Veteran Singer Sharifah Aini Sent This Blog To A Complete Stop

Last Updated August 21st, 2017

Do you know what veteran singer Sharifah Aini did to this blog on July 2014?

It was a shocker to me, at least.

The blog post about Malaysia Queen of Songs Datuk Sharifah Aini controversies and scandals which was published on Sunday (5, July, 2014) was picked up myforum.com.

Come Monday (7 July 2014), this blog came to a complete stop. It went down!

People started making a beeline to the information-filled blog post about veteran singer Sharifah Aini Syed Jaafaar.

veteran singer Sharifah Aini

Veteran Singer Sharifah Aini Caused This Blog To Go Down

The online traffic instantly shot up and the site was paralyzed.

My database server was toasted, so to speak.

The sudden massive amount of traffic grounded this site to a screeching halt due to high CPU utilization (look at the drastic bar chart below).

sharifah aini controversies and scandalsEstablishing Data Connection A Error

This site was experiencing establishing a database connection error.

Most of you readers when they clicked on the blog post of the late Datuk Sharifah Aini, they were greeted with a white blank page with the black phrase: Error establishing a database connection as shown below:

error establishing a database connection bluehost wordpressAs for me, I couldn’t even see my admin login page. All I saw was this:

error establishing a database connection websiteThis was my first time experiencing this kind of technical problem.

Being IT-challenged, I was completely at sea. I wrote to my then host server, BlueHost.

By the way, currently this blog is hosted with ServerFreak.

Initially it was of not much of a help.

They suggested to me some links from WordPress forum and other sites on how to fix this technical  error.

The following two days (and nights) were trying times for me.

Imagine my disappointment.

There was a huge deluge of free traffic continuously pouring into this blog, Info Ruckus.

But they all could not access it.

It was all because of this particular blog post about the controversies and scandals of the late veteran singer Sharifah Aini.

Any way, as they say the benefit of adversity is you get to learn from your woes or troubles.

To quote from Quotationize, “Adversities are like unwelcome visitors in our life we cannot avoid. It is how we entertain them.”

In fact the last forty eight hours, I learned so much.

Firstly, I was convinced that I love blogging and sharing great stories, ideas and interests.

Even though I was bogged down with this technical glitch, I soldiered on.

Yes, I kept on trucking. I could sit hours toiling over my laptop. I did not feel fatigue or bored.

I was totally immersed  in the flow in wanting to solve the problem, so my readers get to read that particular blog post.

The flow is a theory by Hungarian psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

It is a  mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully absorbed in a feeling of energized focus, complete involvement, together with enjoyment.

Secondly, that day I acquired more technical knowledge of the Internet.

For the past two long miserable days and late nights, I read lots of tutorials and wrote incessantly seeking advice and help from online forums.

And drank gallons of coffee.

Their replies and answers were all helpful in some ways.

My head was buzzing with jargon like: MySQL Database Tables, PhpMyAdmin, CPU throttling, DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, DB_NAME, shared hosting, etc.

One more thing I learned from this whole experience is not to lose one’s head when in crisis or in desperation.

We should keep our cool and don’t fall for the first suggestion that offers to you.

When I posted my problem onto one popular digital forum, one guy seemed helpful enough.

He told me about why my shared server has its limitations. For instance, there are limitations of database concurrent connections, cpu processes, cpu usage etc.

If my site reaches one of these limits (cpu, processes, etc) it will slow down to a standstill.

And that my site reaches one of MySQL limits, then it will shows “Error establishing a database connection”.

Then instead of showing me how to fix the problem, he was obviously urging me to upgrade my site to a Semi-Dedicated hosting or to a VPS (Virtual Private Server).

Even though he used the word “recommend”.

For the uninitiated, the above two kinds of web hosting are not cheap. It is a must for those who have a site with constant heavy traffic every day.

That day, I also learned the proper technique of selling to a total stranger from this guy.

If you want to sell something, don’t be too engrossed in asking a person to buy, buy, buy!

For those of you who like to improve your selling skills, I strongly you check out this free e-book, “To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others” by Daniel H. Pink.

 

This Number 1 New York Best Times Business Bestseller explains to you why extroverts don’t make the best salespeople.

It shows how giving people an “off-ramp” for their actions matters more than actually changing their minds.

Frankly, I did not know that the very article I wrote about the not-so-scintillating side of Malaysia’ favorite songbird Datuk Sharifah Aini aka Kak Pah,  it turned out to be a sudden flash of insight for me.

There are tons of free useful computer-related technical tutorials in the Internet, but most of them are not written for the non-tech savvy, like yours truly.

No doubt, they use the correct and proper jargon to explain, But for IT-idiots, they confused us even more. I can feel your pain.

Sharifah Aini scandals and controversiesThat day after fixing the technical problem, I needed my much-deserved sleep.

Then just like  Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie The Terminator, “I’ll be back!”  to share with you more wonderful and useful stuff.