WP Marketing

I got a phone call early in the morning around 4 AM. I could hear the answering machine running and machine voice from Hostgator leaving a message that my shared hosting account is blocked for access due to high CPU usage.

I woke up and checked my email account and found that I also received an email from Hostgator.

Hello,
I apologize, but I was forced to suspend the directory /home/…/public_html as multiple scripts inside were causing high loading issues on the server. Due to it affecting all of the other accounts on the system, we had to take immediate action for the health of the server.
Please be aware, we do not normally disable directories except in rare cases where multiple scripts are causing issues. We believe this is the only way to prevent a server crash and potential loss of data.

In general, introducing new indexes, cleaning databases, optimizing existing code, upgrading to the latest versions and adding some sort of caching mechanism, where the script does not need to generate a new page with every request, helps to lower the over load that a script will cause. Likely the original author or support group of the software that you are using will be able to help you to understand how to add something of this nature.

If you reply back to this with your IP address (http://www.hostgator.com/ip.shtml) we will be more than happy to go ahead enable HTTP access for you, so that you can safely work on the script without it causing further issues.
Please let us know how you would like to proceed.

I checked my domain names and all of my websites didn’t work. They were all blocked indeed. I was very upset and furious that Hostgator admin blocked without any warning before shutting down my websites. It’s like shutting down the business and you won’t have any sales at all until those websites are back on LIVE. I mean most of my sites are not doing well (in terms of Internet Marketing) these days but I was really upset and didn’t know what to do.

I tried to follow the procedures and got all the websites back on after 2 days. I had to work at night  and could not sleep enough since I go to work during the day time. Here is the general steps that I took. I hope this will help someone to resolve similar problems too.

1. First  calm down and read the email carefully in detail. Usually the main reason of high CPU usage is because of WordPress with lots of plug-ins but without any Cache plug-in. If you are receiving many visits, that will consume lots of CPU powers. 

2. They should send you the running process statistics output (ps command output) as the proof of the high CPU usage. Here is the one that I received

userid 25467 19.3 0.2 53528 31500 ? RN 03:42 0:00 | \_ /usr/bin/php /home/userid/public_html/site_androidtablet/index.php
userid 25651 38.0 0.2 54476 32332 ? SN 03:42 0:00 | \_ /usr/bin/php /home/userid/public_html/site_androidtablet/index.php
userid 25467 20.6 0.2 53528 31652 ? RN 03:42 0:00 | \_ /usr/bin/php /home/userid/public_html/site_androidtablet/index.php
userid 25651 42.0 0.2 54988 32844 ? RN 03:42 0:00 | \_ /usr/bin/php /home/userid/public_html/site_wpmarketing/index.php
userid 25651 50.0 0.2 54988 33104 ? RN 03:42 0:00 | \_ /usr/bin/php /home/userid/public_html/site_wpmarketing/index.php

First column is the userid, the second column is the process id, and the third column is the CPU usage %. I see they are really high ranging from 20 to 50. And the last column is the running script name. Of course , they were all WordPress scripts. Make a note of the websites since you would have to do some work on those sites. But just note that you will need to work all of your WordPress sites anyways . The system admin wants you to do so.

3. Now you will need to find out your desktop computer’s public IP address by visiting http://www.hostgator.com/ip.shtml and let the system admin know . So he will allow you to access to your websites and you can start working on it to speed up things.

You can just reply to the email with the IP address to update the ticket . If you want to expedite the process (of course you do) , you shouldn’t just wait. You can call them up or use live chat feature which is better.

When you are connected to one of their tech support , just mention about the ticket number and ask to escalate it to the system admin.  Once escalated,  the system admin will review your ticket right away. By the way, the tech support might want to verify your identity with the last four digit of your credit card number or the Paypal transaction number that was used to pay the hosting .

4. I was able to access right away (that was really fast like within 5 minutes), then I started to review my WordPress websites . Actually I already installed W3 total cache plugins for all of my sites, but indeed, strangely , I see that some of the websites are using high CPU powers . It took me almost a day to figure out what cause the problem. It was because (1) I didn’t setup W3 total cache properly and (2) javascript and css files were dynamically created. I will explain about this in detail in my next post.

For now, let me quickly show you how to monitor the CPU usage. I mean how would you know if a website is optimized or not ? You should be able to monitor CPU usage in real time right?

To do this, you need the SSH access to your account. Check here on how to get the SSH shell access. You need a SSH client too. PuTTY is the popular FREE SSH client. Once you logged into your account. Run below command at the prompt.

[userid@gator1234~]$ top

‘top’ command will show complete system information at a glance.  It shows various information about processes , CPU usage, and memory usage. Also it refreshes the screen every defined period which 3 seconds by default. There is a column named %CPU which is the data that the sys admin monitors. So your target is to reduce this information to minimal level.

But 3 seconds refresh time is just too long. If you visit your website and try to see the process, it may not show. So what you need to do is change the refresh rate by typing ‘d’ on the keyboard. Then it will ask for the new refresh rate. You should try 1 second or 0.5 is a good choice too.

Also you want to see the full command information since ‘top’ shows does not show the complete command line that you don’t know which website’s PHP script is running. You can enable full command line show by typing ‘c’ on the keyboard.

Now you are ready to do some monitoring. Visit your website while you are checking the top output. If the %CPU shows something like 50 and above, you should do some serious WordPress optimization. I will get back on what i did for the optimization on the next post.

5. Finally, I was able to implement W3 total cache plug-in and caught the CPU leaking bug in the WordPress theme. I was able to confirm that the CPU usage is down in great percentage and the page loading was really fast that the process was not even showing in the ‘top’ command output even with 0.5 refresh time. 

So I wrote another email back to the original ticket. I described what I did in detail and asked the system admin to enable my account. After I sent my email , I contacted the tech support using the live chat again and asked to escalate my ticket again, so the system admin can check it right away. After that I just went to sleep . I have done everything that I could do.

Next morning, I checked my email the first thing in the morning and Bravo! The admin accepted my adjustment and enabled all of my websites.

The whole process took me about 3 days with only few hours of sleep. I am happy because I learned many valuable lessons on how to optimize the WordPress and it is very important to do the optimization all the time especially you are expecting large volume of visitors. You wouldn’t want to miss them do you?