VM /ETC goes on a diet. Host provider says too big!

For the second time in the last 3 weeks, VM /ETC was suspended by my hosting provider because of excessive host server cpu utilization last night. Apparently the site has reached the borderline of being able to exist on a shared hosting provider due to popularity. In short, the constant pulling of posts from the Wordpress database has spiked to the web server’s cpu resources too often, and when this happens other web sites on this server are severely impacted. Unfortunately, my hosting provider reacts by suspending the site immediately. They have threatened to turn me off for good, at which point I will have to move vmetc.com.

I have removed several plugins and widgets from my sidebars in an attempt to see if this alleviates the problem. If any readers have any other suggestions please let me know. If you know of any dedicated hosting providers I would appreciate the recommendations as well.

If VM /ETC is suddenly unavailable then you’ll know why. I have tried to work out a monitoring program and agreement with my current provider in the meantime, but they are inflexible and have little to offer. I’ll do my best to get back online quickly if it comes to this.

Oh well, these are the problems I want to have as a blogger, right? Thanks for all the subscriptions, readers, comments and support.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 9:11 am and is filed under vmetc.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

lundrog

I would think that you could find a hosting solution that would allow you with dedicated bandwidth, or Server's.

Have you thought of hosting your own setup? You can always put a server in a farm, and pay space and or bandwidth.

I guess you would have to round up sponsors for this.

Some tips for reducing bandwidth would be, pull photo's unless they are .gif, use a lighter wordpress theme, setup caching for MYSQL, and PHP, Setup Static Pages, and such.

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2007/02/16/four-plu...

http://www.h4x3d.com/how-to-preserve-bandwidth-...

Andrew Storrs

Sorry to hear your hosting provider is still picking on you. Have a look at Media Temple (http://mediatemple.net/), they specialize in "bursting traffic", etc.

Eric Siebert

Not sure who your provider is but you might check out godaddy.com. That's who I use and they some pretty big resource limits for a very small price.

Vladan

Hi Rich,

I had the same trouble few months ago. My blog was suspended several days... I still did not find any solution. My blog is not developped enough to support dedicated server or so. I wanted to install wp plugin to cache wp pages, but I don't have shell access with my shared hosting (needed to install the plugin). So I let go. My traffic stabilized since then, but I fear the day when it happens again.

I'll try to follow Roger's links to help .... -:)

Andrew Storrs

Vladan, that's what I love about http://www.mediatemple.net they will never squash you (say you get on the front page of Digg or Slashdot, etc) they just spool up and down on demand. Their grid-service is pretty affordable (when you don't want downtime)

dglynn

Mike over at RTFM (http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=662) recently went through a move for that same reason, he may be able to suggest a solution.

Cody Bunch

I'd suggest mosso, or slicehost, but I'm also bias (though I would love to be able to Fanatically support a member of the VMware community). Contact me 'offline' and we can likely work through something.

-Cody

rbrambley

Roger,

Thanks for the links

Eric, Andrew,

Thanks for the recomendations

Vladan,

I was able to enable wp-cache and that does seem to help. I can't ssh to my current host either, but I can use FTP. Do you not have an FTP option?

dglynn,

I'll check with Mike and see. Thanks.

Cody,

I'll check those out too, and again thanks for supporting and reading VM /ETC

Vladan

Rich,

Well, I don't know I i'm getting it right. I could upload the plugin wia FTP, then I could activate it. But, then when I go to SETTINGS_WP-cache I got this error message. (I'm not a real linux expert, but I think for executing this command I need an SSH or console access - via putty ...). I don't think I can execute this command with my FTP client. Am I wrong?

advanced-cache.php link does not exist
Create it by executing:
ln -s /home/vladnfr/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php /home/vladnfr/public_html/wp-content/advanced-cache.php
in your server

Cannot continue... fix previous problems and retry.

lundrog

I woudn't call my self a linux pro, but to do any execution, you would need SSH / Console access.

In fact, I am suprised they woudn't give you SSH access if your using it for wordpress.

I was not able to set wordpress up on my linux box, ( SLES ) without some admin / root access.

Roger L

Vladan

Roger, It's definitely no way going without shell access. I might try last think I found here http://www.village-idiot.org/archives/2007/07/0...

Village idiot - crazy name.... -:)

Jason Boche

I host my blog on the rack in my basement. This week I'm also doubling my bandwidth from 5Mbps down/512Kbps up to 10Mbps down/1Mbps up. For hosting, the upload is the key figure because that's the pipe people on the internet are utilizing to read my blog. I'm using WordPress blog caching to serve static pages which cuts down PHP hammering on the CPU although I wasn't having issues to begin with. I did this as a preventative measure.

I'd be interested to see what your web stats are Rich. I use WordPress with 10 or so plugins and my server CPUs aren't stressing out. The same server is also running MS SQL Server, MySQL Server, Symantec Backup Exec, VMware Server 2.0 w/ 3 VMs, PHP, PERL, and Vizioncore vRanger PRO. Is CPU truely your issue or is it bandwidth also?

I'd be happy to help you out with the hosting but I'm afraid of what you'd do to my servers if you're already burying your ISP web servers. But on the other hand, maybe I'm giving them too much credit for their setup. I'd still like to hear some performance numbers.

Jas

Jason Boche

BTW - your ISP are dicks for the way they are handling this.

rbrambley

I have enabled the WP-Cache plugin for vmetc and have not had an issue withCPU utilization since. I'm still with the same provider, so I hope this continues, but all good for now!