since ball pythons tend to like to 'burrow' in their substrate sometimes....you want the bottom of the tub to read around 94-95 degrees which generally transulates to a substrate surface temperature of 92-93. If you have the surface of the substrate set to 95 deg....it could possibly be 100 deg on the bottom of the enclosure and that is not good if your snake digs down and gets right up against it.

If you have a probe just 'flapping around not attached to anything' inside the enclosure.....your snake will move it. If the snake lifts it off of the ground then your t-stat is reading the air temp instead of the UTH temp...the thermostat will be put enough power to the heating element to get the air temperature up to what you wanted your hot spot to be. That is not good.

I would do away with the suction cups and get some aluminum tape. Tape the thermostat probe to UTH then adjust the thermostat to get the proper temperature in the enclosure. This will allow you to acheive a more consistant temperature and keep you from frying your snake.