I almost had a massive DISASTER with my sites today...

Today all of my Wordpress blogs suddenly went down. I got this error message: "unable to connect to database." So I freaked out and called my hosting company, Bluehost, and after an hour on the phone they told me that I had "too many processes running" and that was why everything was messed up.

So I disabled some of my plugins. My sites are back up now, thank God, but they are running slow as hell. Bluehost told me to consider hiring a "web developer" to optimize my blogs and get them running faster. But my sites are not even huge, I only use a handful of plugins, etc. (And how exactly do you "optimize" a Wordpress blog?)

Have any of you experienced this? Blog problems lately on these hosting accounts that give you "unlimited" domains? Maybe I need to get my own server. I just don't know whether my sites get enough traffic to warrant paying hundreds of dollars per month for a private server. Bluehost offers a sweet deal, but I don't ever want to go through this again...

Its probably Bluehost overloading their servers, I believe they have up to 800 accounts on some servers, If you only have a couple of blogs with normal plug ins then that should not affect the shared environment.

The next move up for you would be a VPS you can pick up a good managed VPS for 35 to 45 $ a month. I would wait a while and see what happens.

Install wp-cache.

A good managed VPS for $45 a month? Sweet! People were telling me it would cost $200 and up...any suggestions??

you can get a cheap dedicated server from corenetworks.net for about 30-35$ a month and you can find coupons on webhostingtalk that removes there silly setup fee

robvegas626 said:

A good managed VPS for $45 a month? Sweet! People were telling me it would cost $200 and up...any suggestions??

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like sj101 said, install wp-cache and see if the problem stops. If it doesn't, there's TONS of cheap VPS's out there. http://phatservers.com is a great one to check out

Sj101 said:

Install wp-cache.

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this. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

robvegas626 said:

People were telling me it would cost $200 and up...any suggestions??

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Nope, I've got a manged server for $60 at All managed and monitored, never have to move a finger when something goes down.

I know enough to manage a server but I rather dedicate my time to my business than playing around with servers.
That's why I went for full-managed.