About over a week ago Go Beyond MLS was down for several days. In fact my entire hosting account was suspended. Evidently my websites were overloading the server and exhausting the server resources.
As attractive as shared hosting is, keeping low prices and all, every serious web master and/or blogger needs to look ahead and plan for a dedicated server solutions… eventually.
As much as I love WordPress as blogging platform, it uses good amount of server resources to evidently cause serious enough trouble for my web host to have my account suspended. So I had to do something. Optimize my sites so that they would not over load the server or move to dedicated web hosting solution (which would cost me about $1200 a year even with the least expensive solutions out there). So I opted for optimizing my websites (at least those powered by WordPress) with WP Super Cache plugin.
WP Super Cache along with it’s parental plugin WP Cache, where aimed primarily at allowing WordPress blogs to survive heavy loads of traffic resulting from websites like Digg or Slashdot. However, as it was in my case, you don’t have to hit the front page of Digg or Slashdot to cause some server issues.
So how does WP Super Cache do it? After you install and configure the plugin, it saves individual pages from your WordPress site and serves them to your visitors as plain old html as long as they do not leave comments. Statistically over 90% of your visitors are passing by without ever leaving a comment. Therefor it is save to presume that over 90% of your visitors will be shown the cached hml versions of your pages instead of heavy PHP scripts.
I know that down the road I will have to revisit the possibility of purchasing dedicated server. But if WP Super Cache can buy me a year, it will end up saving me about $1,200.00.
Side note: If you do not have your custom (“pretty”) permalinks configured on your blog, you will have to configure them- WP Super Cache requires that configuration. It is also good idea to backup your current .htaccess file before configuring WP Super Cache Plugin should things go wrong.
Vlad, thanks for the information about the Super Duper version of the WP Cache plugin. I didn't even know that it existed. I'll be checking it out because I think that it is something I could use. Many thanks!
I have it installed but haven't used it yet. Traffic isn't near the point of having to worry about it!
Charley,
I have just had an opportunity to test it. TechCrunch, with a link to one of of my blogs, got to the first page of Digg. Of course I got the leftovers 🙂 , but still it was over 2,000 visitors in a very short time. I absolutely love the plugin. Since I installed it I never get those dreadful "temporarily down" messages from my host due to the resources issues.
Matt, if you ever get to the front page of Digg the plugin offers a "lockdown" option that will continue to serve the cached page even if some one leaves a comment. As I mentioned it on Twitter, I think this is a must have plugin for WordPress users.
Movable Type seems to do this by default, making each post it's own static HTML page. Is this not a built-in option on WordPress?
Jeremy,
I am not that familiar with Movable Type, but I guess it works similarly to Blogger (aka Blogspot). WordPress by default serves the dynamic pages, which can be very expensive if you get spike of traffic from Digg or other social networks.
Movable Type is hosted, server side, and seems very similar to many of the other services.
How did you land yourself on the front page of TechCrunch when it got "Digged"? 🙂
TecChrunch linked to me in one of their posts that made to front page of Digg…. I was getting only “leftovers”- about 1,000 in 10 minutes lol. Still since I am not on a dedicated server, this plugin saved my behind.