What happens when your site exceeds shared hosting CPU resource limit
By Aywren on June 1st, 2009Posted In: Blog
Your website is on a shared host. You’re running an awesome site with bells and whistles PHP scripts. And suddenly… BOOM. For one reason or another, you hit a major traffic spike. Or maybe one of your scripts go haywire and start eating up the server resources. Maybe you got hit by spammers or a mega bot wave.
Whatever caused it, you have gone over your CPU resource limit… and chances are, you didn’t even know about it until your host sent you that dreaded email. So now what?
Process 1- Moved to a Temporary Server
This has happened to me twice while hosting on Lunarpages, and usually focuses on issues with Wayrift itself. Seeing that Wayrift has such a huge archive, if one bit of it starts dragging, there are over 1,000 pages on the site that start dragging. So it’s a terrible effect.
How your host responds differs between hosts. The first time Wayrift caused the CPU ruckus, it was before I knew about cashe plug-ins for WordPresss that could have saved me a lot of tears. Lunarpages pulled my whole site and transferred it over to a temporary delinquent server. Then they sent me an email to let me know what was going on and that I had to bring my usage back down into an acceptable range before they’d let me go back to my old server.
The problem with that was many fold. First, I didn’t know what script was causing the issue — they didn’t give me any information (this was back in 2007). I couldn’t see how much in the way of resources my scripts were using. And I had no idea how much was too much because they never specified what an acceptable level of usage was in the email.
Not to mention that the temporary server was sluggish (I assume that they just dumped everyone on there to prevent mainstay servers from being bogged down). So this made working on the site frustrating and slow. My site was also slow and sluggish due to this load… and the nameservers were having a fit. So half of the visitors were seeing the old version of the site and half were seeing the new. Half the time I couldn’t access the temporary server to work on things…
I didn’t know what script to fix… and my site wasn’t resolving until I did fix it. I ended up pulling Wayrift off of the WordPress format and re-HTMLing the whole site out of fear. I shut down every little inch of PHP on my site except for the forums. I lost two blogs and various other PHP built sites to that. And only then did they allow me back on to the real server.
Process 2- Still Blindly Attempting to Fix the Script
My second experience going over the CPU limit with Lunarpages (March, 2009) played out differently. Instead of pulling my whole site and transferring it, somehow they could track the exact script that was causing issues and they CHMODed it to be unreachable, thus shutting down all of Wayrift. Then they emailed me to tell me which scripts were using too many resources and that I needed to fix it before it was allowed to run again.
Again, I didn’t know until my second or third email with support what their limit actually was (you’re not allowed to use more than 1% total of the CPU resources in a 24 hour period). I also couldn’t monitor my own CPU usage to test things as I made changes — I had to wait for them to monitor me for a day and then tell me if my changes had made a difference.
Needless to say, I got pretty frustrated with this. It wasn’t resolved for a week, no matter what I did to lighten the load. I brought usage down significantly (I think it was 1.3% one day) but it wasn’t good enough. When things didn’t resolve, support began to goad me about upgrading my account to this hugely expensive private server. And I told them straight up… no way.
That’s when I started shopping around for a new host, paying special attention to CPU usage restrictions for each one.
Process 3- Finding a New Host
I ended up choosing Hostgator as my new home. So far, I haven’t had any issues except for the very rare occasions that one of my scripts hangs up on me. But the coolest thing is, Hostgator allows you to monitor your own CPU and RAM usage right on your control panel. You can also see all the scripts that your site is running and check if something is hanging up — if so, you can shut that script down. Instead of running over their limit, if your site starts eating up resources, Hostgator will direct that script to a 500 Internal Server Error. Yeah, that can be frustrating. But I’d prefer an error to going through all that I did with Lunarpage.
With Hostgator, I feel like I have constant feedback and reassurance about what resources my site is using now. And that’s a very good thing.
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