It turns out this is because of my htaccess file.

In my htaccess I had the following lines to stop anyone accessing my WordPress Admin if they were outside of my IP address:

<LIMIT GET>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow 100.8.8.8
</LIMIT>

This stops anyone assessing myWordPress admin unless they are logging in from my IP address. Apparently this is now updated and to do this you now use the following command:

<LIMIT GET>
Require IP 100.8.8.8
</LIMIT>

I changed this and no more server 500 error!

I’ve just typed this up in case anyone else has the same problem. My new htaccess file sitting in my wordpress/wp-admin folder looks like this:

AuthUserFile /dev/null
 AuthGroupFile /dev/null
 AuthName "Example Access Control"
 AuthType Basic
 Require ip 220.233.28.8 

http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/wp-clean-up

It has come to our attention that your site is using an excessive amount of MySQL resources on your Bluehost account.

So some looking into it, the wordpress commentmeta SQL table for http://macintoshhowto.com was 2.7 Gig. Yes 2.7 GB!!!!!

More looking, it’s a bug with Akismet spam filter cleanup.

These two queries fix it.

select count(*) from dbname_commentmeta where meta_key=’akismet_as_submitted’ or meta_key=’akismet_history’ or meta_key=’akismet_rechecking’ or meta_key=’akismet_result’ or meta_key=’akismet_user’ or meta_key=’akismet_user_result’;

delete from dbname_commentmeta where meta_key=’akismet_as_submitted’ or meta_key=’akismet_history’ or  meta_key=’akismet_rechecking’ or meta_key=’akismet_result’ or meta_key=’akismet_user’ or  meta_key=’akismet_user_result’;

Then you need to repair and optimise.

2. Edit functions.php of old site.

Add these two lines to the file, immediately after the initial “<?php” line.

update_option('siteurl','http://benidrive.com'); 
update_option('home','http://benidrive.com');

reload admin pages a few times. remove the 2 lines

3. Update URL’s in database tables.

On new site, replace all URL’s in database. Use ‘Better Search replace’ plugin on database with old url to new url (serialised that’s why you need this
plugin) on all tables

4. Redirect old site.

Done!

1. EXPORT all articles from 7.barracks.cl using wordpress admin back end.

2. IMPORT them all to wayneconnor.com using WordPress admin. This moved all the posts and comments across and put them in the right location. Very nice.

3. Put the following into my .htaccess file at 7.barracks.cl:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.wayneconnor.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Now any individual page at 7.barracks.cl (eg http://7.barracks.cl/holidays/our-new-caravan.html) appears at it’s new location. (wayneconnor.com/holidays/our-new-caravan.html).

I did this and look what happened to my traffic – it dropped from 6000 hits a day to 600!

The reason for this is that blocking wp-content via the htaccess returns a 403 error to googlebot and therefore google removes all your wordpress content from the google search results. It took me a while to work out what was causing the problem!

I’ve undone the wp-content protection and my site is back in google now.

Update: It’s fixed again! Took moat a week for Google to find it again though:

My http://macintoshhowto.com site is getting 150K visits a month, http://dubbo.org gets 20K visits monthly and http://mac-host.com/support gets 60K, plus I host http://dpc.org.au and http://wpcc.org.au and a few other sites on the same server!

Currently I’m using bluehost.com and it costs me 6.95 per month – pretty cheap and very reliable, it’s just struggling with so many hits.

I have been looking into an alternate server. I want a really good quality server with no downtime for my macintoshhowto.com site. After some research I came up with the following as my top two options:

http://www.layeredtech.com
I could get a VPS server here with 2 gig of ram, 20% CPU usage, 60 gig hard drive and cpanel access for about $115 per month. I think they are used by ma.tt and WordPress.com. Their technical support was very helpful and they seem very reliable. It would come all setup with c-panel ready to go.

http://www.rackspace.com/
I could get a cloud server for about $100 pm but I’d have to install all the server and-panel software on it from scratch. I could get a cloud site which would come installed but now we’re looking at about $150pm. cloud sites looks like the best option, it can deal with 2 million page views per month.

Media Temple and iWeb were my other options.

Note the huge jump from $7 a month at bluehost! It seems that when you go from shared hosting to VPS it’s a huge jump.

So I decided to go a different direction. I split my bluehost sites up and moved macintoshhowto.com to it’s own server.

Bluehost had a reseller option for $20 but the total bandwidth was limited to the same as one account. They also have a pro option for $20 but it has no more CPU power. So it seems like multiple accounts is best back for the dollar.

To do this I used websitemovers.com and they did a good job.

How to split a domain off your account:
1. setup new account with dummy domain name.
2. move files across (websitemovers did this)
3. change local hosts file so you can test new site ‘live’
4. manually unnasign domain name from origin c-panel
5. manually add the domain (parked) to new domain
6. ask bluehost to make new parked domain the primary one
7. wait 5 hours, but I only had to wait 3 and it was working.

Maybe I could have done it myself, but I’m happy to pay someone else as I don’t want this to take up any of my time.

If I want to do it again in the future I probably follow these instructions from media temple for the move across bit:
http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/1892/Migrate+to+a+%28dv%29+from+a+%28gs%29

Lower the TTL on the DNS. (not necessary??)
auto mysql backup to a folder like cpbackup/daily/domain/mysql/domain.sql and .create
maybe here search for old pathnames.
Then upload the SQL.
Backup from c-panel (to file like backup-mon-jan-etc zip file 140Mb – the file directory)
maybe unzip and check for pathnames in php files??????????
then upload the zip and unpack files
test
change DNS entries.
lower TTL again.

I’ve upgraded to a dedicated IP with the new blue host account.

So far NO CPU throttling at all!

Here’s a good little site to work out how many other people are sharing your IP address on a server:
http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/

This will backup your entire remote server to your local Macintosh computer.

rsync –recursive –verbose –archive –progress –stats –size-only –dry-run yourusername@yourservername.com:folder_to_backup ~/Sites/

TO do for real repeat the command with –dry-run removed!

Here’s how to make it so you don’t need to type in your password each time you rsync to the remote machine:

1. Open the terminal window and type ssh-keygen -t rsa
Follow the prompts and use the defaults for the filenames it gives you. Don’t enter in a password.
2. Go to the finder menu Go|Go to Folder and type in ~/.ssh
You should then have two new files id_rsa and id_rsa.pub.
3. Use your ftp program to copy id_rsa.pub into the .ssh directory in the home folder on your server machine, and rename it to authorized_keys.

If server IP address changed you need to delete entry from known_hosts file on local mac with this terminal ommand:

ssh-keygen -R hostname