Server overload – Site got suspended. What am i doing wrong?

Some plugins are poorly designed and use up a ton of resources so there’s probably not much you can do in that regard if the plugin sucks coding wise.

You should immediately install wp-super-cache.

How many daily visitors are you getting?

If you’re getting more than 5000 page views per day you may need to look at going with your own server or vps.

There are limits to shared hosting. Here’s how the shared hosting business works.

They promise you a ton of bandwidth etc because 99% of the websites that use the service will only get between 1 – 100 visitors per day.

Any dynamic site that actually becomes really successful they will treat like dirt because that’s only 1 out of 100 customers they lose.

Add this to the bottom of your footer.php:

<!– <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries. –>

Then when you load your posts, look at the HTML source. You’ll see the number of queries and wp-cache will tell you the total time. e.g.:

<!– 25 queries. –>
<!– Dynamic Page Served (once) in 0.245 seconds –>

What numbers do you see on your site?

Thank you both so much for responding.
I get about 6 to 8k hits a day.
I installed WP Super cache as hone atson suggested.
I also added <!– <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries. –> to the footer. I loaded up my most recent post and it came up as 30 queries.

Also are you suggesting I go with VPS or a dedicated server> If so, will VPS do the job?

Thanks again!

You shouldn’t need a dedicated server, although that will obviously solve the issue. Neither of the host that you mentioned are very good. We’ve used a lot of hosts and most of them are pretty much the same. A few (like site5) stand out as being better though. I would check out their forum where you can ask any questions that you need and they will take care of you. I would also make sure that your plugins are current for the version of WP that you’re using. Also, how many plugins are you using? Too many plugins will increase the chances of plugin incompatibility. Might be time to do some early spring cleaning.

Hello,
I am having the same problem. I am using a pro dedicated server at Hostgator.com and I have around 40.000 visits per day.
Here is a list of the plugins that I am using:

* Anarchy Media Player
* Google XML Sitemaps
* Paged Comments
* Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam
* Post Query Accelerator
* Simple Tags
* TLA InLinks
* WP-Polls
* WP-Polls Widget

I also have got APC installed at the server but I am still having problems. I really need to fix this problem because I am having more visits nowdays and the site crashs more often ??
Thanks a lot

chipchick, it’s obvious that the number of database queries is not the problem. Has your host said exactly what resource(s) you’re using too much of?

webDressing – before the site went down I was running 16 plugins. Most of them were pretty essential.

Bobcat – They haven’t told me how exactly what resources I was using too much of, I have to call back on monday to speak to an abuse admin about it. Which I think is totally ridiculous being that they took the site down over the weekend. I cant take the chance that this will happen again and would definately move to a better hosting provider / plan

I took a look at Site 5 and their prices are great (though I dont really care to be cheap in this instance). However I dont see VPS or dedicated server plans. Which I’m assuming I need?

I just took a look at your site, and I don’t see any references to caching in the HTML source. Are you sure you have wp-cache turned-on? It doesn’t look like it’s working. That could make a difference.

SuperCache does not appeared to be installed properly.

I cannot comment on site5 except to repeat that most shared hosts will shut you down once you get bigger than 5000 visitors a day.

Its the traffic spikes that will kill you on shared hosting once you start averaging 5000 visitors a day.

roxer82 – It’s hard to say since we don’t know your server specs and how much ram etc is being used. Your server may have unused ram which you can deploy to mysql.

If all your ram is used you can either,

1. change your operating system to a debian based one and free up some ram
2. Change your webserver to something lighter in resource use like nginx
3. get them to add more ram
4. get a more powerful server with more ram and more processing power
5. add another server and set it up as a database server

Thank you both for noticing that Super cache wasn’t installed properly!
I asked Hostnine to give me my permissions back, something they had done was not allowing me to modify the permissions on my files and directories.
When they did that something happened which changed the permissions on the wp-content folder so that Super Cache couldn’t work. I fixed Super Cache now. Unfortunately, now one of my other important plugins isn’t working. What a mess

Thanks for your answer honewatson. I am using 41.76% of the memory right now but the problem is when I have many users at the same time. The server has got 4096MB of RAM.
Do you think that I can fix it adding more RAM memory?

ChipChick

Did you switch off your supercache? It still does not appear to be working. There are some settings in the option page which allow you to remove certain files from the supercache. You could put your plugin file names in these settings and this may help.

Roxer82

I can’t really say for sure but more ram could probably help. Is your site continuing to grow? You probably need to hire an expert to optimize your server but ultimately you’ll just need more power.

Debian based over Red Hat based on the operating system.

Nginx can make a huge difference in terms of freeing up resources on the webserver side.

Memcached can free up a lot of resources by taking a load off mysql.

A lot of big sites swear by memcached as a way to take a load off the database and free up lots of resources.

https://www.danga.com/memcached/

I use pair Networks. They’re a bit pricy, but extremely reliable. You do get what you pay for. You could ask them if your site is suitable for shared hosting.

Shared hosting: https://www.pair.com/services/web_hosting/ (You would need an Advanced account or better)

Dedicated hosting: https://www.pair.com/services/dedicated/

With a dedicated server, you can also get memcached and eAccelerator.

Oh, this is FreeBSD, not Windows, if that matters to you.

honewatson, do you know where I can find a tech that helps me to optimize my server for WordPress? Thanks!

I can’t recommend anyone specifically. The best forum I’ve seen for squeezing every bit of juice out of your machine is the one at slicehost.com and there may be some people there.

The easiest thing to do is throw extra hardware at it.

If you think you’re going to have more growth getting a stable environment over at amazons ec2 service is real cheap. You get zero support though except on the forums. You can hire people from guru.com and similar services to set things up for you.

But you can get a server with 2 x 64 bit dual core process with 7.5 gigs of ram, 850 gig storage for $288.00 per month. Then you pay 18 cents per gig of transfer out.

Double that configuration and you it will cost you twice the price.

Its a pretty good deal but you have to set up automated cron backups to amazon s3.

You need to have someone available to take care of things if you don’t know how to manage things yourself but if you get things set up there its pretty easy and cheap to throw extra hardware at the problem.

Once you’re in ec2 you could even just buy one of the cheaper machines for dedicated memcached and that would cost you $72 per month.

I’ve had an instance die once but it takes less than 10 minutes to get a completely new instance up and running.

Once you’ve saved your server image you can just click on start new instance and it starts a new complete replica of your set up in a few minutes. Then you just import your backed up database and images from s3.