Apologies if you tried to access this site in the last few days only to be told it’s suspended – I was informed by my web host that it was consuming excessive resources. This came as quite a surprise to me as it’s not a particularly high traffic site, nor have I been aware of any problems with it in the past.
Culprit plugins
In any case, I take my host’s word for it that it was causing undue load on the server, so I set about lightening it up a bit. I very much doubt anything in the WordPress core would be causing the problem, so the first thing I did was scan through my list of plugins. That, along with a bit of research on Google, suggested a couple of possible culprits: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, Global Translator, and Broken Link Checker. Although some have reported problems with YARPP in the past, later versions have been significantly rewritten to address these problems, so I’m inclined to think it’s not the cause here.
On the other hand, I’ve personally noticed fairly intensive processing associated with the other two mentioned above, so I immediately deactivated them. In addition, I deleted almost 30 megabytes of cached page translations since these will no longer be used, and added some redirects to my .htaccess file to redirect search traffic and any bookmarks of the translated pages back to the original English versions:
RedirectMatch 301 /pt/(.*)$ http://www.hippowebsolutions.com/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /zh-CN/(.*)$ http://www.hippowebsolutions.com/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /nl/(.*)$ http://www.hippowebsolutions.com/$1
etc.
I’m no expert on rewriting URLs, but I think that’ll do the trick. So, apologies if you’ve come to this site hoping to be able to read it in your own language, but I’ll only be publishing in English from now on.
WP Super Cache plugin
Finally, I did what everyone else does in these circumstances – I installed a caching plugin. This reduces a site’s server load by creating static html versions of pages as they are requested, which are then served the next time anyone hits the page. This means none of the php scripts or database calls are executed the second time around, so the server has to do a lot less work per pageview. It also has the benefit that cached pages are served quicker, and thus provides a better user experience.
Hopefully the combination of the above will resolve the problem to my host’s satisfaction and you’ll be able to read more of my incredible content next time you visit; otherwise I guess I’ve been talking rubbish, but you won’t be able to read it anyway!
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