Comments on: Wordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.com

By: Curtis M. Humphrey

Curtis M. Humphrey — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:13:40 +0000

That’s for the update! Do you know if they are still silently failing when the memory is overrun? I only originally discover the issue by slowing turning off plug-ins and by added php echo memory used command until I saw that once I was below a certain limit that the site would complete display. If they would report what they really had available then php might display the error and we know quicker what the issue really is.

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:05:30 +0000

I was experiencing some of the problems you’re talking about with 1&1, on a WP site with about 3000 visitors a day (@4 pageviews per visit). 1&1 seems to have doubled their limit now to 40M, sometime in the last couple of months. Still not perfect, and they still by default report more available, but people who manually set WP or PHP to 20M will see improved performance if they switch that manual setting to 40M now.

By: Curtis M. Humphrey

Curtis M. Humphrey — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:41:49 +0000

Probably true and as long as your number of plug-ins in minimal you are just fine. I had several plug-ins and that adds to the memory requirements. I’m glad you shared your experience!

By: whall

whall — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:22:04 +0000

I’ve been using 1and1 for >7 years and I also use wordpress a LOT. I host at least a dozen wordpress sites as well as drupal, joomla and a couple other commerce-based packages. In general I’ve been happy but have had my share of issues.

One of these issues is the PHP memory limit. I do use php.ini to set memory to 20m and when I started doing that, it fixed many issues on most of my blogs. I can confirm that without that setting, many of my blog admin pages crash with 500 error or other timeouts. So it’s at least doing something, and I make it the default on all my sites — a php.ini in root and a copy of it in wp-admin. Every time I do a WP upgrade, I make sure I put this file in both places.

By: Curtis M. Humphrey

Curtis M. Humphrey — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:56:12 +0000

So Piter is a spam bot, lol… figures. Dreamhost might be good, it just depends on what you value. I was intrigued by MediaTemple’s architecture for scalability both on the package I purchased and for the future if I need even more performance. One of the issues I disliked a lot with 1 and 1 was that every time I changed the package had to do all the transfer work. If you go dream-host and it resolves your issues let me know.

By: Matt Katz

Matt Katz — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:07:22 +0000

Hi Curtis, sorry to tell you this but Piter is a spam bot. You might want to delete his post.
I’m also experiencing the horror that is working with 1 and 1. I”m digging dreamhost more.

By: ZDogg

ZDogg — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:19:18 +0000

Same problem here with 1and1 and wordpress. I WISH I had really done more research on hosts before choosing 1and1, even before this phpMemory issue, this host is below average.

By: Craig

Craig — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:18:04 +0000

Any news on the 1and1.com issue? Just installed the latest version 2.83 and everything works fine but the home page. sidebar and footer won’t display.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:11:26 +0000

I have the same problem trying to use Typo3 with the Web Empowered Church configuration. Right out of the box, the website itself crashes with “Out of memory”.

I hope you find a good alternate provider. For now, I’m going to use a machine of my own for development work until I’m ready to publish.