Yesterday around 1pm I got an email from my host. “Your web hosting account has been deactivated.” Uh oh. I’ve been dumped! “Reason: site causing performance problems.” The sinking feeling in my stomach nestled in and got comfortable.
I had no idea what to do. Calling the host didn’t help much. My site was causing too many MySql queries and I had to fix it before they’d activate the account again. I vaguely knew what that meant, but no clue how to figure out why it was happening and how to fix it.
But thanks to a very helpful member of webcomics.com, I had the site back up in a few hours.
I apologize for the sudden and prolonged down time, and hopefully it won’t happen again. But you may want to follow me on Twitter or join the NPC Facebook page in case it does. I posted yesterday’s comic on both sites, and will do so again if I am unfortunate enough to get re-dumped.
My website got closed too because of too many visitors causing too much traffic :/ Only way to “fix” it is to get a virtual host and can’t afford it :e
Caching is very important for a high traffic site. Nothing kills a site faster than lots of database queries.
That’s always the best worst problem to have. I recently had to switch off of Media Temple to a dedicated server I had sitting around for another project because their grid service is terribly slow for anything involving lots of database queries, and Comicpress pulls something like 40 at a minimum.
You should consider getting WP Supercache. It serves all of your pages as static HTML files for users who aren’t logged in or commenting and reduces the database load substantially. I’ve heard of WordPress sites on janky shared hosting withstanding a good Digging without missing a beat when supercache was running, and you’ll see a definite improvement in your page load times as well.
I’ve been running WP Supercache since last year. It definitely helped some server slow downs I was having when WoW Insider linked to me on Sundays.
This latest hiccup didn’t seem driven by traffic. Traffic wasn’t spiking at all that day. So I’m not sure why the queries were so long.
I ended up indexing a table that was causing problems, and updating WordPress. I’m keeping an eye on my slow query logs, and it seems ok for now.
Man, I’m disappointed to hear that about Media Temple. It’s so hard to find a good host. I’ve heard great and bad things about their grid service. It seems like I hear great and bad things about EVERY host. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t moved off of Bluehost yet.
Mike’s costume is the Dungeon Master from the 80′s D&D cartoon series.