Do you think using the Montezuma theme would cause my website to go down? My web host (Namecheap) thinks it might be the problem. I'm not very technical and I'm just trying to see if this is indeed the case.

I have not heard of Montezuma causing problems like that.

Originally Posted by onwithsean

Do you think using the Montezuma theme would cause my website to go down?

MZ, out of the box, is fully compliant with all coding standards, as is WP. However, not all plugins are. Have you disabled all plugins?

What error message are you getting, if any? If you change the theme to 2010, 2011, or 2012, do you still have problems?

If you did any custom php and made errors, that could cause a problem, too. If you have php error messages turned off, as many servers do, you might just get nothing.

Originally Posted by onwithsean

My web host (Namecheap) thinks it might be the problem.

Cheap hosts aren't famous for great tech service, and often point fingers elsewhere.

"Have you disabled all plugins?"

I haven't tried that. I have 7 active plugins (Akismet, Aviary Editor, Compfight, Dynamic Widgets, Exclude Pages from Navigation, Google Analytics for WordPress, Hello Dolly, Quick Flickr Widget).

"What error message are you getting, if any?"

My website just goes down. I get alerted by uptimerobot.com. Where do I go to look for error messages?

"If you change the theme to 2010, 2011, or 2012, do you still have problems?"

I haven't tried that. I'm using MZ version 1.1.3. Is that the 2012 version?

I haven't done any custom PHP.

Originally Posted by onwithsean

"Have you disabled all plugins?"

I haven't tried that. I have 7 active plugins (Akismet, Aviary Editor, Compfight, Dynamic Widgets, Exclude Pages from Navigation, Google Analytics for WordPress, Hello Dolly, Quick Flickr Widget).

Try that and see what you get.

"What error message are you getting, if any?"

My website just goes down. I get alerted by uptimerobot.com. Where do I go to look for error messages?

Enter your website address in a browser and see what, if anything, displays on the page.

"If you change the theme to 2010, 2011, or 2012, do you still have problems?"

I haven't tried that. I'm using MZ version 1.1.3. Is that the 2012 version?

Twenty eleven is a basic theme that ships with WP. It used to come with twenty ten, but it may now come with twenty twelve.

1) what is the url of your site?
2) when you say it 'goes down' what do you mean?
3) what is the alert that uptimerobot.com sends you?
4) what reason did yout host give for thinking it was montezuma?

I tried to load my website yesterday and got this error:

"408 Request Time-out
Your browser didn't send a complete request in time."

I refreshed the page and it was ok.

1) what is the url of your site?

seanlaurence.com

2) when you say it 'goes down' what do you mean?

It's not that I try to visit my website and get some error. Friends have told me that it's down sometimes. And I get an email from uptimerobot.com saying it's down.

3) what is the alert that uptimerobot.com sends you?

"Alert Details: No Response From The Website (The server that the website is hosted on can be down)"

It emails me when it's back up. The most recent time it was down was for 17 minutes.

4) what reason did yout host give for thinking it was montezuma?

Here's what Namecheap said:

"Each downtime reflects to your account being limited by LVE due to hitting memory limits.

It is possible to check resource usage overview via 'Resource Usage' feature in cPanel. E.g. at the very moment it shows that your account was limited in past 24 hours.

Checking resource usage while opening http://seanlaurence.com/ in browser shows CPU and memory usage peaks. They are temporary, but they are hitting the limits.

It might be a good idea to perform the following steps in order to optimize the uptime:
1) Do a Full cPanel backup prior to modifying anything.
2) Enable Cloudflare in cPanel.
3) Disable plugins that are not used at the moment. It is possible that some widgets are badly optimized.
4) Check for various cache plugins - e.g. w3 total cache, db cache, widgets cache.
5) Try changing wordpress theme.

If any of these steps won't help then it might be a good idea to upgrade to the business hosting package, which will provide twice more RAM to use."

Ok, so here is your problem. Your host only allows you to use x amount of memory. If your site uses more than x, they shut the site down for a period of time.

You have several options,
1) buy their 'pro' package
2) swap to a host that gives better value
3) eliminate all plugins and use a theme that uses less memory with no customizations (this is not a guarentee)

remember, for the most part, you get what you pay for. If you are paying $1.99 or $3.45/month expect limitations.

Namecheap said I could add CloudFlare for free and that should solve the problem. Do you think they're right?

Having never used it, who knows but what harm would there be trying it?

Ok, I'm going to give it a shot. Thank you juggledad, jerryc & lmilesw for your input and help!