At first there were just occasional periods where the site was slow. Then, they became more frequent. Eventually, customers called me and were having trouble getting to the site. And frequent sales of some of my top sellers had dropped off.

I started trying to look for patterns and track. Was there to much load on the server? Was it my chat software? Was the database to big? Nothing was giving me answers until my host told me about my server-buddy. Apparently, he just recently joined me on the server. And, although he was not getting much traffic, he was doing LOTS of database queries. And, when I (or a customer) was trying to access the database server at the same time as he was running his site queries, my loading times went up 3 or 4 times. (I consider anything short of instantaneous unacceptable.)

After excessive Instant Messages to my host, he got the hint. He gave me access to a couple of additional features on the server AND he found a new home for “server-buddy”. Now, the server is again smoking and ready for your orders once again.