Regarding the site load, verify that your pages are indeed being cached. Caching alone should dramatically decrease the load on the server. And be sure to adjust your cache settings to find the optimal cache length. (I just visited your site and it doesn’t appear that WP Super Cache is enabled.) Additionally, you should also compress your HTML files. (Currently, only your CSS and JS files are compressed.) Finally, make sure that your shared hosting package CAN handle your website. It may be the case that your plan has not given you sufficient resources. And if that is the case, then no matter what you do, you will continue to run into the high load issue until you upgrade your hosting.

Good luck!

At the moment, I’ve installed Wp Widget Cache to @ least make the widgets load faster. With this widget and a htaccess hack to force browser caching of my site’s elements, I’ve been able to maintain some level of speed in the loading time of my blog.

Talking about hosting, I guess I need to switch to hostgator. The current one (hostmonster) has started showing problems when traffic surge happens though it’s a rare case.

@Nihar: Wow, 500 to 600 visitors at a time! Well, I see that you are using super cache… It could also be your host, and how many resources they can afford to give you at a time based on the other users on the server. I just checked them out, and… clearly their ‘unlimited’ isn’t truly that.

Irrespective of what optimizations we do, In order to handle a traffic surge, blog needs to be hosted on dedicated host.

Wei Liang

@Dennis: Yes, HostGator is a pretty descent host. It does take effort to get suspended.

The problem with most shared hosting is that they are typically oversold. So you really have very limited resources to use, as the company restricts your usage to make sure that other sites maintain their uptime..

@Kim: Wow, CPU issues from plugins? They must not have been well coded. Or perhaps your host gives you very limited resources.

But price usually is a main factor in choosing hosting. After all, a good shared hosting plan can be acquired at less than $8/month. So, why pay $600 – $300 for VPS or dedicated?

@Ajith: Where is that application that you wrote? Is it out there somewhere?

You know, I can’t imagine optimizing a website for a 14.4K dial-up connection… It’d definitely be a very simple site. No images, no external media, limited JS, all CSS, and no whitespace… Hmmm. And those were the days of bulky tables…

I am very glad that internet connection speeds have increased.

As for WP Super Cache, it is a great plugin. I totally recommend it.

I have the habit of being very stingy while naming javascript variables, HTML code spaces, using redundant HTML properties etc. In fact, in my very first web project back in late 90s we had developed a script that removes all carriage returns and unwanted spaces from HTML and compress it well using a custom algorithm and explode contents using Javascript at the client side. Those were the times when most ppl had 14.4K dial up and the pages used to appear in a jiffy. Would like to do something similar with WP

Nice post and nice thought!

Blog posts usually gain massive amount of exposure “out of the blue” and your hosting package should be such that does not suspend you on accidental abuse of server/memory limitations.

Good post Shirley.