FAQ #1: Is this outage my fault? (AKA – I didn’t do anything – how can it be my fault?)
This question deserves an answer right away. As do all your questions, and I’ll be answering your emails and questions as quickly as I can.
Answer: No. This is not your fault. As I tried to explain via the newsletter regarding the outage – this was caused by a variety of factors. Most of which are “higher load” than usual. This is NOT the same as:
- extra traffic
- extra plugins
- bigger or graphically heavy themes
- videos,
- viruses
- or anything else that you’ve done
Sometimes, for some of you, an extra plugin in the last week or two may be contributing. But plugins are par for the course with WordPress. And we encourage the conservative use of plugins to make your website better.
Unfortunately we don’t have a clear explanation of where the high load is coming from. And it will be slightly different for each website. These are the factors that are effecting the load that you have no control over:
- how wordpress interacts with the database
- how the database is configured by wordpress (& your plugins & theme)
- an upgrade to a plugin that will change the above mentioned interactions or configurations
- an upgrade to a theme that will change the above mentioned interactions or configurations
- a change in how search engines crawl your site
- a change in how a theme or plugin lets bots & spiders crawl your site
- a change in how WordPress lets bots & spiders crawl your site
- new advertisers or spiders that are tasked with crawling your site
- a surge in people hot-linking to your site’s images
Step one is to optimize, optimize, optimize to take the least resources possible.
What we did about it (yesterday):
- deactivate all unused plugins
- deactivate all marginally necessary plugins (to expedite this process, I took my best guess on which plugins were only for aesthetics or unnecessary to the function of your sites)
- optimized & repaired the database tables
- upgraded WP, themes, plugins
- installed caching and configured
Step two is to get more bigger, better, faster processors (the stuff that ‘load’ needs) for the server
- this is not the same as bandwidth, or memory which is already assigned to each account
(By the way – this is what host companys are referring to when they say their accounts are ‘unlimited’. They do NOT mean that the ‘resources’ are unlimited. )
- we are moving all existing accounts from Server DDD into a Dedicated server with 4 times the resources
Should we have seen this coming?
I’m not entirely sure of that answer and its been keeping me up at night. I believe we did due diligence. Our server DDD is only 65% full allowing for each of you to grow quite a bit before needing to move. And up until a few weeks ago everything was working smoothly with no need to see the resource limit approaching. See the factors above for why it changed recently.
Please let me know if there are more questions you’d like addressed in future posts or emails?
Thank you for your patience and patronage,
Your friendly geeks,
Cathy
