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Is there anyone technical in the audience who can advise me on this weird situation? Yesterday and today, I’ve received automated emails from my webhost telling me that my hosting account is using a high CPU load. They say:
Your hosting account has been warned due to high CPU usage - it has reached the limit allowed by your hosting plan.
Your plan is allowed to use: 4.5 % CPU average.
Your account has used: 4.62 % CPU average the last 3 days.Your account will be automaticaly blocked if you use more CPU load than your plan is allowed in the next 48 hours.
Looking more closely at the Load Stats, the offending day was Monday, May 5th (ironically, a day I hardly touched the computer, because I was still recovering from an arduous journey on Saturday), when the CPU usage averaged at 7.41%, peaking at 16.31% between the hours of 12-18 (what time zone, I have no idea). The page with that data, also identifies the “offending” process as .php, which is only used to any extent by Wordpress on this very personal blog.
The good news is that, on Tuesday, the average had dropped to within the limits to 3.99% and, on Wednesday, back to the realms of normality at 2.47%.
My next reaction was to look at traffic stats to see if that day had an unusually large influx of visitors, a rogue robot, a search engine bot running amuck, a comment spammer attack, or whatever, but I come up with nothing. No untoward entries and, indeed the 5th was not a heavy traffic day:
This had happened before just after I’d installed Wordpress, so I enabled Wordpress cache, disabled lots of other things (that I wanted), but that might add load and, it had been behaving. I’m not aware of anything that I have control over that could be the cause now, I don’t believe I have any more features I can turn off, so I am at a total loss as to what to do about it.
The hosting company offered Wordpress and an easy installer, by the way, so it’s not like I’ve installed something rare, unexpected or “illegal” here.
As you can see from the Account Usage info snapshot there on the left, I’m also using WAAAAAAAY below my limits for storage, bandwidth, various other items and traffic.
The account allows hosting of multiple domains and my Secret Tenerife domain is hosted on it too, which gets around 500 - 800 visitors per day. That is still not a hugely massive crowd that could crash or unbalance a server.
Secret Tenerife does NOT use Wordpress and has not caused any problems. The other two domains of the 4 hosted are one that is a static site of very few pages that gets, at best, half a dozen visitors a week and the last is a completely undeveloped site, with no pages and zero traffic.
The only place I use Wordpress and .php to any extent is, as I say, for this blog and, despite 4,000+ pages, traffic is … well, if you’re reading this, chances are you’re the first person to do so after me. Give or take, but it’s not a lot. 
My guess is that this is their problem: that they are not balancing the load properly or something. Though, I admit that I’m making an educated guess here, based on things I’ve read online when others have had problems with hosts.
The reason, put subtly, is probably because they are relatively cheap.
I’m certain this is not something I’ve done, nor normal server behaviour, just as I’m sure that not everyone using Wordpress has had to upgrade to an industrial strength server at the cost of at least one leg and two arms per month. I know that even the best can be knocked over by a Digg, a Slashdotting or being Lifehacked, but hell, this wouldn’t even survive a link from a blind alley!
Maybe I should move over to FreeHostia, who describe themselves as, “one of the very few hosting companies that have implemented a cluster server solution where the load is balanced between many servers in contrary to one-server based platforms.” The absolute irony, after spotting a few clues and reading the About page, is that they are the same company as I’m already using!
My thoughts are that I can solve this problem in two ways (well, three if you count doing nothing and crossing my fingers that levels remain normal.) Either, I can stay with this host (it’s paid for until the end of the year and I’ve been with them for 4+ years), which would require deleting Wordpress, returning to Blogger (with FTP upload, as Secret Tenerife uses), or I could take a risk and move to another host and hope they don’t have the same or worse problems.
Another thought was to delete all the old posts, say, those before this year, or move them off remotely to Wordpress.com. Maybe, with the bulk of them gone, I’d be able to get away with continuing to use Wordpress here? It’s hardly where I want all my old posts though and, Wordpress.com (free) won’t allow me to customize in the way I want, nor allow advertising on the blog.
And if I were to try moving, does anyone actually know a RELIABLE and inexpensive host with a decent set of features that accepts PayPal?
Anyone got any other suggestions or better ideas on this?
Sponzurz
[…] As I said before, I had installed WP-Cache when this happened the first time, but it looks like even that will not be enough. In his post, Eric points to the WP Super Cache plugin and, this must be worth a try, since PHP was identified as causing the high CPU load and WP Super Cache, “When it is installed, html files are generated and they are served without ever invoking a single line of PHP.” […]