The Daily Inquirer has been slowing down recently, mostly due to the traffic it’s been getting recently. On a shared host, you have no choice but to bear with the “Error in connection” or “Internal Server Error 500″ messages.
So I thought, “Why not take the next step and invest in a VPS?”
So wrong…
I tried and failed to get The Daily Inquirer running on a VPS a few months back. I signed up with VPS.net and tried them out for a month. I never got far with them because of permission problems, VPS learning blues and my day job. So I gave up and returned The Daily Inquirer to Bluehost.com.
Fast forward to about a week ago. The Daily Inquirer was getting beat up pretty bad after several weeks of traffic spikes. That would normally make a blogger say “Yahoo!”, that is – if you’re hosted on a dedicated server worth several hundreds of dollars to maintain a month!
*Ahem* Jehz *Ahem*
I canvassed for a good VPS and eventually found settled with ServInt.net and dedicated 3 days studying and transferring my site to the VPS.
I quit my day job 3 months ago, so that 3 days meant almost 20 hours per day studying and transferring the site. For the past 3 days, I’ve been sleeping at about 6am just configuring, monitoring, pestering the ServInt’s tech support (great guys) and testing the site.
On the fourth day, I finally got the pseudo site working using the IP and went on to migrate the nameserver to point to my own nameserver. The DNS propagation took about 20 hours to complete and I posted some articles to test The Daily Inquirer’s capabilities on a VPS.
Then it hit me.
A few minutes after my new posts, The Daily Inquirer crawled to a halt. I quickly contacted tech support, they told that the site was gobbling up a crap load of CPU. It even reached 100% and ServInt had to restart my box. After the restart, ServInt suggested that installing eAccelerator might help alleviate the CPU load, so I said, “DO IT NOW!”
Kidding. But they did install eAccelerator and it helped. I also purged, deactivated and deleted a LOT of plugins. It helped shave off about 10% CPU load, which was still bad because that still left me with an average of 60-80% CPU load at any given time. And I wasn’t even receiving a lot of traffic! The horror…
I finally decided to give up (again) on a VPS and transferred the namespace and the new posts back to Bluehost.
A few hours before that, I was chatting with Jehzlau and he told me that shared hosts are usually powerful machines that can withstand WordPress’ CPU hogging tendencies but limit the amount of CPU and traffic you receive to protect the server and your IP neighbors. Jehz suggested that the only servers capable of hosting a high traffic WordPress site are the expensive Dedicated servers. Good luck with that…
Although a VPS promises a lot of bandwidth and memory, that won’t mean squat if your CPU isn’t up to the task to effectively manage WordPress’ CPU problems.
I eventually found what caused the CPU problem in WordPress. When we use a custom permalink structure (pretty permalinks), WordPress queries the .htaccess directive for the permalink A LOT! There were test results in the WordPress forums confirming the problem. When the permalink was left to default, the average CPU load was about 10-20% which is pretty acceptable. But when a custom permlink is used, average CPU load shot up to 50-80%. But the we can’t use the default right? Who wants a link that looks like this: site.com/?p=34334 right?
So I’m back to square one. Lesson learned and $50 after: WordPress and VPS do NOT mix. Not yet anyway. Not until the (great) guys over at Automattic and WordPress.org fix the CPU problems.
In WordPress 3.0 perhaps? Or Automattic’s VIP hosting?
There is a saying that resolutions made in January are usually broken the month after. People stop going to the gym, eat more, work less, blah blah blah! Are your resolutions still intact?
I believe we can keep our resolutions. We just have to start small and perform self-checks every month to keep the essence of the resolutions alive. Dream to big and we risk not living up to the dream and lose confidence.
A list of resolutions I’ll try to keep:
• Sleep earlier – I usually work until 4am and wake up 12-1pm and miss out on a lot of things to do in the morning like my daily gym routine.
• Limit Facebook visits – I get distracted a lot and waste a lot of time scanning for Facebook updates and playing with apps. Less Facebook, more work done!
• Learn how to swim – If I were on the sinking Titanic, I would be the first to one sink like a rock! No excuses! I’m going to master floating and basic strokes!
• Play with my violin more often – pick up where I left off and get to book two of the Suzuki method!
• Look for blogging events to attend – ‘Nuf said.
That’s all I can think of at the moment, but I’ll to update it with accomplishments and more resolutions!
To all philippine-based bloggers, The Daily Inquirer is hiring! 
If you’re interested email me at ron[dot]delrosario[at]gmail[dot]com!
Finally got my packages from the Central Post Office! I really hate claiming my packages there! If you want to see corruption first hand, that’s the place to go! Tsk!
For the good news… The Daily Inquirer’s ranking is steadily improving every week! Yay! From 103,000+ to 96,000+! Now to work on improving revenue… 
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