Why do we limit the system resources an account may use?
In order to keep the servers stable and not going down, we must have limits in place so that one web site cannot use all or most of the resources of the server. If it uses too much the server will become overloaded and the performance will degrade, the server will start going down and all clients will experience downtime because a single web site is overloading. Obviosuly, we could not allow a single web site to cause problems for all web sites on the server. This is why such limits are required. Every good hosting company has such limits in place. They are set to protect clients from abusive accounts degrading the performance of the server. Each of our web hosting brands have different resource limits depending on the cost of the package. Budget reseller hosting plans are cheaper hence you can use less resources there while Power reseller plans allow more resources to be used and you can host more busy web sites there. The shared web hosting plans allow even more resources but they are not reseller plans.
What generates the resource usage? How is my web site overloading?
Each visit to your web sites uses from the CPU and memory (RAM) resources of the server. PHP & DB driven applications use more resources than html web sites since the PHP code is executed on the server while HTML code is executed in the browser and it doesn't cause significant load to the server. The more visitors your web site gets daily the more CPU and RAM resources it will use. Your cron jobs use such resources too. Every scripts which is started within your account uses system resources.
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 you to inform you that your account is using more resources than we allow. Read that e-mail carefully and use the information from there to take further actions to optimize your account in case it is possible or upgrade to a higher package which will suit your web site's requirements. If information for the scripts using most resources is not available, you will need to check the Awstats for the account in question and see which scripts get most visits and optimize them.
You can monitor the resources your account uses via cPanel -> Advanced -> Resource usage. The stats are updated every 3 hours. Please note you must be using the X3 skin to be able to see the resource usage stats.
How do I optimize my account?
Please note that not everytime an optimization is possible. Your account may be already optimized but the web site being hosted there is getting too many visits daily and it just needs more resources to run. In that case, the only thing you can do is upgrade the account to a higher package which will accomodate your web site's needs.
Once you find which script or scripts are using most resources you need to take actions to optimize them. If you don't know how to do that you need to contact your web site developer to do that for you. If you are using free software such as Joomla, WordPress you should check for any modules you installed there that might be overloading. You will need to disable those modules to decrease the resources your web site uses. There might be also cron jobs which are run very often and use too much resources. You should setup cron jobs to run once every 30 minutes or even an hour. You shouldn't add cron jobs to run every 1 or 5 minutes. That will surely generate lots of load on the box and we will notify you that your account is using too much system resources and you need to upgrade.
If you did everything mentioned above and your account is still using more resources than we allow then the only thing left is to upgrade to a higher plan.
Which plan should I upgrade to?
If you have a budget reseller account and your usage is up to 4% you can upgrade to a Power reseller accounts. Power plans allow up to 4% resources to be used. You can read about the resource limits for each of our plans at http://www.webhostingpeople.net/termsofservice.html
Upgrading to a VPS will allow you to use much more resources and you will also be able to sell your own reseller accounts. You will have full root access and full control over your VPS. All VPS servers are fully managed so there is nothing to worry about. If a VPS is too expensive for you then you can upgrade the account using more resources to a shared web hosting account. The shared plans are 100% anonymous so your clients will never understand about us.
