Unable to host WP?

Crappy hosting services oversell their shared hosting systems and so most dynamic packages tend to fail rather spectacularly when they get any sort of decent traffic. WordPress is not a particular resource hog by default, but if you add lots of plugins and such, it can get there. And, to be frank about it, somebody serving tens of thousands of hits per day should not be shocked at the fact that a host which costs them only a couple of bucks a month won’t cover it.

The general fix for this is to use a plugin like WP-Super-Cache. It works by caching the results of the WordPress page generation as static HTML files, which then get served up instead. These static files then get served without any PHP being run at all. This eliminates the database and memory/CPU dependencies for most of the hits to your site, and usually lets it work better on shared servers. The site then remains dynamic for when you change things, but static insofar as it is serving pages to readers.

A normal server generally cannot handle more than 20-40 websites on it, if they get any normal traffic. And yet I’ve seen shared hosting servers setup to handle 300+. Simple fact is that something has to give at some point. The dynamic sites are going to take up more memory and CPU time than static ones will. Simple, really.

Still, my blogs get 1200 pageviews on a very busy day. A shared server should be able to cope with that, right? A decent one?

My friend’s blog will probably never serve two pages at the same time, so the 18 MB of memory would be for a single call to index.php…

1200 pageviews

depends, bandwidth wise, thats nothing. But this host you speak of, theyre not concerned about bandwdith.

Fwiw, if you REALLY want to f*ck up a box, set up a cold fusion site with super crappy code on a win2k/IIS box.

OK, but WP no crappy code, 1200 pageviews is nothing, and Pair is a host that comes highly recommended. So why are they so cautious about running my blogs?

Thats a question they need to answer, dont you think? If they dont want or, or wont, go elsewhere. There are plenty of decent shared-hosting hosts out there.

Better yet, colocate, 1Mbit/95th percentile kicks the crap out of ANY shared hosting.

I’m not tech savvy enough to run my own server, and a SLA isn’t an option budget-wise. Plus I feel I wouldn’t have to, considering how all I’m going to be running is a couple of small blogs…

just because a host comes ‘highly recommended’ doesnt mean its worth a sh!t. go daddy is often ‘highly recommended’ but they are a nightmare. if a host is telling you they cant handle a wordpress powered site, find a different host.

Actually, Pair’s reaction surprised me somewhat. On the one hand they’re probably being cautious because they want to avoid problems, which is a good thing. It’s easy enough for a host to say “Sure, come on board and run anything”.

On the other hand I found it surprising that they consider WP to be such a heavy application that even their most expensive shared account won’t be enough.

I’ve been using shared hosting to run WP blogs for years, and before these 500 errors started showing up I never had any problems. Are the latest couple of versions heavier than older ones? Is it the tags? Do things like the recent comments widgets or 2.3.3’s new database scheme use additional resources?

[edit]Oh, and Pair was recommended to me by an industry insider, who dealt with them before he started Holland’s best hosting company ;)[/edit]

if you were able to run it on different hosts just fine….dont you think the problem is probably with pair and not wordpress? i dont care who recommended them to you. Jesus himself could recommend dreamhost to me and i wouldnt take his advice. there are certain blaring issues that are hard to get past. im running three wordpress sites on a pretty crappy shared host, and ive never had any big problems with any of them. it sounds like this pair place is even crappier, and they even admit it!

The problems I’m currently having are with Hosting Zoom. Pair is where I’m considering moving. HZ has been really bad lately. Sure, they’re cheap, but yesterday my sites were down for hours.

so why are you thinking its a wordpress problem and not a host problem?

Because my friend is on a different server that has not had any downtime. Her issue is solely that her blog is hitting memory limits even though it’s only got a few visitors every day. Even a plain vanilla test install did this with Kubrick and only Akismet activated.

Pair’s caution about running WP off of any shared host also surprised me.

i assure you, there are millions of wordpress site being hosted in shared host environments. you just have to find one that doesnt oversell, as Otto already explained. its not a wordpress issue. its a host issue.