As many of you have noticed, the site is periodically (as in, multiple times a day!) becoming unavailable with an “account suspended” message. So here’s the status:

A while back, apparently, my host put a tighter CPU limit on me because the site was getting so popular it was affecting other sites on the same server. You would not be alone in thinking this an odd way to handle the situation: “Hmm, this site is pushing at the limits of its allotment. So let’s decrease it.” They of course neglected to tell me that they did this. In fact, they neglected to even note it in my account, so all subsequent support folks have been baffled. Kudos to support guy Jamie for working to figure out the problem. Unfortunately, it’s still not fixed.

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The feed appears to be fixed (thanks, Mox!).

However, I’m still maxing out the CPU regularly even with WP-Cache — just writing a comment can trigger this, and I don’t know why. If you see “Account suspended” when you visit here, that’s why.

Next steps are going to involve turning off some of the dynamic stuff on the sidebars…

I just spent half an hour on the phone with Bluehost, my web hosting service. In the past, I’ve given them fits with expensive SQL queries and the like, but we were always able to resolve the problem.

This time, however, the verdict was, “You may have outgrown our hosting service.” The random “account suspended” messages you see are triggered by things as innocuous as serving up the favicon. The issue is just too many hits in a short span of time — the site may have just grown too popular. As I glance at the sidebar and see 40+ people here on a Sunday afternoon, it’s hard to argue with them.

They do have a “high CPU” option for twice the price, but they also said “at this rate, it’s a temporary solution for you.” So they suggested that I might want to look into some form of dedicated hosting.

Ugh. Expensive. Advice? Host recommendations? If I go to dedicated hosting, I may actually be obliged to actually push the ads I have on here so they are worth something, which would be annoying.

After taking a thorough backup, I will be upgrading to WordPress 2.1 today, in hopes that this buys me a teeny bit of headroom.