Finally!

After more than 10 days of god-awful downtime, I’m finally back on my feet again. No it wasn’t laziness or sloth on my part this time. I wasn’t able to update this blog because of a little something called php memory. I’m sure one of you may have chanced on this blog when it was only showing a couple of sentences saying fatal error. It was in fact a fatal error. I couldn’t log-in to my wordpress dashboard and it’s all because of that frigging php memory thing. It’s a painful lesson in small print that every self-hosted blogger should know about, especially when one is using that absolutely fantastic Wordpress blogging platform.

Being a non-techie person like most bloggers, when I decided to go for a hosting plan, I only looked at two things(aside from the cost of course); storage capacity, and monthly bandwidth allocation. Who the heck cares about php memory right? Well apparently, php memory is way more important. You see, even cheap hosting offers a lot of storage and bandwidth to convince the newbie blogger. Php memory however, is one of those things that are usually left unsaid, but when you least expect it, this thing turns around and bites you in the butt.

According to the technical person I talked to, when I was getting all those fatal error messages from my blog, every hosting account they sell is only allocated a maximum of 10Mb’s worth of memory. Enough to make your eyes bulge right? But of course at this point you still don’t know what eats up that memory, so enough with the pretension. J/K. Well as explained very thoroughly to me, Wordpress is very php heavy. A lot of its themes and plugins are developed using this programming language. So for guys like me who likes to keep a mountain of themes stashed in my WP-themes folder, 10Mb gets consumed really, really fast. Couple that with at least 30 plugins (all written in php) installed, what we have is a recipe for disaster. The technician was even so bold as to tell me that I was actually consuming 3x that memory limit!

The lesson here is that we need to be really cognizant of these little things. I believe I can be forgiven for not knowing this beforehand and luckily on a good day this blog only earns around $0.01 from all the advertising I put in here. Just imagine if this were a really profitable blog with hundreds of dollars a day in earnings! The several days worth of downtime could have really cost me some serious dollar. Perhaps it’s also a wake up call for me not to be too trigger happy when I see new themes and plug-ins. Sure, having nice zings and dings for our blog is awesome, but it shouldn’t be a blog-breaker. It’s very important to do some housekeeping every once in a while just to ensure that there’s no unused php hogs just lying around.

Other than that, it’s happy blogging all around.