Since this morning I've had over 20k pageviews. Right now there are +150 active sessions in the real-time view. The server cannot cope. I'm on a VPS. I run Genesis with caching, fully optimised and I've just had to turn CloudFlare on. What do I do? I basically need help. Maybe I can get a sponsor or hosting in return for some ad space or banner? My site is not yet making enough money for dedicated hosting, but once it does I'd be happy to pay for decent hosting. I'm only one year in to my blogging experience... I'm having to learn fast - about how to monetise and the rest Is there anyone here who could help? my site: (google) 'vandog traveller'
good you will probably make money..so my if you get that much of traffic best thing you decent hosting to keep site running!
You are not hosting it on GoDaddy are you (I hope you are not)? I see you are using a caching plugin (WP Fastest Cache). https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fastest-cache/ I have never heard of that one before. Usually when someone is using a cache it is something like WP Super Cache. A decent VPS should be able to handle tens of thousands of cached page views a day without much problem. We are talking $30 - $60 a month (depending on data transfer). Put some ads on your site and use that revenue to pay your hosting expense. I cannot see a host wanting to sponsor it because advertising to an audience with no interest in something is a waste of money. Maybe some PPA travel ads might work? You only have one ad zone on your site, below the fold. Add more ads, maybe some banner ads, too. Because then you can make a tiny bit with every page view.
Thanks. No I'm using a private server in England. It's got a fair good spec! I thought I'd never need to change it, and I really don't want to. Maybe I should try switching to Super cache? Thanks for the advice. I'm playing with ads now
You could try WP Super Cache. But first: what kind of problems are you having? I assume you are having problems with server load? Slow load times? It is Sunday and internet traffic is not heavy right now, but your site loads fast for me here in the middle of the USA (I know you are using CloudFlare now). Just wondering how your server cannot cope as you really did not say. Hard to say which direction you should go in without knowing the kind of problem you were having.
Thanks for letting me know it loads fine where you are. The server was giving 500 errors when trying to log into Cpanel or Wordpress backend. I also got shouted at for breaking stuff :-/
A 500 error can be caused by many things, possibly by excessive resource consumption, file permissions, bad configuration, and more. How much RAM/CPU cores does your VPS have? Are you using a control panel like cPanel, Plesk, or something else? Have you accessed your site using the command line (SSH)? Have you run the top or htop programs to view your CPU, memory consumption and resource usage of your running processes (like your web server, database, etc.). Are you using Apache? What are your KeepAlive and Max and min spare server settings? There are lots of ways to optimize a server to get better performance and/or lower resource consumption. I see you are using cPanel and I assume you have WHM as well. Log into WHM and go into the Apache configuration screen (I forget how to get there) and look for the KeepAlive and max and min spare servers settings. Report those figures back. I just found this which mentions some of the things I did: https://thethemefoundry.com/blog/optimize-apache-wordpress/ When you get a VPS, it is minimally configured. There is a lot of ways to configure it for better performance and that depends on the type of site you have. If you are using a caching plugin and still having poor performance, I think the KeepAlive may be an issue. The link above recommends setting KeepAlive to 2 seconds. I say 3 seconds, maybe 4 - 5 seconds on an image-intensive site. Then the process will be free to serve other visitors.
Great thanks everyone. All is cool for now. I paid for wp rocket (really good caching plugin) and optimised some other stuff. Also using Maxcdn when traffic is high