In recent months, I faced a couple of traffic hikes on my blog which resulted in high CPU usage and my webhost suspended my account to get the resources under control. I thought it was the time for me to switch to VPN or Dedicated servers.
I even signed up for an unmanaged VPN account to host my blog. As I was installing all the resources on my VPN, I started to thinking whether the traffic hike was so deadly that switching to VPN server (which costs around $20/month) was important. I get around 2.5K – 3K pageviews daily and I started researching traffic rates and hosting packages of my fellow bloggers.
Some of them were getting 7K – 8K pageviews daily and had VPN servers. Others who were getting 3K – 4K were still on shared hosting. So, I thought I still have time to switch to VPN or Dedicated servers. Shared hosting is good for me till then.
Why did my visitors burn up the resources of my Web Host?
All the post images were hosted in wp-contents/uploads folder of the blog. That was the main reason for the use of processor and bandwidth. CPU was being used upto 25% and bandwidth usage was about 1 to 1.2 GB daily. I wasn’t worried about the bandwidth because my shared hosting offered me unlimited package. But, CPU usage was a problem. Unlimited is truly not unlimited. Check the TOS of any shared host and you’ll find that they limit the CPU usage to 10% to 25% per account. Anything about that will fire up the resources and because you’re hosted in a shared environment, you must share all the resources with other sites hosted there.
How to make sure you don’t go Dedicated too soon?
There’s nothing wrong in going dedicated “too soon” if you’re not worried about burning a hole in your pocket. But why spend extra money when you can still hang on to your shared Linux or Windows web hosting.
Here are some tips to reduce the CPU usage of your WordPress blog:
1. Cut & Paste your images from your shared server to free image hosting sites. Sites like Photobucket & ImageShack will do a great work for you
2. Optimize your blog’s database atleast twice a month. It clears the extra overhead caused on the database
3. Use Page caching plugin like W3 Total Cache
4. WP Minify is also a great plugin to compress your JS and CSS files. This will save your processor’s extra work
5. Remove unwanted plugins. Yes, plugins cause extra load on your server. Also, make sure you remove plugins which track visitors to your site. Such plugins consume a lot of resources. Use Google Analytics instead
6. When you’re writing a long and time consuming post, make sure that you write it locally on Microsoft Word or any of your favorite text editors. This is because, WordPress’ text editor constantly saves drafts after a couple of minutes, which causes unnecessary connections to your MySQL database
Conclusion
If your WordPress blog is getting less than 5K of pageviews daily, then you should optimize your blog and stick to shared Linux or Windows web hosting. If your blog is getting more traffic and your server can’t handle it further, it’s wise to switch to VPN or a dedicated server.
If you’ve any questions/suggestions, feel free to Comment.
[Photo via Flickr]
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