Make Money from Blogs » Hosting

Hostmonster users – How to get an update of server status

ashish — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:33:13 +0000

Hostmonster (click here to learn more) is a popular hosting service used by individuals to host their blogs and other sites (although I have not heard of too many professional sites with huge number of users using WordPress as a hosting service). I use WordPress for my sites, and it runs fairly well, with easy installation of blogs, and other similar software. I did not have to learn much to do installation and configuration of my blogs.
However, one pet peeve I have is that the service goes down once in a while, not frequently enough to be an irritant, but I do notice once it is down (and sometimes can take 1-2 hours to come back up). At such times, it is easy enough to go to Hostmonster chat (right on the main page) to talk to somebody from support, and you can get enough detail about when the server will be back up, as well as what the problem is.
However, getting on the phone to talk to support, or to go to the chat system both take time. There is an easier way to quickly find out if there is a known problem on the server, and what the status for that problem is. There is a page called “Hostmonster Server Status Notification’ that has an update for the servers on which you have to host your sites. This page is located at this link.

Stop Plagiarism: Find the name of the hosting provider

ashish — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:59:42 +0000

Let us consider that you have managed to detect that somebody is copying your content (either by directly taking the content from your blog, or by reading the content from your feed). Now, you need to take steps to get them to stop doing this hosting, or atleast start a discussion with them, so that you can decide on next steps (whether they will change their method of copying so that it meets with your approval, and gives you a link back to your blog, getting you some more traffic).
Now, consider that you are not able to get in touch with the owners of the other blog since they do not have contact details, and sending emails to addresses such as admin@ or owner@, etc do not get a response. This gets you more determined to actually try and get the other blog to take down your content, and you need to work out a way to do so. One way of escalation is to contact the hosting company of the other site to inform that they are hosting content that may be copyrighted, and they should stop hosting all such content. Now, hosting companies normally have policies regarding copyrighted content (it helps that legally a hosting company can be held not responsible for copyrighted content if they have been shown to have taken some action when it has been pointed out to them).
Now, how do you actually detect the hosting company for the other site. Well, a simple solution is to use this site called http://www.whoishostingthis.com/. You just enter the name of the other site that you want to report, and WhoIsHostingThis will provide you with the name of the hosting service. It works, since I tried out a few other sites.
From the site:

Are your hosting results 100% accurate?
As far as we know, there is no way to provide 100% accurate results. However, we use several data sources to find out who is hosting a website, including feedback from users. You can help by reporting bad results for us to investigate.

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Optimizing your WordPress account – 2

ashish — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:09:48 +0000

A few weeks back, I had written about how to take some basic steps towards optimizing your WordPress account. Imagine what would happen if more people started promoting your WordPress Blog, or wonders of wonders, it appears on the front page of Digg or Slashdot. In such cases, unless you have optimized your WordPress configuration already, you can be pretty much sure that your account will get to a state where the server is not able to handle the load, and will shut down; further if your account is on a shared server, you might have some uncomfortable queries from your host.
So, here are some points on how to optimize your account:
1. Since WordPress works on a database system, it pulls every bit of content from the server. If there are a large number of requests for your blog, your server has to make that many DB queries to fetch the content. This puts a lot of stress on your server. User a Super Cache plugin to Cache some of the load and serve static HTML files instead of querying the DB (link to plugin, and page).
2. When you serve various files such as binaries, videos, images, scripts, etc from your server, it becomes slow. Place them on other servers, so that the load on your server is reduced. For example, you can get videos from Youtube and Photos from Flickr, and also, you can even hire some hosting space on another server or on a service such as Amazon S3 for this purpose.
3. If you are more advanced, look at your server logs; it may be possible to determine multiple requests from a bot or script that is of no good, blocking these may make your server behave a bit better
4. Look to get stats on how your web page is loading. If it takes a lot of time to load your page, there may be a lot of plugins working, or scripts loading, and so on. Some tools you can use for this purpose are – LiveHTTPHeaders (link, displays the HTTP headers), Firebug (link, Look at loading times for various artifacts on a page),
5. Inside your wp-config.php file, remove some of the DB calls that are not necessary. For example, hard-code your Template Path, Stylesheet path (link to relevant site). You will get some improvements.
6. Review your themes. Some themes call a lot of graphics, and overall call a lot of files. If your CSS files are divided into multiple files, combine them. Replace graphics wherever possible with text.
7. Review the plugins your are using to see whether they are required. Plugins can make your site much slower, especially if they do a lot of DB access and inefficient. If you are advanced technically, monitor the performance of your plugins.
8. Refer to this quick cheat sheet for DB optimization (link to cheat sheet)
9. Reduce the number of posts on the front page of your blog. Typically, WordPress gives you 10 posts on your front page, you should reduce this to 3-4.
10. Use WP’s Built in Object Cache as described on this page (link). From the same site, refer to the MySQL Query Cache.
11. For some detailed technical analysis of what can be done (link)
12. Clean Options (Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_ options table) – Get it from this page
13. The combating comment spam page on WordPress.org (link). If you have a good blog which is getting popular, increase in spam is only to be expected. Akismet filters out most comment spam, but just getting it into the junk spam list also adds some load to your server.
14. Page with 5 tips for making your Blog Digg / Slashdot proof (link)
15. High Traffic Tips For WordPress on WordPress.org Codex (link)

If you know more ways beyond this, please do let me know.

Optimizing your WordPress account – 1

ashish — Sun, 31 May 2009 17:06:25 +0000

In 2 previous posts where I described problems with my WordPress account, the preliminary solutions prescribed were:
- Keep your WordPress account updated to the latest release
- Keep spam to a minimum, including emptying the Akismet spam folder on a regular basis

These are just temporary solutions, given that WordPress is supposed to be not yet including optimization code in it and as a result, takes more CPU than required (see a description of WordPress optimization deficiences on this page).

What are some of the other things you can do:
1. Review the list of plugins that are in use. A number of users download a number of plugins and keep them active. Each plugin is a performance hit of some sort, and you should review your plugins to see which of these plugins are really necessary vs. plugins that do not add much value and are a performance hit.
2. Use some sort of caching in order to prevent each page hit querying the database and slowing down the server. You can use WP-Cache (link) or you can use Word Super Cache (link)
3. Using graphics. If you have a number of graphics, those are additional graphics that need to be served to your users. As an example, refer this calculation from WordPress Codex:

For example, let’s say the front page of your blog calls upon 8 graphics to create the “look” of your blog’s design. Add to this number the various WordPress template files it takes to build your page. You’ve got the header, sidebar, footer, and post content area at a minimum. That’s four more “calls” to files on your site. For 100 visitors, those files get loaded 1200 times. For 1000 visitors, those files are accessed and loaded 12000 times. This increases your bandwidth and server activity.

4. Use spam filters such as Akismet to prevent comment spam
5. Try and get others to host your content. You have some great graphics or some analytics that need calculation which are done at run time. These also take server processing load, and is preferable to get content from elsewhere. For example, analyics information is also availabe at sites such as Google Analytics and all the calculation is done on those servers.

Running into problems with hosting service – 2

ashish — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:56:23 +0000

In the last post, I mentioned as to how I was running into problems with my hosting service regarding some of my blogs having performance issues, and hence being shut down by Hostmonster as causing unacceptable risks to their hosting servers. Since these were standard WordPress Blogs, I was flummoxed as to what to do. Plus, Hostmonster support could send me some traces of the calls that were causing performance problems, and they did so, but I recognized that they would not be able to offer me comprehensive advice that could provide me solutions. I was actually in a bit of panic for some time. However, soon, rationality prevailed, and I decided to do some research as to what could be the reason for these performance issues, and use the good old Google search engine to find possible solutions.
First, the traces provided by the support staff pointed to one specific blog, and more specifically to something to do with the Comments table. I read a lot on the net as to what could be done to improve the performance, and got a lot of leads, some of which I will publish in subsequent posts. This post is geared towards 2 steps that I took that helped the problem to a large degree, and because of which, I did not see the problem again.
So what were the actions that I took ? First of all, I got in touch with Hostmonster support and convinced them to enable my access so that I could make some changes to my account. They were pretty cooperative in this process, and gave me access. Next steps:
1. I used to leave my WordPress blogs with older versions running, and not upgrade very often. However, reading of many WordPress optimization techniques convinced me that frequent updates is the way to go, since a newer version contains fixes that typically includes fixes for performance issues.
2. Next step was to make sure that the Akismet spam table is emptied often. I used to leave spam unattended, not emptying the spam table often. One of my blogs (the problem blog) would generate upwards of 500 spam comments per day, and at one time, I would have upto 20,000 spam comments in the table. I used to depend on the time dependent deletion of spam comments, but no longer. Now I delete the spam comments every few days, never leaving many of them in the spam comments table.

Next post will carry some additional optimization techniques.