Excessive Resource Usage

Steps to take when your account is flagged for excessive resource usage

If you see a warning or a suspension of your hosting account that states your account has been flagged for excessive resource usage, then you should consider the steps needed to reduce your resource usage.  We offer some suggestions on ways to reduce your resource usage below.

Aussie Wide Websites is a shared hosting platform using a VPS base, so there may be cases where it may not be possible to decrease your resource usage to acceptable levels. Web sites that develop or require large databases or are controlled by software running on the server will typically require more resources in order to function properly. Naturally, as traffic increases, resource usage increases. This is why higher-traffic server-interactive sites tend to outgrow a shared platform more easily than static HTML sites.  You can also say, if your website is a huge success and very popular with high levels of traffic, then it will also have outgrown a shared platform.  If your site is generally too resource-intensive for a shared system, you will need to speak with our Systems team in order to determine your options.

While we offer programming assistance at a chargeable fee to assist you, we do strive to offer positive recommendations that help you determine your best course of action. The below items are a very good starting point in your quest to locate reasons for your Bandwidth or Resources excess usage.

Enabling Caching

It is important to utilise caching where you can, especially for cases where the server has to compile every PHP page and process every MySQL query. If your site uses PHP or MySQL, caching can reduce your resource usage and improve the performance of your website load times. Caching stores PHP pages as static HTML files, so the next time the page is loaded, the HTML page is loaded instead. If you are using a Content Management System such as Joomla, WordPress or Drupal, you likely have a caching system in place or can download a third party plugin to help with caching.  There are many other caching solutions, but Enable Caching is an obvious one.

Optimizing MySQL

Like any large collection of data, growing database often need to be re-indexed to help speed up data retrieval. Properly maintained SQL databases make it easier for the server to get the data. In order to manage your database, you simply need to login to the cPanel.  The MySQL databases and phpMyAdmin options can be used to manage 'optimise' or 'repair' the database. 

Enabling Hotlink Protection

Hotlinking is a term that describes when another site directly links to images on your site.  This means that when someone clicks on an image that you have added to your website server, your server pays the penalty to serve that image out to the third-party website which should NOT have access to your files.  This is known as "bandwidth stealing."   You can prevent this with hotlink protection which is easily enabled in your cPanel. Be sure to include your addon/parked/sub-domains in the 'allow' list so that all your sites function properly.

Using a Robots.txt File

One of the most common causes of an abrupt rise in a web site's traffic is actually caused by the common search engine. Most of this traffic is typically unnecessary so reducing it can save a lot of resources on the server. You don't want to eliminate search engines altogether, but you should restrict them from being able to access directories that do not contain content that needs to be indexed by the search engine. You can use the ROBOTS.TXT file to block unfamiliar bots and spiders that are frequenting your web site. You can identify the spiders and bots crawling your site by looking at your AWstats, and restrict their activity using a robots.txt file. Also, they may be crawling your website too heavily and may need to be rate limited to keep your website from eating up server resources. You can use Webmaster Tools to set a crawl delay to help in this case. 
 
Preventing IMAP Activity

Finally, another common cause of excessive usage for Web Hosting accounts is the excessive use of resources through large IMAP email accounts.  Excessive resource usage can easily occur when too many users on the account have large IMAP email accounts.  The server may often use a large portion of CPU activity simply synchronizing large email accounts.  The best way to prevent this is to utilise offline folders and simple prevention limits on email accounts so as not to tax the network.

While you may run into possible cases where your options to reduce excessive resource usage on a shared server are minimal, taking these simple steps to reduce the load may go a long way to resolve these problems.  Proper management of these issues all guarantee that your users experience systems that provide information in an optimised yet organised manner. 

If your problems persist, then make sure to take to time so speak with the team here at Aussie Wide Websites as they will have the best perspective for your options to rectify any excessive Bandwidth usage.