Why do we limit the system resources an account may use?
In order to keep all servers stable and operational, every hosting company must have limits in place so no single website can use all or most of the available resources.
Obviously, we cannot allow a single website to cause problems for all other clients on the server.
For starters, make sure to choose a package with enough resources to accommodate your project. Shared and reseller plans are naturally more affordable but you can use less resources there. On the other end, SSD cloud servers guarantee much more resources off the bat and you can host more busy websites there.
What generates the resource usage? How is my website overloading?
Each visit to your site takes some of the CPU and memory (RAM) from the server. As an example, PHP & database-driven applications use more resources than HTML websites since the PHP code is executed on the server while HTML code is executed in the browser. The more visitors your pages get daily – the more CPU and RAM they will utilize. Things like cron jobs cron jobs use such resources as well. Practically every script that resides within your account needs server power to operate correctly.
How do I find out what is using most resources in my account?
In most cases, those details will be available in the notification message we send to inform you when your account is using more resources than we allow. Read that email carefully and use the information inside to take further action and optimize your account. Whenever needed – upgrade to a higher package that will suit your website requirements.
If such usage information is not available, you will need to check the Awstats for the account in question and see which scripts get the most visits and put the most server load.
You can monitor the resources your account uses via cPanel -> Advanced -> Resource usage. The stats are updated every 3 hours.
If you use one of our SPanel Managed VPS solutions, you can get an idea of how much load you’re putting on the server through the Admin Interface. On the homepage, you have graphs showing the overall health of the VPS.
Via the Resource Usage section, you can get detailed day-by-day stats on the load put by individual accounts and processes.
How do I optimize my account?
Please note that optimization is not always possible. Your account may already be optimized to the maximum but still get too many daily visits to handle with the available resources. In such cases, the only thing you can do is upgrade to a higher package with more processing power and operating memory.
On the other hand, if you find the culprits among your scripts, you need to take action to optimize them. If you don’t know how to do that, it’s best to contact your web developer and get professional help. If you are using free software such as Joomla or WordPress – you should check if any plugins you installed might be causing a load. You can then disable those modules to decrease your resource usage.
If you have set any cron jobs, very often they can also hog too much resources. Make sure to avoid running cron jobs every 1 or 5 minutes as this will generate tons of load to the server.
Of course, you can always contact the ScalaHosting Support and let our experienced staff help you with some pointers.
