Regular readers will know that I launched a bit of a investigative review of Dreamhost webhosting after my WordPress blogs ended up being offline a few times in a just a month. The answers I got from Dreamhost tech support were not very satisfying, considering that every admin who looks into my problems gives me a different answer. I don’t know if they aren’t actually looking, or if they don’t know what they are doing, but either way, I plan to launch a major online effort very soon, and up and down websites is not something I can tolerate.
Update: For those of you following along, I have moved one of my blogs to HostGator, and I have setup two others over there as well. So far, so good. Of course, none of my sites have been down since then on Dreamhost either, so no conclusions yet.
Today, I stumbled across this post about how much memory WordPress uses now. Apparently, a "regular" WordPress blog installation now uses 32 MB of RAM. The most disconcerting part of the post is where he says that 32 MB is more than most shared hosting providers allow. That is big news, if true. All of these web hosting companies out there selling their shared hosting solutions as good enough for a handful of WordPress blogs when, in fact, they may not be truly capable of running even a single WordPress blog at full strength.
I haven’t had a chance to look into this any further, but it might explain my issues at Dreamhost. I was hosting 6 WordPress blogs on my Dreamhost shared hosting account. None of them gets much in the way of traffic and they aren’t exactly high-end JavaScript loaded power websites. Check out my make money from website writing blog for an example. They are mostly just text and pictures with a couple of plug-ins to make things run smoother. But, if each one is using 32 MB of RAM, that adds up to 192 MB of memory.
The weird part is that I can’t even find how much memory someone gets when running on the shared Dreamhost hosting option. I haven’t searched really hard yet, but I shouldn’t really have to should I? I mean if the memory limitation is going to be what restricts my ability to host websites with Dreamhost shouldn’t that be a big front-and-center number that gets publicized right up front?
In all fairness, I don’t see that number widely publicized on other hosts either.
Maybe this is the dirty little secret of the whole webhosting industry.
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