If you receive an email titled "Hosting account resources exceeded," it means that you exceeded the memory or connection limit (aka EP) set for your website plan.  The email will look something like this:


================================================================================
| Username |          Domain          | Name | CPU | IO |  Memory | EP | NPROC |
================================================================================
| myuser   | mydomainname.com         | ---  |  0  | 0  | 0 Bytes | 2  |   0   |
================================================================================


What does this mean? 


This notice is sent out only for excess memory use, excess demand on the CPU, too much disk activity (I/O) or for too many EPs -- that is visitors.  Memory and EP fault conditions will return an error to visitors of your website during the event.  (For a complete description of how resources are allocated and managed, read the KB article 'Resources?  What resources?'


Memory limit incursion is very rare.  Unless you have seriously malfunctioning code or, perhaps, a DDoS you won't reach your memory limit.


Much more common is the EP limit incursion.  The EP limit means you received too much traffic in a short amount of time.  There are four reasons for this extra traffic -- two are "good" and can be planned for -- and two are "bad" and may require some webmastering on your part.  Which one applies determines how you respond.


The good:

  • Your visitor count may be steadily increasing and one day just reaches the limit for your hosting plan.  This is the easiest to deal with because all you need to do is upgrade your hosting plan and your golden!
  • The Digg effect -- your marketing campaign, a mention on a popular blog, or another reason may cause a large number of visitors to descend on your website.  If you know in advance you will receive a traffic spike, we can help ensure your website is ready for all the visitors.  If you're not prepared, your container will ensure that your website does not crash the server by limiting the traffic during the spike.

The bad:
  • A misbehaving bot "attacks" your website.  This is quite common, unfortunately, but these types of attacks are generally of short duration.  You should investigate and consider a plan to defend against these attacks.  But if they are not too frequent and your website is otherwise secure, you may want to ignore these occasional irritations.  Or, you can upgrade your website to handle more traffic.
  • The worst case is a denial of service (DoS or DDoS) attack.  The containers that regular resources are not designed to absorb DoS attacks.  But they are an effective first line of defense.


What should you do?  


Log into your CPanel and examine your resource usage.  You can find it by clicking on the Resource Usage graph in the Logs (or Metrics) area.  On the resource usage page you can see what limit was exceeded and when.


If you see a trend of increasing resource usage, you have three choices:

  • You can upgrade your account which will give you a higher resource limit.
  • You can optimize your website so your pages are processed more efficiently.  Optimizing methods can include caching, using a CDN -- CloudFlare is particularly effective and can be activated in your CPanel -- or you can redesign the website.
  • Lastly, you can keep your current plan and accept occasionally hitting resource limits.
If you see a one time "spike" in a resource limit, you can investigate by downloading your raw access logs and examining the visitors for the period around the spike.  You will find an icon for your access logs near the resource limit icon.

As a webmaster with a self-managed website, you should get familiar with your access logs paying particular attention to the user agents, IPs and type of URLs your visitors are requesting.  You can block anti-social visitors through user agents or IPs.  

We're pretty good about keeping miscreants off of our servers, but if you see visitors that are obviously up to no good -- scanning URLs that do not exist on your website, for example, or very unusual looking URLs -- let us know through the Help Desk and we can investigate for possible additional action on our part.