I can see the point-of-view of the Hostgator staff regarding $10/month plans being only suitable for recreational blogs, but I still think most of these situations can be solved with some optimisation.

The problem is that dynamic sites require a lot of CPU and database activity to run in their default un-cached mode. For example you said you had 10 Wordpress blogs getting 20-30 visitors a minute. That might not be a huge load for the Apache server to handle, but in Wordpress, each visit to a page results in anywhere from 10-50 MYSQL database queries depending on the theme and plugins you are using. That would mean your account could be dealing with something like 1000 database requests per minute. That is a lot.

The best and simplest solution to this is installing the WP-Cache plugin. This saves each page as a static page for a fixed period of time and/or until something on the page is changed. The default cache time is 1 hour, which means each page on your blog will be generated only once in an hour rather than many times a minute. This leads to a huge saving in CPU cyles and database queries. If you have a site which doesn’t get a lot of changes in the form of comments, you can even set the cache period for a longer time to further reduce CPU usage.

If Hostgator is willing to give you a chance to reduce your usage, I would definitely set up WP-Cache on all your blogs and see if the reduction is sufficiet for you to continue using your current account. If not, then you can always move on to bigger hosting plans. Before you move on to dedicated hosting, it might be worth it to first try out a VPS (Virtual Private Server) account. It gives you many of the benefits of dedicated servers at a much reduced cost.

Hope this helps, and do drop by and let me know how your problem is finally solved. This kind of discussion is increasingly useful to a lot of people, and I am interested in knowing how things turn out.

Best of luck and hope to see more of you on this site.

CPU usage on my account has exceeded the % limit, and I think it’s time for me to move into dedicated hosting.

Support staff at Hostgator seems to suggest that the $10/month plans are only suitable for a few blogs of recreational nature.

For Wordpress, the WP-Cache plugin really is the simplest and most comprehensive way to reduce server load, so I’m sure it will work in for you as well. You can even tweak the effect further by changing the settings for the plugin in the admin area. If for example, you don’t update your blog several times a day and you aren’t getting many comments, you could set the “Expire time” setting to more than an hour (3600 seconds). But generally speaking the defaults should aready have a drastic effect in reducing your processor load.

Best of luck with the hosting issues and hope to see you around here often.