Recommendations for hosting for WP / WPMU

are you still on shared hosting? Cuz you may be outgrowing that type of hosting….might be time to go VD or dedicated

Definitely time for a vps.

Not really a need to find a mu-specific host. Just make sure you get a dedicated IP address, and have a good 512 ram to start.

Thanks, Andrea! Do you know of a review site or other source to figure out which hosts are stable and have decent service? I don’t want to find myself with host downtime (like today, when even their main website wasn’t available for a time) and cpu throttling again.

I do understand that, as a moderator, it might not be OK for you to recommend particular companies.

RV, yes, I’m still on shared hosting. I guess I knew it was too good (cheap) to last . . . dangit.

Hi Jennyd,

Just saw your post while I was doing some scanning of these forums for an answer to a question I have.

I wouldn’t typically do this (as this isn’t the intention of these forums) but as you have asked I would like to offer the services of my company, Computer Service Centre.

We have our own tier 3 data centre and offer virtual hosting packages to many clients.

We are currently running WP3.0 on other boxes and would be happy to have a chat to see if we can offer you a solution to your problem. We pride ourselves on both our customer support and service uptime.

If you are interested please mail me on b.yassin at computerservicecentre.com.

If not, all the best finding a suitable alternative.

Regards,
Ben

Andrea, I have taken your advice and relocated to a server providing 512MB RAM, etc. I have gone with WiredTree, for whom I could find essentially only positive reviews on the Web.

I’m now getting “server busy” errors, and their staff tells me my simple WordPress site is bumping up against the maximum memory. First, they disabled “clamd”, a virus scanner for email (odd that it’d cause a problem, on a NEW account that HAS NO EMAIL).

Errors continued today. Oh, but when they check it, nothing is actually running high, except Apache and PHP.

Are they selling me a service where the BASIC OS on the server is too much for the memory allotted? I get the feeling I’m getting screwed here.

Something’s up with your site, and it’s not the host.

With that level of visitors, there should be no way it’s running up all that RAM usage. Basically you’ve got a faulty plugin somewhere. Since the host (who are indeed wonderful) disabled the virus scanner for email, then maybe you have a plugin related to emails?

On a new account with no email accounts set up – you’re WordPress is *still* sending email. You get comment notifies by email, yes?

No, I don’t get comment notifies by email. Turned off.

Any suggestions on how I might find the faulty plugin? The latest they’ve told me is that the front page loading eats up 7+% of my CPU with each load.

If there’s a way I can watch to track it, I can test . . . but they seem unable to provide a way to do that.

jennyd – I’m no whiz but when I have a problem like that, i ask my host. They are better at tracking processes than I am. They always tell me which plugin is the problem, and I remove it. This just happened to me today in fact.

If they can’t tell you, then switch all the plugins off.

Then turn them on one by one and test. Also Google each one, see if there is a known problem.

Personally I’ve been with DreamHost for years. I really can’t say enough good things about them, their customer service is great, and the site has reasonable uptime. I have 20k+ visitors a day and run their PS package which allows me to scale as little or as much as I like.

I really have nothing to do with Dreamhost at all. I run 6 wp sites there and one wpmu, all at a very reasonable price.

If there’s a way I can watch to track it, I can test . . . but they seem unable to provide a way to do that.

Got WHM? It’s in there. ??

and what’s on the front page? Any custom queries, for example?

Andrea –

I have WHM, but I can see nothing to track CPU usage in real time. Neither can they; their best suggestion is that I download PuTTy and learn to use it, then can watch processes from the command line.

They told me that anything running statistics and the like could be the likely cause. I removed a plugin which calculated popular articles by pageviews; I assume it had to query the database every time the page loaded to determine what had the most pageviews. Seems to have improved. A shame; it was a nice feature to have. It probably needs to be rewritten so it queries every 30 or 60 minutes, or something like that.

Bonusball, the problem with turning each one off and testing is the inability to track CPU usage in real time. All I can do is turn off the suspected ones and wait to see if the site crashes when there’s enough traffic to trigger whatever is causing the spike in CPU usage.

In WHM, go to the System Health menu. Show Current CPU Usage will give you the exact same details as you would see from the command line.

(none of that would say “hey! this plugin right here!”)

But if you’re sitting on top of it watching (and from the command line it auto-refreshes) then you can see spikes as they happen.

Yes, one of the popular posts plugins could run up processing. you could cache the results. ?? Do you really need it recalculated on every page view? Would they change that much in, say, 24 hours?

I’d be happy to have it recalculate every few hours. Daily wouldn’t give my readers what they need to know, what’s presently of the greatest interest. They’d only know what was popular yesterday.

However, I’m not a programmer and don’t know how to edit it to do that . . . not that I’ve rooted around in the Popular Posts files to see if I could figure out what triggers the query. So, I took it down for now.

All the Current CPU Usage tells me is that index.php is running it up. So it’s something on the loading of the front page. Unfortunately, that doesn’t narrow it down much. So far, removing the Popular Posts seems to have done it.

I guess it’s good to know that the command line won’t give me any more detailed information, though. Thanks ??

I also had problems with “popular posts” plugins. Tracking popular posts on a blog of any size is difficult, which is why you don’t see it a lot.

Bonusball, the problem with turning each one off and testing is the inability to track CPU usage in real time. All I can do is turn off the suspected ones and wait to see if the site crashes when there’s enough traffic to trigger whatever is causing the spike in CPU usage.

That’s right.

1) Disable all plugins.
2) Turn on 1 plugin.
3) Wait. And Google that plugin in the meantime. Are there a lot of problems with it?
4) Site crashes? Then that’s the plugin. Doesn’t crash? Turn on another plugin.
5) Site crashes? … etc.

Hopefully you don’t have a lot of plugins. If you do, that could be your problem.