Let me tell you a story... I've had to move to a new host...

The problem began a week ago when the comments post page on WordPress suddenly started using high CPU, leading to my former host contacting me with the order to "fix it", or my account would be suspended.  As a software developer by trade, I thought, "no problem", and it was then that I discovered the ugly truth: The host provided no means to determine the CPU usage of my account.

Admittedly, I was on a shared hosting service, but how was I supposed to fix the problem without a way to monitor the CPU usage?

Surely it's not too much to ask for a simple script to send me a periodic email of the output of top so I can see if changes I make are having an effect? Well, yes, that is apparently too much to ask. Updates were few and far between, a total of 3 responses in over a week. The end result was that the CPU usage problem miraculously fixed itself after about 8 days, once I had removed every Wordpress plugin and started deleting chunks of the Wordpress code.

I suspect that this was a server glitch for several reasons, but my former host refused to investigate:

• The MySQL server had been restarted shortly after the php processes started consuming high CPU
• I only had 10 comments posted per day that would have called the page
• I hadn't made any changes to the site in several weeks prior to the problem
• No change I made had any apparent effect yet the problem went away on it's own

What caused it? Unfortunately, I'll never know, but I wasted a lot of time and effort trying to guess. My former host did give me a good bit of advice thought. I was told that if I wanted enough information to fix the problem, then I was going to have to pay for a VPS accouint. And that's just what I did... at a new host...

Goodbye Wordpress

Sometime before the mysterious CPU demon struck, I began to work on a page devoted to explaining how to use HTML5, but I found that Wordpress simply wasn't up to the challenge. I tried a few different Wiki engine and finally settled on TikiWiki, but that gave me a new problem. The two just didn't look integrated, and it was going to take quite a bit of work to fix that.

Since I'm moving to a new host, I thought I'd switch to Joomla, which provides a more flexible platform for what I want to do, though it's not the perfect, as blogging aspect is lacking. It can however be bent into shape, so that's what I'm going to do.

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against Wordpress. It may not have the most efficient design, but it is a great piece of blogging software, if blogging is all you want to do.