I got a support email from my hosting company just now: "Hi, Your account is utilizing excessive resources, causing a significant degradation of services on the server. This is a shared environment and we can not allow one user to utilize the majority of the resources on a server as it affects all users adversely. " Now the email was saying that my site/blog was utiliziing: CPU: 6.51 % Memory: 2.17 % Mysql: 0.5 % Top Process %CPU 66.0 /usr/bin/php Top Process %CPU 60.0 /usr/bin/php Top Process %CPU 32.5 /usr/bin/php I'm not sure yet what has caused this, but I notice there were 7000 traffics from StumbleUpon in a few hours timeframe..Do you guys think this is the cause? They have moved me to a different server temporarily until I fix the problem or upgrade to a dedicated hosting :'( What do you guys think?
These are your usage stats...? CPU: 6.51 % Memory: 2.17 % Mysql: 0.5 % If this is true, your shared webhosting provider is junk. I strongly suggest you request a refund if possible and transfer your website to a different shared hosting provider. Hostmonster/bluehost and hostgator are good choices for US websites, servage for European websites.
Well I think they are more concerned with the 66% of CPU usage, which is fair enough, cause I'm on a shared server there
Well, with a shared hosting account there is always a limit to resources a site can have. This limit is basically set by the web host to ensure that all the sites on the web site do not suffer because one or more web sites which is hogging the resources. If one site uses 66% of the CPU, it would inevitable cause the rest of the customers which shares the same server to suffer. So it is definitely possible for a sudden rush of traffic to overwhelm a server especially if your website uses a scripting language and is not static.
Hmm it's a Wordpress blog, so yes it's dynamic and PHP-heavy (not to mention that I've installed ads code and also Google Analytics code in there) If you know about StumbleUpon social bookmarking site, this kind of traffic only happens once every blue moon, so it's not like I'm going to get this traffic everyday. Therefore upgrading to a dedicated hosting (adds me about $25 more) doesn't seem like a worthy option Any advice?
use a good cache plugin maybe? the ads and google analytics just make a site slower but they have no affect on server load
Good call! I've just installed WP-SuperCache plug-in. It works by caching the page as HTML file instead of dynamically generated. This should reduce server load significantly!