It seems like once every week, my site goes down with a "500 internal server error" for fifteen minutes.

Dreamhost contacted me the other day about some WP-plugin I was using that made my CPU usage too high or whatever, so I took it down, but the site still goes down every so often. I don't know if those problems are connected or what.

Does anyone else know? Is it something wrong with Dreamhost?

i wouldn't doubt if it was a problem on dreamhost's end. they were having some major network problems last week, and you might be having some left overs from that.

just out of curiosity, what was the plugin you were using?

wp-useronline

o.O

ehh...that wouldn't have anything at all to do with a 500 error. & now that i think about it, it's probably not because of the network, but more because of a DNS server going down. they were doing some work on that too, and said it was resolved. i'd say contact dreamhost, have them check your domain (it's probably ns2.dreamhost.com) and make them fix it.

also, have you tried wassup? it's like a real-time google analytics for wordpress.