Site overloading server – being shut down

Hi All,

Our hosting (IXwebhosting) has shut down our site 3 times in the last week. They’ve made a bunch of suggestions as how to fix the overload- none of them worked, so I’m trying to figure out what else I can do.

http://www.fivedollartraveller.com is the site.

Here are a few stats about the problems:

Date CPU – min
Feb. 11, 2014 101.19
Feb. 10, 2014 57.44 (Site was shutdown for 13 hours between 10th and 11th)
Feb. 9, 2014 152.64
Feb. 8, 2014 140.07
2014-02-07 100.35
2014-02-06 104.71
2014-02-05 116.77
2014-02-04 113.60
2014-02-03 109.08
2014-02-02 0.05

bin/php-cgi | vitalize/fivedollartraveller.com/index.php (4994) cpu_min: 114.37, ram: 333252.29 MB, disk_read: 0.24 MB, disk_write: 0.25 MB.
bin/php-cgi | vitalize/fivedollartraveller.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php (945) cpu_min: 14.48, ram: 67282.38 MB, disk_read: 0.0 MB, disk_write: 47.26 MB.
bin/php-cgi | vitalize/fivedollartraveller.com/wp-cron.php (107) cpu_min: 6.42, ram: 7020.27 MB, disk_read: 2.83 MB, disk_write: 0.12 MB.

We get 300-400 visits per day, average of 3.2 pages per visit. – so about 1000 ish page views per day.

Number of requests from certain IPs:

9308 74.91.131.176 (This is the ip address of the actual site itself)

1629 36.37.132.59

979 80.2.41.141

825 66.249.76.4

690 59.152.189.49

656 36.37.132.122

532 50.242.171.251

418 180.182.142.230

414 66.249.73.4

412 220.239.250.177

402 66.249.80.7

382 62.224.54.78

312 203.81.71.95

266 58.168.112.87

231 36.37.132.92

– I checked out most of these. A few were blacklisted. Most were not. Some are Google bots. IXwebhosting told to manually block them ALL in htaccess. I’m not too happy about blocking google bots in htaccess as this might affect my google indexing.

I did block the ip of the website itself, as requested by the hosts. This had no effect on the amount of requests being made by that IP, presumably because blocking your own ip doesn’t make any sense??

——–

The problem is there was a massive jump in memory usage on the 2nd Feb. They didn’t contact me for over a week about this problem so I have no idea what changes I made that day, if it was something I did that changed it?

Fixes I’ve made since they shut me down.

1. I’ve replaced W3 total cahce with Super cache – because its simpler and I am not an expert. Some reviewers reckon W3 can cause problems on shared hosts. However, I hadn’t changed settings in W3 in weeks, so doubt that caused the sudden change.

2. I’ve changed the setting in XML-sitemap so that google bots don’t need to index as often – monthly for posts, instead of daily.

3. I’ve installed “Wp-better-security” and “Bad Behaviour” to try and reduce spambots etc. (Suggested by host)

4. I’ve set the robots.txt to stop bots crawling more than every 24 hours (Suggested by hosts)

5. I installed P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) to check if I had any rouge plugins… although Woocommerce and Yoast SEO are a little above other plugins, it doesn’t seem significant enough to cause the massive change. Both have been installed for weeks anyway with no issues.

Does anyone have any other suggestions for fixing this?

They always shut the site down in the middle of the night (my time) which is the middle of the day in the USA where a lot of our traffic comes from. Meaning, by the time I get up and deal with it I’ve lost half my traffic for the day already.

Thanks in advance.