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If you use Hostgator.com for Hosting your WordPress Blog - READ THIS!

Discussion in 'WordPress' started by Snoopy240, Jan 14, 2014.

  1. #1
    Hey WordPress Lovers!!

    I have a little story to tell you about what happened to me yesterday ......

    I just recently came across a bad problem with my Hosting Service (Hostgator.com) because my CPU Usage shot through the roof!

    ...so all of my websites were down until I figured out what was causing the problems.

    After a major headache and 24 hours in ... trying to fix everything.....

    Found the problem to be too many visitors loading my blogs and crashing the CPU Data because of the Plugins I was using.

    I was highly recommended to only use 4 to 5 plugins for my sites and I also found out what plugins can give you a lot of problems with your Hosting - in this case would be with Hostgator.com

    With a lot of traffic and with a lot of plugins installed - all of my sites crushed down. But it was not the traffic that was causing this but it was the too many plugins I was using.

    At the beginning of blogging online (4 years ago) I was using about 60+ plugins. My sites got very slow and crashed a lot as the traffic went up.

    Learned from a lot of mistakes and learned a lot about WordPress Website's Speed and stuff to make the site load faster.

    I finally got the right knowledge to speed up and build a site that can take a lot of traffic without crashing.

    The number of Plugins I was using then went down to about 32 plugins installed.

    Yesterday my sites crashed and finally were restricted by Hostgator for using too much CPU Data!

    The only way to get all of my sites back live online was to talk to Hostgator's Customer Service and spend a lot of time trying to figure out what was causing these crazy CPU Data Usage!

    I guess I'm still learning about WordPress and how it needs to be setup for specific types of Hosting Services.

    So I did my research and talked to the Hostgator.com Customer Service for hours and learned many new things.

    If you did not know....

    Hostgator.com highly recommends WordPress Sites to only have an average of 4 to 5 plugins installed MAX!

    And they also have a small list of recommended plugins that help with these types of problems. Some plugins can really hurt your site and your Hosting so it is really important to learn this.

    If you are not getting a lot of traffic to your blog right now - you might not come across a problem like this YET.

    But as your traffic grows - you will need to make sure your site is very well-optimized for the massive amount of people that is going to be loading data from your site.

    Now, I know most WP guys use more than 4 to 5 plugins for their blog - and that is because they probably want to focus a lot more on how the site looks and the features of it....

    ....but to be real honest here..... having the best looking site online is NOT the key to its success. And I can really tell you from experience because I WAS one of those guys that tried every plugin possible and just focus A LOT on the features of my WP Blog and how it looked.

    I have seen real ugly sites online, getting more traffic than my own blogs and making more money than me.

    So...

    I wondered why and now I know the real answers.

    Here is what is not recommended, if you are using Hostgator.com for hosting...

    The following plugins are not recommended as they are known to be severely resource intensive and could cause downtime, longer page load times or larger process counts.
    • Google Sitemap
    • StatPress and other WordPress statistics software plugins
    • Unique_articles
    • WP Post Views
    • WPRobot3 and other auto-poster plugins
    • Most SEO plugins
    • Some image galleries and media players are intensive, but this largely depends on how you use them.
    • All related posts plugins such as WordPress Related Posts or YARPP
    • All Backup plugins
    I'm not sure if this could also be relevant for other Hosting Services but if you are having these types of problems and you are using more than 30+ plugins then you might want to look into advice from your hosting service.

    And these are the only Plugins the highly recommend to use....
    With this in mind, I knew I was not really going to be able to get my Plugins Installed Number to 4 or 5 or even 10!!

    But I did my best....

    Now I'm down to about 15 plugins and no more. I still got to do my best to lower the number of plugins even more but that will be with time.

    My sites are working even better than before this happened.

    So I guess everything happens for a reason.

    My sites are faster and do not use too much CPU Data from my Hosting Service anymore.

    Now I can get back at focusing on the traffic to my sites.

    I haven't seen anyone sharing something like this here but maybe is because not too many people are getting a HUGE amount of traffic to their sites yet - where things get complicated if things are not set up the right way.

    I just wanted to share this with you guys to help out!

    :cool:

    If you had the same experiences, please share them....

    I'd appreciate your feedback!

    Thanks!

    ;)
     
    Snoopy240, Jan 14, 2014 IP
  2. Josh Hughbanks

    Josh Hughbanks Active Member

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    #2
    Cheap shared hosting gets you low memory resources. Upgrade to a dedicated server or VPS if you want more ram to have a more ram intensive website plugins. Then you don't have any "neighbors" to share your ram with.
     
    Josh Hughbanks, Jan 14, 2014 IP
    Snoopy240 likes this.
  3. Snoopy240

    Snoopy240 Well-Known Member

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    #3
    I'm going to invest in my own Dedicated Servers soon - I know that is the solution but I wanted to share this for the newbies out there that are probably not really aware of this and might get discourage in building a successful blog online because of all these problems not too many talk about.

    Thanks for the reply!..
     
    Snoopy240, Jan 14, 2014 IP
  4. matt_62

    matt_62 Prominent Member

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    #4
    I left hostgator years ago, when all my sites were slow to load (and that was with pretty much no traffic). The servers were just too overloaded. When I moved to my own server, WOW, my sites just flew (and so did the bills)

    But your issue has nothing to do with hostgator, it is to do with the fact that your site has outgrown shared hosting. Had you been with another company, you would have been limited alot earlier on. For example, if you were with a quality host that uses cloudlinux, your site would have been restricted from exceeding its cpu / ram limits months ago. Cloudlinux is fantastic as it prevents high resources sites (like yours) impacting on other sites on the server (which is why I left hostgator). But it sucks as in your case, you would have had to upgrade / change hosts alot earlier on.

    I am surprised you feel that you need soo many plugins. Even with only a few plugins, wordpress does use resources, and there are some dodgy plugins that are poorly written that with just cannot cope with any real traffic

    I have not tried this site, but I have heard good things about them, so perhaps take a look at http://wpengine.com/
     
    matt_62, Jan 14, 2014 IP
  5. cyqnusnite

    cyqnusnite Greenhorn

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    #5
    I used to have a lot of speed and memory problems with plugins so I installed W3 total cache to improve website speed and removed any unncessary plugins and my site sped up a ton
     
    cyqnusnite, Jan 14, 2014 IP
  6. competent123

    competent123 Notable Member

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    #6
    competent123, Jan 14, 2014 IP
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  7. gisel

    gisel Active Member

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    #7
    I was a Hostgator customer like you, and had the SAME problem.
    They recommended a dedicated server: so i expend USD 6k in almost 3 years.

    As you already know, since the HostGator Acquisition by EG, Tech Support and uptime were falling down.
    Several downtimes later, i decided to move off HG.

    KnowHost will be the best change you will ever do. Particularly, SSD VPS.
    I'm with them for about 6 months now and, not only by the 3rd part of what HG cost me, but their tech support and uptime is the most.

    I had several WP blogs and some heavy php/mysql websites.
     
    gisel, Jan 15, 2014 IP
    Snoopy240 likes this.
  8. RobinInTexas

    RobinInTexas Active Member

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    #8
    I limit my plugins to about 15 installed, some I only turn on when I'm logged on so they don't impact the server like the automatic backup, and backlink checker.
    Akismet
    Autolink WikiStyle
    Broken Link Checker
    Click-Fraud Monitoring
    Contact Form 7
    Datafeedr Random Ads
    Stop Spammer Registrations Plugin
    TinyMCE Advanced
    Use Google Libraries
    W3 Total Cache
    Wordfence Security
    WordPress SEO
    WP Google Analytics
    WP-DBManager
    WP-Optimize

    I also think Cloudflare is essential to reducing the load and I block a lot of bots using wordfence and my htaccess file
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} magpie [NC,OR]    
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Baidu [NC,OR]     
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Yandex [NC,OR]    
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} _Bot/ [OR]        
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} MJ12bot [NC,OR]   
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} AhrefsB [NC,OR]   
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} YYSpider [NC,OR]  
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$  [OR]          
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} linkdex  [NC,OR]  
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} feedparser  [NC,OR]
    RewriteRule .* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR} [L,R=301]
    
    Code (markup):
     
    RobinInTexas, Jan 15, 2014 IP
    Snoopy240 likes this.
  9. Snoopy240

    Snoopy240 Well-Known Member

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    #9

    THank you very much Robin!

    I sure see some plugins I haven't heard of - I will check them out. Thanks!

    ANd well I used the Cloudflare Service and everything was doing great, everything fast as light :cool:, but then it started to mess around with my other site and basically my entire Hosting.

    My site started to have a lot of down times and for a very long time sometimes. I had no idea why this was happening and when I contacted Hostgator they recommended to not use Cloudflare if it gives me problems. So I stopped using it since July last year (2013) - I would use Cloudflare if it didn't give me these problems but I'm going to have to switch to a dedicated server soon anyways. :oops:

    Thanks for your recommendations!

    I appreciate it!

    Much success!

    Cheers!;)
     
    Snoopy240, Jan 15, 2014 IP
  10. ashokdhan

    ashokdhan Well-Known Member

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    #10
    If you have wordpress site its true large number of plugins create unwanted load on every page,
    when you install plugins it will create get command in header.php
    all plugins may have java scripts & CSS file call in header.php
    so its true create unwanted load.
    Use only useful plugins and edit also these plugins.
    Minify plugins CSS and Java Script.
     
    ashokdhan, Jan 15, 2014 IP
  11. atsad

    atsad Notable Member

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    #11
    Very informative post. Thanks a lot for your time and sincerity.

    I also have idea of suffering shared-hosting's CPU resource usage problem. Most of the hosting providers don't allow to use more than 10% CPU resource to their shared-hosting clients.
     
    atsad, Jan 18, 2014 IP
  12. Snoopy240

    Snoopy240 Well-Known Member

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    #12

    You're welcome and well Hostgator Shared Hosting only allows you to go up to 25% - after that you are automatically shut down.

    This is why I am looking to invest into my own dedicated servers as the traffic to my blogs grow each month.

    I'm glad this info is helpful to the community here! .. :cool:
     
    Snoopy240, Jan 18, 2014 IP
  13. snakeair

    snakeair Notable Member

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    #13
    I moved off HG 3 month's into when I started my blog in 2008. The main reason was bad support. I'm in the IT world and knEw more about the server then the person helping me. That made me leave them. lol

    I've used a few other hosts but for the past year (10 months) I am on managed web hosting (VPS) and have room to grow. It cost's more money but I know I'm not going to shut down my blog's. Godaddy just came out with managed wordpress hosting this past week. I blogged about that and the features/price are good but I'm not going to move hosts.
     
    snakeair, Jan 19, 2014 IP
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  14. damoncloudflare

    damoncloudflare Greenhorn

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    #14
    "My site started to have a lot of down times and for a very long time sometimes. I had no idea why this was happening and when I contacted Hostgator they recommended to not use Cloudflare if it gives me problems. So I stopped using it since July last year (2013) - I would use Cloudflare if it didn't give me these problems but I'm going to have to switch to a dedicated server soon anyways."

    Did they give you an actual reason? As we haven't had any wide network issues at all during the past year+ across our network, it is not likely that the downtimes were caused by CloudFlare. Did you open a support ticket with us as well? We can share our logs to see what we're seeing trying to connect to your site.
     
    damoncloudflare, Jan 21, 2014 IP