Linux

Most hosting companies have introduced 2+ plans. The price of the hosting depends on the hardware and software the company is offering the customer. A plan that offers a low amount of RAM or a single core processor will be less expensive as compared to a plan that provides heaps of system memory and CPU. No matter what plan you use, you must always keep an eye on the server CPU usage. If you don’t do so, a user process may use up to 90 - 100% CPU and other applications/system processes won’t be able to execute their tasks. ...

I started my online career with a site hosted on Godaddy. I switched to A Small Orange from Godaddy after finding its plans cheap. After a major DNS incident, I quit ASO and bought shared hosting plan from Hostgator. HG shared plans are great for growing sites. The traffic to my site grew and I had launched a few more sites. To make sure that HG doesn’t ban my sites by high server resource usage, I bought unmanaged Hostgator VPS plan. The VPS had 512 MB RAM. Everything was going great. When I was holidaying at my native place, my sites were down for 8 hours. To find the reason for this, I logged into the server to go through PHP, Nginx, MySQL log, and system log files. The system log file had several “MYSQL server has gone away” entries. This problem occurs when the system doesn’t have enough free memory for MySQL. ...

Since two weeks, my website was frequently crashing because the MySQL server stopped abruptly at random times of the day. This issue started when I was on a holiday. My site was down for several hours. I configured crontab to start MySQL server when the service had stopped. This didn’t help. I enabled query cache to reduce the load on the server. I use NGINX Fast CGI cache, APCu, and OpCache for my sites. Thus, I didn’t felt the need to install a caching plugin for my WordPress blog. ...