Starting August 1, 2020 Reclaim Hosting launched Reclaim Cloud which allows for more flexibility with applications such as Node.JS, Python, and Ruby. After the launch Reclaim is decommissioning installation of CloudLinux across all new servers. Feel free to check out Reclaim Cloud as an alternative!
Note: The Resource Usage icon discussed in this article is part of the legacy CloudLinux tool and may not be included on all shared hosting servers.
Overview
The nature of shared hosting is that you are one of many customers on a single server, which makes for a very economical price point to host your files on the web. You don’t have to pay the steep costs to run a dedicated server, rather the costs are shared amongst a larger group of people. However, in any shared hosting environment, the risk for one bad actor to consume a large amount of resources exists which could negatively affect performance for the other 99% of users on the system. Because of this Reclaim Hosting employs the use of a piece of software called CloudLinux which has resource limitations on a per-account basis to prevent a single account from using too much CPU, memory, or other resources.
Resource Limitations for Shared Hosting Accounts
The peek resource limitations for our shared hosting account are as follows:
Personal Plans: 1GB of RAM, 100% of 1 CPU, 20 open processes
Professional Plans: 2GB of RAM, 100% of 1 CPU, 40 open processes
Organizational Plans: 2GB of RAM, 100% of 1 CPU, 50 open processes
In the vast majority of cases you find these limitations much higher than the standard needs for a user, but there are some cases in which you might find yourself hitting these limits, which manifest themselves in a public error on the site that looks like this:
Resource Limit Is Reached: The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.
Interpreting ‘Resource Limit Exceeded’ Errors
To best troubleshoot which limits are being reached and why, there is a dedicated section of cPanel labeled Resource Usage:
The first thing you will notice in this area is whether your site has been limited at any point in the past 24 hours. If not you will simply get a message that there have been no incidents, however you can still view details on your usage:
If there has been errors related to resource limitations you’ll see the number of times over the last 24 hours that the errors occurred as well as links to Details and Snapshots which we’ll cover next:
Resource Usage > Details
The Details section provides line graphs over a period of time to see which resources are being used and by how much, as well as identifying which resource is causing a fault or error on the site. In essence it answers the what of which resource is causing a problem and you can pinpoint to specific times by adjusting the timeframe
^ In this particular example we can see that over the course of 45 minutes the site reach a maximum number of open processes (Entry Processes) and began to issue errors. This could be a sign of a high amount of traffic, in which case the best course of action is to implement higher levels of caching to keep up with visitors. It could also be a sign of an issue preventing the site from loading in a timely manner, so processes may be getting queued too quickly filling out the resource allotment.
Resource Usage > Snapshots
To better understand the issue we can look at the Snapshots option in CPU and Concurrent Connection Usage for more details about what scripts were running at the time of the fault:
Snapshots are insights taken at the time a fault has occurred and can help pinpoint if a particular script is consuming the resources or a database query or something else. In this particular case we see many open Apache (httpd) processes pointing to a traffic concern which matches up with the Entry Process limitation. Looking back at the Details screen we see that the user upgraded from a basic student plan to an Organizational plan which raised the limit from 25 to 50 and no further errors have presented themselves. While this is a workable fix, an alternative would have been to look into options for caching but in some cases a high level of traffic will simply need a higher resource allocation in which upgrading makes sense. You can read more about the difference in plans and alternative options at Shared Hosting Features – Reclaim Hosting.
If you are experiencing the Resource Limit Is Reached and you’re not sure how to diagnose it don’t hesitate to reach out to Reclaim Hosting Support for assistance!
Need more Resources?
Shared Hosting plans on Reclaim Hosting are restricted in their use of resources to ensure that all customers have a good experience on the server you’re on. We recognize that with low prices comes a very different set of expectations, and so we offer upgrades for people that anticipate they will need more resources or find themselves with a very popular site. You can compare all plans at Shared Hosting Features – Reclaim Hosting which outlines the resources of each plan.
We also have a Professional Services addon for $50/month that amongst other features includes migration to a low-tenant optimized server. This is highly recommended if you have already tried the low-cost shared hosting options and still find that your site is hitting the limits regularly and you have attempted the troubleshooting techniques outlined in this article.
To ensure a great experience for all customers Reclaim Hosting cannot and will not raise limits on shared hosting accounts beyond the plan that is paid for.