I need to minimize [....] MySQL queries [....], or I end up using more than 25% of the server's CPU resources. When that happens, they suspend my account and give me a nice e-mail/phone call.
Ouch! Are you slammed by the
hosting hammer for
mere spikes, or can you rely on
some patience being applied? Odd, isn't it, that ads promoting shared-hosting don't ever seem to describe the provider's
penalties for exceeding its configured limits on your sharing? I know
I hadn't thought about
that before.
I'm on a shared hosting account, believe it or not.
That's actually
easier to believe, because that suggests to me that you're being bitten by a weakness of the
Apache model for shared hosting, where every site hosted runs as the same 'user', which likely deprives the operating system or server-subsystem of information needed to
gracefully throttle the performance of sites, by lowering the execution-priorities of those users or tasks exceeding CPU-usage limits. Or perhaps it's something completely different; I know far less about its & *nix internals than I'd like.
Or perhaps the hosting service-providers actually
plan not to provide graceful throttling of performance, because providing it would eliminate a substantial selling point for upgrading to a dedicated hosting account.
I'd like to keep it [....] on a shared hosting account.
I assume that you're thinking mostly of the
beeeg increase in monthly costs to indulge in
dedicated hosting. And elsewhere you
have mentioned children, who presumably need feeding at least occasionally.