I am currently paying $60 a month for a VPS with LiquidWeb. Have been with them for years. Today my primary blog kept going down - "unable to connect to database." I might have received 1000 visitors total. A lot, but not a crushing load, exactly. They kept rebooting it, it would come back up, then crash again. They said their "optimization team" reviewed the server and they tell me I'm using too many resources - "too many processes" etc. etc. I spoke with a sales engineer today and asked why that would be. He said too many visitors - they had tried to optimize it but it kept hitting the memory ceiling. I host maybe 10-15 other domains on it via my reseller panel, but none of them do any real HTTP traffic - it's mostly just e-mail forwarders for friends. I'm not an Apache expert or anything, but it seems absurd that my Wordpress blog with a few hundred visitors should be hosing my VPS. I've had peak days of 10,000 visitors and it hasn't crashed. I kept checking my "service status" in WHM throughout the day and "server load" kept spiking badly. They want me to upgrade to dedicated for twice as much dough. On the other hand, I am also not too enthusiastic about switching hosts, as I have a couple custom nameservers running and it's all going to be a big PITA. Do any of you have any good advice for settings to check or to otherwise see what's going on here? Thanks guys.
their $60/month plan has 256MB RAM only. You should be better with more RAM. Also, cPanel is using too much system resources, switching to other would be a good choice.
You need more ram.. I would also check into getting one of their small dedicated servers, as it sounds like your blog is growing pretty good ans will keep growing.. And cpanel uses half of that just to run.
i'm running 2.5.1 - i thought i read that the wp-cache functionality was now built-in? i'll check that out, thanks.
Again sorry to necropost but I know people will bring this thread up in searches. When the host upgraded to VPS optimized it did make a big difference. I also run the WP-Cache plugin and that seems to help, too. But the biggest difference seemed to be in memory management with the VPS optimized update to cpanel.
Yeah RAM can be a huge issue. If you ever decide to upgrade PM me and I'll be sure to give you the best possible price. And let me know if you have further issues.