complich8

Rather than speculating on a hypothetical site, I’d suggest just grabbing Analog ( https://analog.cx ) and analyzing a week or so worth of logfiles with it. You’ll get a good estimate of your current viewing pattern, and you’ll also get a good estimate of how your bandwidth usage might scale (ie: multiply by whatever factor you think you’ll grow in some amount of time, and there you go).

Personally, I find it’s easier to just go way overboard and not have to worry about it. Right now I’m on dreamhost — they’ve got pretty insane disk and bandwidth allocations for pretty cheap, and they’re pretty feature-rich as far as shared hosts go.

yeah, mine wasn’t doing that, I didn’t have any interesting plugins going, and the behavior was erratic.

During my last hapless flailing at it, I changed my table type from MyISAM to InnoDB, and I haven’t been able to replicate the problem since then. Might just have been myisam failing me… dunno

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

what’s with this “https://” in the DB_HOST definition?

That doesn’t seem right at all. You shouldn’t be telling it to communicate via http, you should just have the db server’s ip address, and the port if the listening port on the db server is nonstandard.

So, if the db server is “db.myhost.net” and the port is 9999, you’d say

define('DB_HOST', 'db.myhost.net:9999');

There’s a trick though. On the db side, you need to grant permission for that user@host to access the database. Try using the mysql command line client to establish a connection, to see if you can (example: mysql -u username -p -P 9999 -h db.myhost.net databasename). See if it works.

If you can connect that way, then you should be fine, just keep everything set appropriately.

If you can’t, then that’s your problem. You might need to re-run your grant command. Something like: "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on databasename.* TO 'username'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

(% for the host is a wildcard, matching any host)

Oh, and by default, mysql’s config binds it to loopback ports — that is, only allows localhost to connect. The vast majority of deployments are set up that way. Shared hosting environments often host multiple databases on a single server, and allow access to either addresses in their own address space, or to the world at large. Neither configuration is particularly unusual.

And if the port happens to be 3306, you don’t need to muck around with specifying it, since that’s the default port.

sounds like a character encoding mismatch to me.

Looks like one too from the site. In firefox, if you head to view->character encoding and pick “Western (Windows-1252)” those things go away. <<edit: they actually just change, my mistake … but it’s definitely the encoding mismatch that’s the problem>>

I’d check the charset on the database and see if it matches the encoding you’ve set in wp-admin/options-reading.php.

This could be the host’s side, serving windows-encoded text but letting you override the listed encoding type, or it could be your db giving you windows encoding and you just needing to match it or change the encoding on the db.