I’ve gone through a nightmare in the last few days!

I got a message from my web host on Thursday evening stating that my sites/ domains were using too much of the web hosts resources on the server that they were on and that they had moved my sites to a non-production server until I could either figure out what was causing the drain on resources or until I decided to upgrade to a VPS hosting plan or a dedicated servers hosting plan.

Well, both of those options are more expensive and while I know my traffic has gone up recently and continues to rise I’m certain that it’s not high enough to warrant upgrading my hosting account just yet.

So I stayed up Thursday night and worked on my sites. Looking over all the stats to see if I could figure out which files were being used too often or if there were any files or folders in my domain directories that shouldn’t be there.

I didn’t find anything abnormal but I did deactivate a few plugins that I thought might use more of the servers resources than the others. That’s all I could think to do.

I’ve also upgraded the Google Sitemap plugin that I was using to the newest beta version as that one is said to go easier on CPU resources than the last stable version.

So today … well today is Canada Day. We had a friend over for the weekend so I left my sites alone briefly last night and earlier today. We’d been supposed to go out of town, but that wasn’t going to happen when there was the possibility of me losing my sites or of them going down. You see I was still waiting to hear back from my web host. I’d written to them twice since I got their message on Thursday evening and didn’t end up hearing from them until today! Grrrr.

Unfortunately the message that I got from them today was that my sites CPU usage had increased! Aaaah! It shouldn’t have increased! What the heck????

They also told me that they’d disabled the index.php file for this site because:

We have been forced to disable your script(index.php) located in
(/home/thewe22/public_html/feverishthoughts/index.php) as they appear to have
been exploited.

Well what does that mean? Was my site hacked? Did someone try to access my site with a script?

I have no idea, but the result was that Tricia’s Musings was down for the count.

I was advised to again search for any scripts of files in my directories that didn’t belong (didn’t find any) and to upgrade my software.

So I’ve upgraded Tricia’s Musings to the most recent version of WordPress. As I said earlier I also upgraded the Google Sitemap plugin. I’ve turned off Bad Behavior (now I’ll be hit with spam!) and I’ve installed WP-Cache.

I still have a number of plugins running. I’ve turned off a number of them, but I do still have several activated.

If CPU usage is still high I’ll turn off all but Akismet and see how that goes.

If you have any ideas for me as to what else I might be able to do to limit the CPU usage on my sites I’d love to hear it.