Test Post on My Blog at It’s New Host

If this goes through, it will be my first post on my blogs in over two weeks.  Two Wednesdays ago I received an email from my hosting service then - Midphase.  I was told that I had exceeded my CPU and memory usage and that my account had been suspended.  Now you geeks/nerds like me know what that means, but for the others reading this, it means that my blogs were supposedly hogging up too many of the resources on the shared server on which they were being hosted.  I spent about 5 hours trying to get my account restored that day, and then I spent many, many hours over the next week and a half trying to reduce my CPU and memory use.

While the support people were always prompt in their replies, what they had to say was extremely unhelpful.  They said things like "Your memory use is still high, try to reduce it,"  or "You may want to upgrade to our VPS servers (for a cost of $50.00 a month over the $8.00 a month I was paying), or "Your memory usage is still too high.  If it continues we will suspend your account."   I ended up unplugging most of my plugins that did neat things on my blog (one of the reasons I went to a paid host, mind you), and took off many of the cool items in my sidebars.  What I ended up with was a blog I could have kept on Wordpress.com for free, but it did reduce my CPU usage to acceptable levels.

The memory usage problem was, well, more problematic.  I installed wp-cache first, to no avail.  When one support person suggested wp-supercache, I removed wp-cache and installed the supercache version instead.  The result was the same, however . . . my memory usage did not go down.  The last straw came on Sunday when I received another response to my request to check my memory usage.  Here is the reply:

Hello William

I checked your RAM usage is 12.38, please try to decrease your server resource usage
Thank you
—-
Alexandr Nakonechnyj  (all the support guys have names like this.  I’m guessing their support team is in Russia . . . not that there’s anything wrong with that)

In response I wrote back:

I am trying to do just this.  I have removed widgets galore and have installed wp-supercache on my two heavier use blogs.  Nothing has seemed to work.  My [latest daily] stats on these two blogs are:

wordandtable.onethingiknow.net - visits-321   pages-756
onethingiknow.net - visits-963  pages-2264

Are these stats too high for shared servers?

My final email from Midphase support said this:

William

These stats is not too high for shared servers
I advice (sic) you to optimize your Wordpress I think it will fix this issue

After 25 email exchanges and at least 15 posts on the support forums all I ultimately get is "I advice you to optimize your Wordpress."  What exactly did they think I had been trying to do for almost two weeks?  It was time for a new host, and so this week I began to move my blogs to Media Temple’s GS hosting service.  And so far, so good. I will have to make some tweaks in the days and weeks to come, but I am always doing that sort of thing, so no big deal.  One special note:  I will have to rebuild my blogroll, so those of you were on it be patient with me . . . it will be up again in a few days.

In closing this long post, I want to give some special thanks to Justin Baeder for all his help in my making this move to a new host.  I couldn’t have done it without him.  Justin blogs at Radical Congruency and also owns WebbleYou, which provides "Professional Webmaster Services" and "Expert Wordpress Support."   I got to know Justin when WebbleYou was also a blog hosting company and "One Thing I Know" was hosted there.  He was also great to work with then, and when WebbleYou stopped its hosting business, Justin made sure everyone was taken care of.  I highly recommend him if you are need of the services he provides.  He will not let you down.

That is all for now.