Not in the Mood
I have not really been the mood to do much blogging the last few weeks and the number of posts shows it. A couple of times I have been close to being motivated, but I really got the mojo on after having issues with the hosting platform and being shut down yesterday. As ticked off at Lunar Pages as I was yesterday, I suppose I should really be thanking them for getting my groove back on and hence the very reason I am posting this tonight.
To begin, largely because of the huge amount of traffic over the last few months to this blog and a few of my other sites, I have been on the radar. Two days back, in the late afternoon noon this site hit the point on the random radar of taking to much of the CPU on the shared server on which all my sites are hosted. That resulted in the main index file being renamed, which in effect disabled the scripts on the site. However, scripts on the other site were still pushing me over the limit, but not nearly so bad.
In the interim of my making sure I did not have anything doing crazy stuff and just some general cleaning up some things I had it out with the low end support tech at Lunar Pages. In general I have liked the hosting, but it was being really slow during the time frame. What really got me was a ticket entry saying they would monitor for twenty four hours but they did not re-authorize the file they changed. We went through that for several hours and I was told I was in an ‘admin’ queue and it would be dealt with in the order it was received.
While I was waiting I did do some checking into a couple of caching systems that I had heard about before. I finally settled on WP-Super Cache. It is a plugin for Wordpress that basically generates HTML (flat static files) of your site based on what the PHP script would do. This takes a load off the processor because the heavy load of calling the PHP engined and code execution is removed for all but the one time. It also leads to much faster loading pages as a nice side effect since it is just as quick as an flat HTML or image can be sent.
Thirty hours or so later they finally turned it back on and maybe it seems like things are okay now. It has now been over twelve and despite asking the low level techies at Lunar Pages to check on it, I have not heard anything from them. I guess the combination of caching and other cleanup was good? I will say this though, at the end of my five remaining months I am going to serious reconsider staying with LP. First is the clear fact that too many virtual hosts are allowed on each server and beyond that, tech support for the little guy is clearly lacking. I can say this as the business has several larger and more expensive accounts and the service is never as bad as I got yesterday when I use those credentials. Maybe it is time to consider a dedicated server or at least a VPS somewhere?
January 30th, 2010 at 10:14 am
I should have also noted that while working through the above issue I have temporarily disabled both the snazzy archives and global translator plugins. I am pretty sure they will be put back in place at some point, but my apologies to anyone in the interim.