Hosting Provider Says I’m Using too Many Resources

  • Resolved Dylan

    (@gotalifethanks)


    3 years, 11 months ago

    Keep getting these emails from the account manager with my hosting provider. They tell me I’m using too many resources. I’ve noticed that my site has been slow as mud for the past several weeks. Something is definitely wrong, but I’m not sure what, and I’m NOT a technical person. The whole reason I use WordPress and Elementor is because they’re reputed to be user-friendly and easy to configure. This guy spouting some b.s. tech-speak at me without explaining in English how to resolve the issue isn’t helping. I’m considering abandoning everything. The real problem is: I’m unemployed, broke, credit card maxed, and feeling ticked off about what was supposed to be a therapeutic venture to reach out to the mental health community. Here is the text of the last 2 emails I’ve gotten from the hosting provider:

    The issue is not related to the traffic itself or the bandwidth.
    We don’t limit bandwidth or traffic, as it doesn’t necessarily make the website heavy.
    We only limit server objective criteria such as Entry Points, CPU usage, I/O usage, which highly impact the server.

    The account is overreaching the allowable quota of resources.
    Mostly due to Entry Points and CPU usage.
    It means that the account is running more simultaneous processes than allowed by your hosting plan. and these processes are demanding more processing power than the amount allocated to your account.
    When it happens, your website goes down and it creates cPanel faults.
    It has been happening constantly with your account.

    Our internal team has stated that, since you weren’t able to optimize the website (websites), by reducing the amount of resources it demands, you should probably upgrade to a higher hosting plan, which will provide you with a bigger chunk of resources, resolving the issue.

    I would personally recommend the WordPress Business Pro plan, which provides twice as much Entry Points, CPU, I/O, nProc, Database and Email storage capacity, which would resolve the issue already. Plus, it provides several additional features for free. Such as website Backup, premium SSL card, Jetpack Premium, faster servers and many others.

    This plan would cost $466.20 plus tax for an entire 3-years period.

    This would not only resolve the issue, but also provide several features that will improve performance and security of your project.

    Please let me know if you approve this upgrade and I’ll have my team working on it right away and System Admin immediately revoking the suspension.

    There has been a certain urgency to close this case, since shared hosting involves more than one account per server, and therefore when an account overreaches the quota of resources, others might lack resources.

    The account might be suspended in accordance with the Terms of Service, in case it keeps overreaching the limits.

    As your account manager, I would like to provide you good options for you to deal with it. Please let me know your thoughts on this proposal and I’ll notify my admin that we are already working on a resolution for this case.

    As a customer of [ ] we value you and your businesses in high esteem and work to provide the best service and user experience.

    And his next email which was in response in my threatening to switch providers:

    Thanks for your reply.

    The service you have is both performant and secured.
    You have cPanel access, CDN (which also increases security), SSL for encryption and several other features.
    You have several tools that provides security. Such as CDN and SSL.
    But you can use it or not.
    Security for a hosting environment is always a joint venture between the hosting provider and the owner of the hosted project.

    [ ] is one of the most secure and reliable hosting providers in the world.
    We provide free SSL for all of our shared hosting plans, for as many websites and pages as necessary, something that very little providers do, as they can profit from selling SSL certificates to customers, something that every single website needs.

    What I’ve explained is that WordPress Busienss Pro has features that improve both performance and security.
    Which by no means would be a statement that the service you currently have is not secure.
    On the contrary, the service is very secure.

    But Protection Power Pro, Jetpack Premium, SiteLock, CloudFlare and other feature can improve your security.

    Well, in order to resolve the issue, you need to lower the number of Entry Points and the CPU usage.

    I would recommend looking for WordPress cron jobs, excessive bot crawling, WordPress related URLs on your most accessed URLs, irrelevant IPs on your TOP IPs. All these things might lower the Entry Points, the simultaneous executions you have in your pages.

    Often, the plugins and scripts might generate several executions at the same time, making the account be likely to overreach the Entry Points limitation.

    These simultaneous executions might be causing these outages in CPU, processing power.

    If you can lower these, you might resolve the issue.

    But this is not guaranteed to lower the usage back to under the quota, but it would be a good start.

    Can someone please give it to me in plainspeak whether it would be easy to fix the issues he is talking about, or should I just get the hell out of dodge?

    Thanks.

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Jan Dembowski.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 19 total)

  • It is hard not to consider that the host is simply trying to upsell you.

    From a technical perspective – addressing these two issues can be valid :
    “WordPress cron jobs, excessive bot crawling”

    Disabling cron in WP is very easy – here is a good doc to follow :
    https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/disable-wp-cron/#disable-wp-cron

    bot crawling is more effort on your part bc you need to block IPs individually :
    https://www.malcare.com/blog/how-to-block-ip-addresses-in-wordpress/

    However, the host should be responsible for this if this is the tactic they expect to be used.

    Don’t adjust anything with your website yet.

    Can you please share a link to the site so we can provide better and specific technical support?

    I assume it is this ?
    https://www.cira.ca/ca-domains/whois?domain=wholenessjourney.ca

    You are running through CloudFlare, so I can’t see your host.
    And can you put the site back online ?

    Thread Starter Dylan

    (@gotalifethanks)

    Hi, I had already switched themes, and now it is nowhere near to what it should be, in order to address his issues. Also, further update, I went into cPanel site metrics, and discovered that there have been no faults or issues since Dec 2. He emailed me yesterday, though, and said that my site was still having issues. Therefore, he is lying. If you need me to, I can remove the Maintenance landing page – thank you for looking, and please let me know if you still want me to remove it.

    Here is the actual link to my site:

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Jan Dembowski.

    Yes.
    You would definitely need to remove the Maintenance page.

    I can take a look to troubleshoot and provide recommendations today around 14:00 EST if you wanted to remove it around that time.

    Thread Starter Dylan

    (@gotalifethanks)

    Thanks, I appreciate it. I will remove it at about 1:30 p.m. EST. Take care.

    Thread Starter Dylan

    (@gotalifethanks)

    It is up again. Please disregard the poor appearance. I am customizing a starter template that I got thru Astra themes pro.

    Thanks.

    @gotalifethanks

    There is nothing on this sight that is significant enough to be running process that they host indicates. Have you ask them to view the access logs in order for you to determine their claim on your own ?

    Here are my comments :
    1. Unless you are using specific functionality within the Jetpack plugin, dump Jetpack from your site. It’s a bit of a sh*t show imo. And I’m not alone :
    https://wpjohnny.com/get-rid-of-jetpack-plugin/

    2. Why are you running through CloudFlare ? It is simply from a DDoS or security perspective, from a balanced load perspective, (location based load) ? Otherwise, I would recommending not using it.

    3. Your schema prints out fine :
    https://search.google.com/test/rich-results?id=hrPRTI7ZGv2MddzAaHXXkg
    however, the errors come from your page size.

    4. Why are your images being delivered from this resource :
    https://i1.wp.com/wholenessjourney.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/slogan.png
    Is i1.wp.com your host or something ?

    5. You’re using 2 different analytics for your site ?
    There is scripting in place for both WP Stats, as well as Google Analytics.
    Pick one.
    And unless you use the plugin to look at your stats, just grab the simple embed code from Google, and dump both plugins. Too much overhead.

    6. There is a monstrous amount of CSS and JS being loaded in the page before any content is found at all. I guess that just may be a downside of Astra + Elementor.

    7. Disable your cron here :
    https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/disable-wp-cron/#disable-wp-cron
    or use this :
    https://en-ca.www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-crontrol/

    As I said, I’m concerned your host is not being straight-forward.
    From the front-end, there is nothing outstanding on the site that would indicate that server resources are being used because of your site. If the server / site is been bombarded with search bots, that is a hosting issue, not a website owner issue.

    Also :

    View post on imgur.com

    Excellent :

    View post on imgur.com

    View post on imgur.com

    Thread Starter Dylan

    (@gotalifethanks)

    Hi, thanks for taking a detailed look at it.

    1. I removed Jetpack. I was only using 1 feature from it, anyway. I’ll look for a better replacement plugin.

    2. I’m running through Cloudflare because someone told me it speeds up your website, and I didn’t know any better.

    3. I’m using a plugin called WP-Optimize to compress my images. I’ve noticed that it uses something called “Smushit” to actually do the compressing. I had no idea it was doing anything else. WP-Optimize also does a lot of other stuff that I thought was useful, such as clear your cache, etc.

    4. What is WP Stats? I don’t have a plugin with that name. I thought I was only using MonsterInsights, which is linked with my Google Analytics account. I don’t know how to get rid of WP Stats, or even what it is doing there.

    5. I was told Astra is one of the most lightweight themes – I even did a lot of research on it, and read reviews. Elementor I have heard can be bulky, but I don’t know of another way to make site-building user-friendly, since I am only a fledgling web programmer with very little technical knowledge.

    6. I’m reviewing the link you posted about the cron job – thanks!

    7. Can you tell me what search bots are? I’ve never heard of them before.

    8. I currently have a plugin installed called MailPoet 3, that handles mailing lists, which I intend to start growing once my site is working again. However, MailPoet just sent out a notice that they are now owned by Automattic, and judging by that JetPack article, this could be a bad thing. The problem is, I hate Mailchimp, and I also can’t afford a paid plugin right now; MailPoet is free up to a certain point. What are your thoughts on this plugin?

    Dylan

    Thread Starter Dylan

    (@gotalifethanks)

    I removed some code from the header section that seemed to point to Google Analytics; I assume that is why both MonsterInsights and Google Analytics were both being referenced by my site. ???

    Learning as I go. Just glad for people around me who know more than I do, such as yourself.

    Thread Starter Dylan

    (@gotalifethanks)

    Hi Corrina,

    I’m hoping I can elicit your further help – I got myself into a pickle when I removed Cloudflare from my site. I simply went into my Cloudflare account and removed my site completely. In trying to access my site, I now get this message:

    This site can’t provide a secure connectionwholenessjourney.ca uses an unsupported protocol.
    ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

    I am guessing that there is something wrong in cPanel with my DNS records. I have no idea how to begin. I don’t know what’s missing, or what is there that shouldn’t be there, and what needs to be changed. Are there any resources I can consult that can walk a newbie through the process? I am afraid to contact my host provider because they haven’t always been up-front about things. But maybe that would be the best route.

    Sincerely,

    Dylan

    Hmmm, you should have just Paused it if you were going to remove CloudFlare at all.
    You can add it back, or you can update your DNS to point directly to your host.

    > someone told me it speeds up your website

    No, not really.
    It’s certainly not the primary funciton of CloudFlare.
    It’s not a *bad* thing to run it on your site, but I would say it’s unecessary. Was your site running slow and you needed a way to speed it up ?

    > I’m using a plugin called WP-Optimize to compress my images.
    > I’ve noticed that it uses something called “Smushit” to actually do the compressing.

    I dunno, again, was your site running slow and you needed these tools to speed things up ? Simply bc there are better ways. tbh, the Smushit tool creates a lot more matinenance than any sort of value it provides.

    > I was told Astra is one of the most lightweight themes, Elementor

    Astra + Elementor is a good setup. Very typical. No issues here at all.

    > Can you tell me what search bots are? I’ve never heard of them before.

    Robot scripts that index your site such as Google, or scan your site looking for secuirty vulnerabilties.
    There are 000s of other indexing scripts that hit your site and create a huge amount of load. Again, this is not your issue.

    > MailPoet just sent out a notice that they are now owned by Automattic, and judging by that JetPack article, this could > be a bad thing.
    > I hate Mailchimp

    hahaha. Don’t let Automattic hear you say this. Jk.
    I dunno tbh. I use MailChimp exclusively bc that is where my experience is, and they have a very strong API for business integration that I am used to.

    Again …………. back to the original problem :

    There is nothing in here that would indicate that your site is using extensive resources. Your site is very typcial.
    Ask them to see the logs, to see if you can isolate the issue.
    And lastely, there are approx. 12 trillion other hosts to choose from, and you can move your site.

    Thread Starter Dylan

    (@gotalifethanks)

    Thanks, Corrina. I’m currently reviewing different articles on that WPJohnny site you referenced in one of your earlier posts. He has some great suggestions on there.

    Can you please elaborate on what is a good plugin or method of compressing your images? I intend to use a lot of high-quality images eventually, and have determined that it would be better to compress them.

    Thanks,

    Dylan

    @gotalifethanks

    The right way to compress your images, and retain quality is to make sure the image has been adjusted in dimension *before* you upload.
    Edit the image so it is the right size, and compress the image using an online compressor, i.e. : https://tinyjpg.com/

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 19 total)
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