Imagine renting a big-ass car, with pretty much unlimited mileage. But when you get in the engine turns out to be too weak to actually move you forward. That’s how this feels. This site too has been hosted with Hosting Zoom for a while now, as are some of my other sites. Recently however, I’ve been getting 500 errors (internal server error). So was a friend of mine, and she eventually got HZ’s support department to fess up. WP is exceeding their memory limit for PHP scripts.

“…your hosting plan does not provide you with sufficient resources to allow WordPress to perform perfectly. Don’t get me wrong, it’s capable of running it - but not to an extent that you’re able to serve multiple user’s with.”

What you have to know is that she had set up a fresh new WP blog for testing purposes only, and wasn’t serving any users at all. Nevertheless it took the sole user only a few clicks to have the blog come to a grinding halt, especially if those clicks were of the ’submit’ kind.

What makes this extra painful is the fact that Hosting Zoom actually provides a one-click install script for WordPress. Why would they do that if you can’t actually run the single most popular ‘publishing platform’ on their shared hosting accounts? What good are 20 GB of storage and 400 GB of transfer if you can’t even host a small personal weblog on it?

If Hosting Zoom doesn’t revise it’s PHP memory resource strategy, I think it’s time to look for another host. So far I’ve been hosted by two large, US-based companies, and both have been a dissappointment. Perhaps I should see if a small local firm will provide a better service…

I had to prepare this post in a text editor btw, my blog was ‘404′ (page not found)…