Wordpress Changes - Caching Obligatory
We've been offering Wordpress via an automated installer for quite some time and it's proven to be very popular.
Unfortunately Wordpress' use of SQL is far from optimal and this can easily lead to a popular blog or site causing serious issues on our servers (or anyone elses for that matter!).
We don't like enforcing certain policies on our users, but we're not left with much choice.
Due to the recent issues regarding busy WordPress websites affecting the performance of shared hosting servers, we are contacting all of our customers that are using WordPress and asking them to please look into enabling caching.
I just wish the Wordpress developers would listen to reason and enable saner caching by default.
There are two possible solutions:
- use a blogging / CMS solution that is a bit "saner" in terms of SQL and / or caching content (You'll notice that this blog has always been running on MT for this very reason!)
- install one of the available Wordpress plugins that will provide caching
There are currently two caching plugins available that we know of:
What the caching does is take the load away from the MySQL / PHP processing so that the web server (Apache) only has to serve static content, which it does very well!
If you do not enable WP Cache (or similar) there is far greater chance that if your WordPress site experiences a period of high visitors or similiar, then it could cause issues on the server.
As per our Acceptable-Usage Policy, we might have to suspend any site that causes issues like this. Putting it simply - if you're not being a considerate neighbour we might have to shut you down until you behave.
Setting up caching should only take a couple of minutes and if you have any issues or need assistance our support forum is available, as is our helpdesk
EDIT: Gary, from our technical support team, has put together a short document to help people install and configure WP Cache. You can get it from here