I may need a new web host

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I may need to find a new web hosting company. I love DreamHost and I’ve had no problems with them, but my sites are using too much CPU time. I’ve received several warnings about MacMegasite from them like the following:

Unfortunately it appears that your site is using more than your
fair share of system resources on your shared hosting machine
jezebel. Our system has flagged your account because it is using a large number
of CPU minutes per day on jezebel. We need you to trim down your
resource consumption considerably. Should you ignore this or subsequent warnings your
account may be moved to an evaluation server which could cause downtime.

Specifically your CPU minute usage for today is 100.63.

DreamHost gives me a ridiculously huge bandwidth and disk space limit, which I’m nowhere near reaching. There’s no way anyone could reach that limit without using too much CPU time unless they’re simply hosting large media files.

I’ve done as much as I can to attempt to reduce the CPU usage, including reducing the number of articles on the front page, removing blocks, disabling features, and increasing the throttle level. I’m using a standard installation of Drupal 4.6.3 with no unusual modules, but the site gets around 30,000 hits a day. If anyone else is hosting a Drupal site with that amount of activity at DreamHost, are they also getting those warnings?

3 thoughts on “I may need a new web host”

  1. It looks like you are useing wordpress. I don't know if Drupal is PHP based or not but if you have root access on your host server (if it's a virtual host that you have complete control over), you can try a PHP accelerator. I use the Ion Cube PHP accelerator (http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk/) which works wonders on my site. I first used it on the Salt Lake Linux Users Group site when we were running PHPNuke on a 486 DX2 66 which brought it to it's knees. After installing the accelerator on that machine it was quite useable. I have used it on all my PHP sites since and have been pretty impressed with it. Anyway, just an idea…

  2. This site does use WordPress, but MacMegasite (as well as WorldBeatPlanet) uses Drupal. I'm using a shared hosting plan at DreamHost for all of my sites.

  3. I noticed that you had Clean URLs enabled on MacMegasite. Clean URLs causes .htaccess to be read on every page hit. If you have bad statements in your .htaccess that might account for the high CPU usage.

    Try trimming down your .htaccess. Also consider disabling Clean URLs altogether if the problem still exists.

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