Team Interrobang runs off of a standard Dreamhost shared hosting instance that’s on a box that probably runs 2000 other sites.  This corner of the Internet is fine and adequate unless you do something to upset the apple cart like install a shoutbox, do a vBulletin update, or hit F5 too quickly.  I had thought I learned my lesson from a previous case where doing a vBulletin update cause the server to burst into flames but apparently the act of running a DB backup was enough to max-out the Triscuit that was being used as a processor within the cardboard box of a server we shared.  I contacted Dreamhost to have them cut the DB connections and learned “whenever we close the DB threads new ones are opened just as fast, there’s nothing we can do.”  Really?  You’re physically incapable of temporarily shutting down my tiny virtual instance?  The irony of this being brought about by a backup operation is what I found delicious.

So, I did what they were unable to do and closed each open DB thread by clicking the “Kill” button in phpmyadmin a little more than 400 times.  Not fun, but necessary.  Each time I hit this button, my internal homunculus put a tick mark in the “times I’ve wanted to drop shared hosting” tally section of my brain.   On the plus side, I was able to use iMovie to make a little Youtube video after not having slept for 28 hours.