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How to Avoid Server Crashes with Wordpress

Posted on January 22, 2009 by David with 6 Comments

There was so much traffic on my blog, David Henderson.com, about an evolving crisis communications situation involving Ketchum Public Relations and FedEx that it crashed my new VPS hosting service with InMotion Hosting. Let me express that I believe InMotion is an outstanding Web hosting company. A quick call to their 24-hour live tech team and the server was reset, and I was back online within 5 mnutes. But, here’s how it happened:

Each time a Wordpress blog has a visitor, the server delivers the page or pages the visitor clicks on. When thousands of people visit a blog at one time, as happened last night, the server must deliver the same page(s) over and over, putting great demand on the server’s CPU. It led to a crash.

The techs at InMotion suggested, and I have installed a Wordpress plugin called, WP-SuperCache. WP-SuperCache makes a Wordpress blog more streamlined and delivers page demands more efficiently and faster because it creates a cache or memory of popular pages.

If your Wordpress blog has heavy traffic demands, WP-SuperCache is not a guarantee to prevent a server crash but it helps to lessen the chance.

Tags: ,

Category: Blogs, Wordpress

About the Author: David is a veteran communications strategist, writer, blogger, online publisher and Emmy Award winning former CBS Network News correspondent. He lives in the Washington, D. C. area and works worldwide. David launched Blog Strategies in April 2008. Later, in December 2009, he transferred ownership to the blog's current owner, Michael Pollock.

Comments (6)

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  1. ovidiu says:

    this plugin is not a 100% solution. you also need to optimize your VPS in terms of configuration of apache and mysql.
    You can use the Firefox add-on YSlow to get some additional ideas on how to optimize your site. Your page has a score of 30 out of a max. of 100 that’s horrible :-)

  2. [...] of Twitter is about communication with your peers and meeting new people How to Avoid Server Crashes with Wordpress – blogstrategies.net 01/22/2009 There was so much traffic on my blog, David Henderson … at [...]

  3. ovidiu says:

    btw. here is a pretty good guide to get you started :-) link

  4. BTW David – the Andrews thing. It was all about a racial incident, not about Elvis’ hometown or any company. People still don’t get it.

  5. [...] Digital branding has been added to the mix and more companies realise that a lot of their target audience are not tech savvy and now have moved on to the internet to find most of their solutions [...]

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