Hosting questions part 2: Ram, running out of memory, estimates, recommendations
 

I have a few hosting questions. First i want to give a scenario. I have 2 wordpress mu installs at the same location. Each only contain about 60 active blogs/splogs. The top level domains have about 10-15 videos each, all the videos are hosted flvs from sponsors and not long clips. Both wordpress mu installs have light traffic total across all blogs with the total being under 10k pageviews per month for everything both sites and all blogs. Total bandwidth used between jan 1st and now 61gb. VPS Hosting plan has 512k available ram. Did get a nice deal on it, and im not looking to bash or out a host. Just want some straight answers.

Now questions. My blogs have periodically experienced outages. Sometimes i visit a blog and get blank pages. Should such a low amount traffic cause me to run out of memory on blogs? Btw, all the spolgs are rss fed, with no hosted flvs etc. and only the tlds have 20 total videos, and not much traffic.
If it is the traffic, do i need to constantly optimize the mysql databases? Is it the host? Or the script? Is wordpress mu very resource extensive? I dont really want to get a server because i dont have the traffic/sales from those sites to justify it. I did see a nice offer from securedservers.com, $48 for a starter server. Anybody use those? Any company with similar offer for comparison? Long post if you read it and have ideas please share thanks.

A lot of it depends on your plugins. Plugins can use a LOT of resources.

I'd check out and contact gotekky servers for a vps plan. I got a ridiculous deal with them.

i forgot about those ill go back through them thanks

512 Ram is not enough to run a wordpress site with traffic. (of course you CAN but that's like sticking a VW engine in a Peterbuilt and wondering why it won't climb hills)

Maybe as a hobbyist/personal site with just text and little clicks, but not for anything beyond that.

Yeah, if you are running all those blogs you need more memory for sure. 2GB should suffice.

I have a small dedicated server that's running about twenty blogs, averaging about 1k uniques per day.

It originally had 512k ram and the sites were starting to choke. I had it upgraded to 2 gigs ram and it runs beautifully now.

I seem to remember someone telling that 512 was enough but its all subjective i guess so im hearing the consensus is get more memory

Yes, if you want to start with 1 GB and upgrade to 2 later, you can try that.

Also:

1. Optimize MySQL
2. Update Plugins (never auto update)
3. Delete Plugins you unstalled but are not using.
4. Delete databases you created but do not use.
5. Update all scripts

hmm also i do have about 65-70 unused plugins :error i only use about 10-12 per site so i see i have some work to do to clean up my mess thanks for the info :)

ssh in and run 'top' or 'htop' on it (both at peak and off peak times) to see what is going on and where the resources are going. Alternatively if you have SNMP with cacti setup this can give you a picture of what is going on as well.

From what you describe it sounds like 1 GB would be a good idea.

WE have some new VPS plans with lots of ram http://amerinoc.com/vpshosting.php
There is also a coupon code there for 50% off your first month.

You can save a lot of RAM by commenting out a dozen or so Apache modules that
you aren't using.

You may want to disable any plugins not in use, there are many resource intensive plugins that can cause server issues (due to the fact that they were written poorly). Memory is key when it comes to wordpress, load it up as best you can and be sure your web server and mysql configurations are set to be as light weight as possible. A good caching plugin will go along way as well, we like w3-total-cache. It allows you to use many existing caching methods transparently and works with CDN networks (like ours ;) which will help offload static traffic/requests of your machine.

Echo everything about plugins. Also the themes you're using can eat up CPU power and ram. If its got a ton of calls to the database it is more intensive to process each page every time someone goes to it.

If you aren't already, you NEED to set up each blog with the wp super-cache plugin which will drastically cut down resources needed for serving pages to visitors. I would do that before moving host and having a look over the next month to see if you experience the same issues still. WP Super-Cache stores your pages as static so goodbye to all the database calls. Its smart enough to know when you update or add content to refresh the cached version of the page.

I would think that would do the trick for you, especially if you can cut down most other plugins as well - - they are usually poorly written and use up way more resources than they should (again, mostly via endless calls to the database).

hope that helps.

1. add more RAM (2GB should be ~$5/month)
2. since you are not attached to Apache (wpmu), try installing nginx (or even lighttpd) and quit using shitty php modules.
3. delete all the plugins you are not using and reconsider deleting some of those you are, but don't necessarily need them.
4. then install some wordpress caching add-on - in this case check out: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...he-integrator/
5. say thank you! - your system will decrease cpu load significantly.

install WP Caching plugin
that will help for sure...

:thumbsup:thumbsup