CPU minutes over use

EKRIUQ

I have a couple of websites on my hosting plan, 2 have a lot of pictures on them but its not as if they get a lot of hits every day but then I get this email this morning,

Over the past month, we have been monitoring the resource usage of your Web site on our Shared hosting server. We would like to think that, with the amount of resources your site is consuming, your business is doing very well these days. Unfortunately, the plan you are currently using no longer meets your site's requirements. We would like to invite you to review the current plans we offer, available at http://hosting.aplus.net/, and have you choose a more appropriate one for your site to avoid a disruption in service

Overuse : 31min CPU time daily
Suggested Plan : Pro


This is what they say I'm using

Is this a lot??

I'm happy enough with their hosting plan but as the websites aren't that busy and hits could be measured in hundreds every day not thousands am I getting value for money??

Thanks for any advice

zAbbo

Press them a little more on whats causing the CPU usage, it may be possible to pinpoint what process is doing what, this could be due to poor performing resource hogging script

forbairt

Whats your total bandwidth usage ... really need a few more statistics ...

Are the pages static or dynamic ? ... are the images being pulled from a database

Can the pages be cached to speed up the process

also what are you paying or which plan are you on ?

EKRIUQ

I'm on Solo XR cost $9.99 a month about €7.50

Reason I'm told is the scripts are hogging the usage,

In total I have

1 shopping cart Dynamic Mysql database
2 Joomla sites (1 just a tester) (dynamic)
1 Coppermine photo album(dynamic)
1 small message board/forum only just started very low usage.

All the above are spread over 3 mysql databases

Plus a website with about 200 static webpages,

None of the websites are very busy hits wise but they have a lot of content and pictures

details of usage below

Malice

According to the picture you linked you've used 0.04% of your allowed traffic and yet you've used 135% of your CPU time? Something doesn't add up there and surely they should be able to tell you what is/was hogging the CPU.
You weren't doing some testing that might have gone into an infinite loop or something? Has your site been linked onto something like Slashdot?

forbairt

You're not getting hammered by bots indexing your site are you ?

You're shopping cart isn't getting repeatedly indexed by something is it ?

EKRIUQ

forbairt wrote: »

You're not getting hammered by bots indexing your site are you ?

You're shopping cart isn't getting repeatedly indexed by something is it ?

I have been trying to optimise my websites for search engines using

Google webmaster tools and had the crawl rate set to faster crawling

from GoogleFaster A faster crawl will enable us to crawl your site quickly, but may put more load on your server.

(All now changed back to normal)I'll monitor that for a couple of days.

You weren't doing some testing that might have gone into an infinite loop or something?

There is a script where a random pictures appears on every webpage but I've optimised the pictures in the folder to the proper size needed for the webpage appears.

As regards getting hammered by bots, I have the websites submitted to most popular search engines.

If these websites get more popular I don't know how much CPU mins I'll need

Malice

But surely you shouldn't have to monitor anything? Does the hosting company not keep logs of what happens on their servers and could they not tell you that, for example, Joomla script blah.php took 65 minutes of your quota?

forbairt

you probably have awstats installed on the server ... ?

Have a check through that and see what files are getting hit and try narrowing it down ...

EKRIUQ

malice_ wrote: »

But surely you shouldn't have to monitor anything? Does the hosting company not keep logs of what happens on their servers and could they not tell you that, for example, Joomla script blah.php took 65 minutes of your quota?

I've e-mailed and one of their "escalation representatives" and await their response.

Will let you know what they tell me

Trojan

I would switch hosting companies on principle.

Malice

Someone better informed than me will probably know for sure but are CPU minutes a normal part of a web hosting contract? I've dealt with both Blacknight and Hosting 365 and have never come across the term before.
Unless there's a reason why you've gone with a company based in Kansas, I'd switch to one of the above.

EKRIUQ

malice_ wrote: »

Unless there's a reason why you've gone with a company based in Kansas, I'd switch to one of the above.

No particular reason, but I've been with them nearly 4 years and its good value for the hosting and back then I didn't know much about hosting, web development etc.. and up till now I've never had an issue with them.

I've looked at Hosting 365 and they seem to give good packages reasonably priced and may start switching over some of my websites soon as they may suit my needs in the future better.

steve-hosting36

CPU minutes are normally in the AUP, not as 'billable' thing. As such, if your site starts impacting the whole server (it would need to be really really busy or really horribly written) most hosts will 'sandbox' you are limit your site (not charge you more for CPU time).

EKRIUQ

steve-hosting36 wrote: »

CPU minutes are normally in the AUP, not as 'billable' thing. As such, if your site starts impacting the whole server (it would need to be really really busy or really horribly written) most hosts will 'sandbox' you are limit your site (not charge you more for CPU time).

Most of my sites are Valid XHTML and CSS. so should be fine

forbairt

BingoBongo wrote: »

Most of my sites are Valid XHTML and CSS. so should be fine

I'd assume he was talking about the back end ... not whether you have valid xhtml / css ... they won't impact on the server load as such and can be written as badly as you want

Malice

steve-hosting36 wrote: »

CPU minutes are normally in the AUP, not as 'billable' thing. As such, if your site starts impacting the whole server (it would need to be really really busy or really horribly written) most hosts will 'sandbox' you are limit your site (not charge you more for CPU time).

Hopefully this isn't a stupid question but what's AUP?

forbairt

malice_ wrote: »

Hopefully this isn't a stupid question but what's AUP?

I assume he means Acceptable Usage Policy

steve-hosting36

Sorry - Acceoptable Use Policy - what the hosting provider defines as 'acceptable' use of their services.

Malice

forbairt wrote: »

I assume he means Acceptable Usage Policy

Thanks forbairt.