Blogging Fool

One of the first mistakes I made when I started building my own “self-hosted” WordPress blogs was what any kid with a shiny new nickel might – I ran around the plugins directory and gorged myself on every wicked new app out there, hoping to build the Ultimate Star Destroyer of all Blogs with my massive arsenal of killer addons.

This was good for a while, and I am glad I had the opportunity to test out different combinations, but one day I woke up to a text message that one of my key sites had the most terrifying message known to any site admin:

“This Account Has Been Suspended.  Please contact us immediately.”

Huh?  Did I do something wrong?  It’s not like I was spamming anyone or uploading porn – so what the heck?


A call to my host provider quickly revealed that my account had been bogging down the shared server I was on and someone at the company had flagged it.  I had fifteen days to correct the problem before my account (and all my sites, emails, configurations, everything) would be deleted.  Sure, I had a backup from three days prior but I had done a lot of work in those three days.  Even worse – I couldn’t even log in to the backend of my WordPress accounts because everything was SHUT DOWN.

I pleaded and begged and proclaimed my innocence and how I was bringing love and joy to the Gnosis-starved readers out there, burrowing in their blankets as the evil winter snows pelted their creaking homes across the Eastern seaboard.

The tech support guy couldn’t stand hearing my racking sobs any longer so after putting me on hold for a good twenty seven minutes (probably to eat his lunch) he had me back up and ready to rock.  But I HAD to fix it and fast.  Regardless of my belief that I was innocent, I really was screwing someone else over on that shared server because, quite frankly, something I had done WAS sucking up tons of bandwidth and putting way too much strain on the MySQL databases.

OK, too late for the whole “long story short” cliche, but here is the point:

Eventually, your blogs are going to grow. You will add tags, categories, titles and Neat-O plugins that search and cross-reference all of those elements to display stuff back to your loyal viewers, keep them on your site, and lower your bounce rate.  But every time someone comes to your page and clicks on something, your site is making a call back to your database to yank out the information it needs.  If you don’t optimize this stuff somewhere along the way you are begging for trouble.

Tweet This Post Plurk This Post