As you know from my earlier trouble’s this week my blog suffered some serious downtime due to some runaway php process on my system, I don’t know if it was related to a traffic spike that then shut down the site, which ironically caused my traffic to be 20% of what I usually receive in a day. In the meantime I am relatively sure I need Private Hosting, and I have been looking at various providers online. As it turns out, there aren’t nearly as many VPS hosting providers as shared hosting providers, my current hosting provider DreamHost.com actually has one of the best VPS plans on the web.

You get to set your memory limits so that you don’t have runaway usage, some hosting providers will charge you for ram used, and if you have runaway processes, I read nightmares where you could end up with $100 per month fee’s due to just poor PHP plug-ins and not really related to traffic. This kind of scares me and makes me think Dreamhost’s method of letting you set a memory cap and terminating your processes when you reach that memory cap is perfectly valid. This means you find what you need, and you never have to worry about a runaway process costing you more money every month, you set your payment plan basically.

After I return from my Cabo vacation, I am considering upgrading my website to a VPS plan, and I may do this if I run into more trouble with my shared hosting solution, this way I can tune my memory a little better to accommodate for traffic spikes. I still wish Dreamhost gave phone number support for customers, though their customer support apologized for taking too long to respond to my email and assures me that it isn’t a very common occurrence. Truthfully they usually have responded in an hour or two in the past, and it wasn’t as long a wait.

In the meantime I don’t want to do anything crazy with my hosting provider or my blogs just before going on vacation for a week, I am too afraid my blog will be negatively impacted and offline while I am away, and I don’t want to spend my vacationing worrying.

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