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What is high CPU usage / load

CPU represents the number of central processing units (CPUs) available to your account to process requests. This ranges from loading data into RAM and processing scripts, to delivering content to visitors and writing into databases. Essentially, your CPU underpins the rest your account’s resources. 

 

If the reason for high resource usage relates to CPU, you can refer to some of the most common causes thereof: 

 

High volumes of traffic 

This simply means that you received a lot of visitors to your website at a particular time which caused high CPU load. To see your traffic statistics, you can log into your control panel and select Awstats 

 

You can also check your “CPU and Concurrent Connection Usage” for more detailed information regarding when certain resources were high at a given time. 

 

Resource intensive addons 

Examples of this are themes or plugins for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc. There are a few popular plugins that are considered resource intensive so if it is necessary that you use one that is, then it would be best to upgrade your package. 

 

Outdated or poorly written code 

Since we only host your site, it would be best to have your web developer investigate the cause of the high load as it could be related to the code written by them. 

 

Hot linking 

An example of hot linking. Say I like the image on your website, and I want that image on my site. If I use the full URL of your image on my site, then the image is downloading from your site every time someone looks at my site. To prevent this, you may have to make some changes to your .htaccess file. Please consult your web developer regarding this. 

You could also try the following to reduce the load: 

  • Reduce your number of banners and ads from other sites.
  • Avoid using too many scripts, and do not force html to handle server-side code (like php and shtml).

 

You’ll receive three warnings regarding resource limits. Should you still exceed the limit by the third warning, your package will be automatically upgraded to the next plan to avoid any impact on your website. 

 

If you are a reseller, host a few websites or simply want better performance, our Business VPS solutions would truly benefit you as we do not monitor resource usage on these services. You can find our current solutionshere.

Updated on March 7, 2023

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