerous emails about a script they’re running going for 30 seconds each time and using 128MB of memory we had no choice but to disable the account.  The user did not believe that doing that sort of thing was a big issue as they believed the script ran it must be working.  Well I guess the fact that their error log was full of max execution time errors was not a clue that maybe it wasn’t doing what was intended
• The users account was suspended.  They violated our TOS/AUP by hosting a chat script generating 500,000 page views a day and at peak doing 50 requests/sec.  Our terms are very clear about this but apparently it’s a sign of us overloading our servers.  I’d like to see any host allow users to do 50 requests/sec at peak times and be at all sustainable unless they’re charging $200/month to each user and is actually putting each on a dedicated server.

I’d just like to thank all the brainwashing from some hosts on the internet who have convinced a small amount of users no matter the problem it’s a sign of the server being overloaded.  As a result we have to explain how a PHP syntax error does not mean the server is over loaded.  Also 0.50 load average on a brand new 8 CPU system does not mean it’s overloaded no matter what xyz host says about how anything above 0.00 is bad.  It’s just what some of these hosts need to do post all over the internet to compete I understand.  It just sure is annoying posting over and over again that whatever the error is has nothing to do with the server’s system resource usage.