The “scary error message” was back this morning. And unfortunately this time there was actually a problem. Turns out my blog has been using more than its share of server resources (in my host’s opinion anyway…). Not bandwidth so much, but what they call “load”, mostly processor power if I understand right. WordPress is known for being kinda greedy, so I guess it’s not a huge shock, but it caught me off guard.
Anyways, I’ve made a few changes to try and reduce load.
- Reduced posts per page from ten to five. I don’t particularly like this, but from what I’ve read it can make a significant difference. Typically I do four posts per day when I can manage it, so normally that’ll still be 24 hours worth of posts on the front page.
- Enabled “hotlink” protection. I don’t know if anyone was doing that, but it was an easy change so why not? If you were doing that and want to continue, let me know and I should be able to add an exception if it sounds reasonable. And be sure to let me know if this breaks anything unexpected.
- Some backend changes to caching and whatnot. The possible downside is the posts might not appear as quickly. I have a suspicion that the way the cache was set up was the biggest culprit, so this really had to be done.
- Some mysterious WordPress tweaks I barely understand. Hope I didn’t break anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Installed Akismet Anti-Spam. This is a very popular plug-in, so hopefully it works well. But let me know if you encounter any problems with it.
Hope that takes care of it. If not, I may need to upgrade to a more expensive hosting plan. Wouldn’t be the end of the world (or the blog), I can afford it, but obviously it’s something prefer to avoid.
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