Keep Your Installation Clean or Face Blog Death | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

I got an automated call from Hostgator last night that my sites were taking too many resources (not sure why still) and my account was turned down until I could fix it. Ugh.

I spent a lot of the morning chatting and emailing with support and got everything turned back on. I was given specific configuration suggestions for my caching plugins (they said WP Super Cache is better than W3 in their experience) to ensure it doesn't break again. I thought I would share:

I strongly recommend using the WP Super Cache plugin. After much testing, we have determined this to be the most efficient Wordpress caching plugin. Please configure your WP Super Cache settings as follows: 

On "Advanced" tab: 

Check box next to "Cache hits to this website…" 
Select button next to "Use mod_rewrite to serve cache files" 
Check box next to "Compress Pages" 
Check box next to "304 Not Modified browser caching" 
Check box next to "Don't cache pages for known users" 
"Cache rebuild" & "Extra homepage checks" should already be checked, leave them that way. 
Select "Update Status" button. Then, scroll down and select "Update Mod_Rewrite Rules" in the yellow box. 
Scroll down to "Expiry Time & Garbage Collection" and enter "86400" in the box, then select "Change Expiration" 
Scroll down, remove entries in "Rejected User Agents" and select "Save UA Strings" 

http://support.hostgator.com/a…..che-plugin

For the sites using W3 Total Cache, please configure the following recommended W3 Total Cache settings: 

Enable Page Cache, Minify, and Browser Cache in the plugin's settings for the best performance. 
Database and Object Cache should not be enabled. They decrease performance when cached to disk. 
Also, be sure to disable Preview Mode, or the caching mechanism will not be enabled. 

They also asked me to update some old sites that I don't use to the newest version to prevent any security issues across the account and server. I had forgotten about them and updated right away.

Anyway, if you are on any of my sites and see any problems, please let me know.

Thank you.

I had the same issue with Just Host this weekend and they shut me down for a few hours. It was a pain since they couldnt tell me what plugin was causing the issue, but to "just make sure you plugins are up to date".

I still dont know what caused it but it might have been the 2000 spam messages sitting on the server from Askimet.

Im switching hosting providers just the same, but it looks like Hostgator might have the same issues.

That would royally piss me off that they wouldn't give you a warning / heads up before just shutting it down. 

That being said, I actually had on my to-do list to install a caching plugin today.  I'm going to check this out as it's quite timely info!  I'm also going to check my traffic reports since I now have a few weeks of data and my hosting service (not Host Gator) provides this on a dashboard.

What is everyone using for hosting providers?

This is the first and only issue I ever had with Hostgator, and it was easy to get my IP access back to make changes and escalate the ticket to get instant feedback. They also fixed a few things in my .htaccess that I didn't realize were messed up.