Yikes! I got suspended for "Too many MySQL queries "

[reuben]

Hoping for some advice regarding hosting, my site is currently down because my web host has suspended my account, claiming that my ZC store is killing the shared server I'm on.

Here's his ticket response:

"There were around 20 queries on the site yesterday, and, as this is on a shared server, that's too many.
I can't say what the queries were, or help in figuring out what caused the problem, that's going to have to be between you and the script dev team."

So my questions is, how many SQL queries are too many?

Also I'm considering moving to a dedicated server. Any thoughts on that?

Cheers
Reuben

[DrByte]

If your host can't handle "20 queries", then they've no business being a hosting provider. Run.

You don't need a "dedicated" server. You need a "competent host".

[RescoCCC]

Seriously? You got suspended for 20 queries in a day? Are these people running a DX4-100 with 8MB of fast page ram?

[joejoejoe]

Wow, 20 queries and you overloaded their system? I didn't know the Commodore-64 could be configured as a web server. You need to be running away from that host as fast as you can. And once you're established elsewhere you need to go to every web-hosting review site you can find and post the name of those idiots and make sure you include the ticket response in your review as a warning to others.

[reuben]

Thanks for the responses. I'm definitely going to look into a dedicated server with someone on the ZC recommended list.

Really the problem is that the admin isn't telling me anything at all, and now that the account is suspended I have no access to anything so I can't look into the problem myself either.

I recently installed data-digger's query cache add-on to reduce the SQL load but I found the cache folder blew out to gigabytes. Anyone else notice this?

[reuben]

You don't need a "dedicated" server. You need a "competent host".

I do agree about that. I'm with my fourth web host, and every one of them started out really great but then got worse over time. I figure that if I pay for a dedicated host I'm buying a guarantee that it won't get overloaded (since I'm the only one on it! lol)

[niccol]

All good advice.

But...

There is no way you could have got as far as you could if the hosting topped out at 20 queries. You just wouldn't ever have loaded a page. I am assuming that you have loaded a page in the past. So that figure just has to be wrong. ( Which obviously is another reason not to trust the hosting )

But it does perhaps suggest that there is a possibility that there is something amiss with your install of Zen. I only say a possibility because there are a lot of 'ifs' in the logic.

If the figure '20' is just wrong, then perhaps your installation is actually running a excessive amount of queries. Which could be due to all kinds of things like an add-on module that is messed up or some incorrect code or.... or..... or....

I am not saying that your proposed course of action is not the best. What I am saying is work with your new hosting right from the start to investigate the number of queries that normal operation of the site produces if you find there is no problem then all is good. If you do see that there is an issue then you can solve it rather than just postponing a headache. A good hosting company will help you with this and also Zen can display the number and time for queries at the bottom of each page, the setting for which is in admin>>configuration>>logging.