In what way was your plan not able to keep up?

Were you running out of bandwidth? or was it a CPU utilization issue?

I guess you could be getting no traffic at all, which would probably be worse. But I hope you get things running smoothly soon. Good luck!

I had noticed you site being pretty slow for the last week or so.

I’ve been thinking of starting my own blog, although I’m planning on hosting it off my own box as its just for my own personal use.

In any case I’ve had several people point me towards Dreamhost. Do they say how much is too much? It irritates me that all these hosting companies promise you x number of TBs of transfer, but they don’t even allow enough CPU usage to ever use that bandwidth, and they neglect to tell you this. Sorry for the rant, but this practice just really bothers me, and I’m not even in your shoes right now.

Over at John Chow’s website there has been a lot of praise for BlueFur.com hosting. The price looks right, but I’m not sure about the details of the packages. It looks like their monthly transfer limits are significantly lower, but maybe they actually deliver what they sell.

I would recommend against Dreamhost, actually. They had a pretty catastrophic crash that screwed a lot of people just a couple of weeks ago.

Good luck!

Trent, how long do you leave the WP-Cache pages in your cache? Maybe holding on to the cached pages for a longer period of time, say a few hours more than you usually do, would cut down on the number of page generations you’ll need to do?

(Disclaimer: I have no experience with WordPress, but I have a lot of Web development experience.)

If you’re looking for good rates… try Hostgator… I host my site with them. Been great since last June.

Throwing in as a very small time site hoster that dream host is pretty cool for the 30 bucks or whatever you can get the first year for. Start there, then if you take off, move to a more professional/highend hosting company.

I’m surprised that your CPU usage is super high if you’re using WP-Cache. Yes, it was probably a lot of traffic, but most people were being funneled to a single page, which should have been sitting happily in your case an not generating much in the way of CPU usage. Mine is set to rebuild the pages every 3600 seconds (= one hour).

Regardless, that’s kind of a bummer.

Grrrr… Sitting in your cache, not your case. Love that spell check!

Whoa 20k a day… Are you sure its that many? lol
Dreamhost gives you like 2TB of bandwidth, what if you limit the number of posts that display per page?

Juan (1mil)

Ok, after looking at your code. I don’t see anything to hectic here. Assuming your using a database to store your posts, I think you’re pushing your MySQL to the limit. Do you really need to list every related post on every page those are kind of lengthy. If you login to mysql you can check the tables to see if theyre optimized or not.

I am the webmaster of several sites and have been happy with the service that bluehost provides. Plenty of bandwith, sql databases etc. available. Good luck!

GoDaddy.com. Can’t go wrong with them.