@Andy Christian - Most would think that, including me. But it's not going to happen. The VIP teams hands are full already of very expensive clients paying for their time. It doesn't make much sense to put WPTavern in their way.

@Eric Mesa - Considering how well this website is operating now, I'm not going to take the chance. Perhaps after a few days of speedy responsiveness, I'll reinstall it just to see what happens.

@Lester Chan - I have no idea why PostViews would generate so much load. All it does it move a ticker up each time the site is loaded. Maybe if a few hundred people were visiting the site it would be an issue? By the way, the WP Stats plugin they are talking about is different from the one you created. They thought I was using an analytical type of plugin when it was really your Top 10 stats plugin which probably doesn't affect performance much at all.

@Len - WPEngine explained on Twitter why W3 Total cache and all other caching plugins were blacklisted. It's because they have their own caching implementation and those plugins end up interfering with their solution.

@_ck_ - I have about 1,271 posts. Thank you for explaining why YARPP has the reputation that it does. It's only now that I've had so much trouble. I know in the database, I saw a table that showed about 4,000 records for YARPP Related Cache and I wonder if between that and W3TC that the queries to update the YARPP cache was just as much as part of the problem. I guess once I hit a certain point, the effects of running YARPP become visible to the naked eye.

As far as hosting, that will be taken care of in the near future. I don't have to worry about hosting costs anymore. One thing I'm not ever going to get into is managing my own server or VPS.

Off topic, how have you been CK? What have you been up to since the bbPress days? Are you still messing around with code behind the scenes? The last I read, you became so busy that you had to give up updating all of your plugins.

@donnacha - Yes. I've actually thought about moving WPTavern to Drupal Gardens http://www.acquia.com/products-services/drupal-gardens I think the site would be a beautiful smelling blooming rose in their garden :)

@Rob - Interesting. Since I performed the cleanup yesterday, I've noticed a substantial increase in speed and performance both on the front and back-end. When did you try accessing the site?