What are resources in hosting?
In the shared hosting environment, resources refers to CPU, physical memory, entry processes and number of processes. All these come into play when your site is online and being accessed. As visitors access your site, your hosting account utilizes this resources to display your website to the visitors.
Resources are allocated per account and not per domain. This means, if you have more than one domain hosted in an account (like standard and unlimited hosting ), then all your domains share the same resources allocated for the cPanel account.
What is resource over usage?
Sometimes you may see on your website a message about resource limit being reached. When you see this, it means your account is reaching the maximum limits of the allocated resources. When your account reaches this limits, it also causes your domain to load slowly and may eventuall load Error 508: Resource Limit Reached . Other error messages that may appear when your site resources are reached include:
– Error 500
– Error 503
However, even when resource limit is reached, you’ll still be able to login to cpanel using http:SERVER_IP/cpanel so you can fix the issue.
How to check your accounts limits.
To check the limits, login to cPanel and navigate to the Statistics section, normally on the right side. Limits and usage as at the moment you are logging in are displayed there. See image below.
For more details on how your resource usage has been over a period of time, you can check the Resource Usage icon in the cPanel under Metrics tab. Then click Details
When you click Details, you will get graphs and tabulated data showing your resource usage statistics and how many times you have reached a particular limit of a resource.
What causes your account to reach limits and how can you resolve it?
There are varying reasons why different accounts occasionally hit the limits. These include:
- Bad PHP scripts This is the major cause of resource overuse. PHP scripts that have not been properly coded will exhaust resources in your account. This is popular with some WordPress themes and plugins. If you notice that as soon as you install a plugin/theme, then your resource usage starts spiking, you need to first uninstall it and check again if the site is still behaving in the same way. If it stops the behavior, then the culprit was the plugin/theme that was just uninstalled. The solution is then to use an alternative plugin/theme or if available, try an updated version of the same plugin/theme. Some plugins known to be resource intensive include Page builders like Elementor and caching plugins like wp-super-cache
- Running too many resource intensive cron jobs If you place cron jobs that are too frequent and running scripts that require too much resource, then you are likely to hit the limits. Run crons only at necessary intervals.
- High website traffic. Sites are meant to grow. If you are running a blog, after one year, you expect more people to be visiting your blog than when you started. As people visit your site, your account utilizes resources allocated to serve the website to the visitors. This means, if the visits are too many, then resource usage is also high. Some sites even outgrow shared hosting and need VPS hosting where resources are more and dedicated to one website. There are several ways you can view the traffic to your website. You can then get in touch with our support team for options available for you if your site has outgrown your current hosting plan. Our team will be able to advice.
- Search engine crawling your website. Search engines crawl your website. If this occurs too frequently, it affects your site performance. You should add Crawl-delay on your robot.txt file, say of 30seconds or higher. Use the code below in your robot.txt to add a 30 seconds delay.
User-agent: * <br>Crawl-delay: 30
- Too many websites in the same hosting account. If you run too many active websites, either as Addon domains(as with Unlimited and Avanced hosting) or subdomains, then this may cause resource limit to be reached frequently. Each of the websites in the same hosting account shares the resources allocated for that account. Thus having so many actively visited sites hosted on the same account impacts your resource usage.
- A hacked account. If your account is hacked, it will have abnormal usage of resources. Ensure you have strong passwords, keep your website components up-to-date and avoid cracked themes and plugins from online as these may allow access to your account.
- Hotlinks to your domains When other websites are able to load images and videos directly on your site, then they are using your websites resources and bandwidth to serve visitors that are not really visiting your site. When such access is done too frequently, then your accounts resource usage will be too high serving visitors on another site This is called hot linking. You should not allow other websites to hot link to your account. You can prevent this by accessing the cPanel and navigating to Security section. Click Hotlink Protection icon and enable the protection.
