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By now my web host is probably ready to murder me. Prior to October, my web hosting had never been suspended. Since October, when I converted several of my sites to Wordpress blogs, my account has been suspended at least eight times. I’ve since fixed many of the problems, but I’ve also had to shut down all of my blogs but this one and my article directory.

Although I love Wordpress, what I have learned is that if you install too many plugins, or you install the wrong plugins, it can really be a resource hog, and that was why my account kept getting suspended.

If you use Wordpress, and you’re on a shared server, there are a few things you need to know about this so that it doesn’t happen to you.

First, find out how many queries your Wordpress installation is generating to see how many queries it’s taking to create a page on your site (My article directory was generating over 800. This hogs a huge amount of resources. I’ve since gotten it down to less than 40).

This is very easy to do. Small Potato, one of my favorite Wordpress theme designers, has an excellent post on his site to show you how to find out how many queries your blog is generating, and how to fix it.

WWMD: Uninstall Unnecessary Plugins

You can also put an end to excessive comment spam by using either Spam Karma 2 or Akismet:

Spam Karma 2

Akismet

One is free; the other is commercial. However, if you use Spam Karma 2, you’ll need to take it up a notch.

(I’ve been using Spam Karma 2, and I thought it was enough. It’s not. I found over 21 MB of comment spam in my database, which I had to delete to speed up the database. That was over 9,000 entries.)

You can make sure that you pretty much catch all of the comment spam by using Bad Behavior. What this plugin does is looks at the IP to see where the comment is coming from. It can also catch comment bots and stop them from posting to your blog.

This will save you a ton of bandwidth, which is another thing that can suck up a lot of resources, piss off your web host, and get your account suspended.

Finally, I installed WP Super Cache. What this plugin does is create static pages of your site, which will load faster, reduce the number of calls to your database, as well as save you a ton of bandwidth.

I have to be honest with you. I feel pretty embarrassed, as well as humiliated by this experience. It makes it look like I don’t pay my bills, but that wasn’t the problem at all. Unfortunately, I just don’t know everything there is to know about building dynamic websites.

Don’t let this happen to you. It’s cost me a lot of money, as well as a lot of time, trying to figure out what was wrong with my sites. I hope these resources will help you protect your blog, as well as help it run faster.