If anyone has any ideas as to how to reduce my various sites CPU resource usage on my web hosting server I’m all ears.

Yes, if you’ve been reading a number of blogs in a row you might have seen that I’ve posted about my problems on a few blogs – don’t get confused … it’s all me. I just need help and I’m looking for suggestions!

I’ve just spent the last few days updating all of our blogs software and plugins. Turning off unnecessary plugins or ones that I thought were using resources that I didn’t need them too.

I did add one plugin to all our sites though and it was WP-Cache. I’ve had a few people ask me if I’m using that yet and yes, I’ve been using it now for a few days.

Trouble is my web host still says my sites are over using the CPU resources.

Here’s whats going on in my hosting account. Maybe someone can see a way I can reduce CPU usage?

I’ve got a shared hosting plan on Lunar Pages. The plan is very similar to what one would get with BlueHost. There are 17 websites on my account – 10 domains, 17 sites.

On my main domain Feverishthoughts.com I’ve got 7 wordpress blogs running. I bought 6 new domains to move some of those blogs to and I’ve been working on those sites but as of right now they take up little space and likely use very little of the CPU resources. However my plan is to move the sites over when the new domains gain a bit of PR … then I’ll be back to 11 or 12 websites.

Two domains have websites on them. One is a very large and fairly busy HTML based website. Since it’s HTML based I don’t think it’s causing the problem. This domain also has a subdomain running a blog on it.

The other website is running on Joomla. I had an old version of Joomla running the site until two days ago. Now that application has been updated to the latest version and I’ve removed some components and modules that might have been causing problems.

I’m actually hoping that it was the Joomla site that was causing the trouble – and hoping that by upgrading the site and getting ride of a few faulty components that I’ve solved the problem. I’ll probably find out later today when I hear from my web host about my CPU resource usage over the last day or so. Oh caching is activated on the Joomla site as well and has always been so if it’s working properly it should help.

So again … all the blogging software has been updated. Plugins such as google sitemap have been updated, and the Joomla CMS has been updated. Plus I’m using WP-cache on the WordPress blogs.

I can’t think of anything else that I can try to do to lessen CPU usage.

The sites are fairly busy but not that busy! How many page views and unique visitors a month does it take to make you move to a Virtual private server or a dedicated server?

Out of the 11 active sites only 3 are extremely busy. The rest get traffic but only 100 to 150 visitors a day at the most.

In total – all the sites – active and not yet very active domains got a total of 255,641 visitors and 722,038 page views last month. I’m sure the sites will be up to a million page views per month by August or so, especially when the new domains get a bit more active.

I’m not saying that 3/4 of a million page views a month is a small amount but really … is that enough to have to move off shared hosting?

Any ideas? I’ve got to resolve this problem ASAP as it’s driving me nuts and keeping me from doing real work on my sites.