CPU Minutes
Shared hosting customers may receive an email from us if their account is using far more CPU minutes than the average account on the server. The email is our way of letting you know about conditions that impact the performance and stability of your account and the server that hosts it. By letting you know about these conditions early, we can work together to improve performance and stability of individual accounts before an issue is created for the entire server.
It may just be that the site is receiving that much traffic. In other words, the site is very popular, which could be good news! In that case, please contact our Sales team to learn about your upgrade options. However, it is also possible that the high CPU usage is unintentional and caused by some other factor. Below are some common software malfunctions that can cause high CPU usage and can be fixed without requiring an upgrade. It's worth checking into these to see if any are the reason for the account's high usage of CPU minutes:
1. Frequent CRON jobs -- only run them as often as you absolutely need to!! Check any cron jobs set up in cPanel and make sure they are not being run more frequently than every 15 minutes or less. Disable any database or other backups or other maintenance jobs that are set up, as these backups can be very CPU intensive.
2. Check your site for old installations (Fantastico) that have been left "in the wild". Check these for spam postings that look automated. If any are found, upgrade the application to the latest version (or remove it if it isn't in use), and make sure to setup Captcha, or comment approval, to eliminate automated posting. Check both your main domain (public_html) and the directories for any add-on domains that may have been set up.
3. Check web logs or statistics program (AWStats in cPanel) for traffic. See what pages are getting the most traffic and where that traffic is coming from to look for any patterns that do not make sense.
4. Search engine spiders -- please make sure to have a robots.txt with the following line:
Crawl-delay: 30 or higher
7. Hacked account -- please keep all software up to date and use a secure password!
8. Check to make sure any MySQL databases are optimized with efficient queries
9. Check the PHP version being used in the PHP switcher -- trying using the default, if compatible with your software, for optimal performance.
10. Again, if none of the above apply, this is just due to your site traffic outgrowing what a shared server can handle, and you should consider upgrading to one of our affordable dedicated servers. Contact sales@greenhostit.com for pricing and options.
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