My website was down for 7 hours last night

If you tried to visit my website a few hours ago, you got “Error Establishing a Database Connection”. I am sorry about that.

I started investigating the issue, and it seems it might be caused by insufficient memory on my server, which in turn causes the MySQL server to shut down. It should not be happening — my website is relatively small, and the traffic is not that big. One of the plugins may cause it.

For now, I changed the settings in the “WordPress Popular Posts” plugin:
— “Data Caching” is now set to “Enable Caching”,
— “Refresh cache every” is set to “1 Week”.

I admit I don’t know much about this, so I am trying to fix it by trial and error. If this doesn’t solve the issue and my website still is down sometimes, I will need to upgrade the server.