CPU limit exceeded warning: from shared web hosting to VPS hosting |
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When choosing a shared web hosting plan, most people only consider the amount of bandwidth and space that a website will need. However, as time goes on and your website gets more popular, it is common to get the dreaded CPU limit exceeded warning from your web host. After the warning your website almost always ends up suspended/removed from the server.
Why you got the CPU limit exceeded warning
There are a few possible explanations for this:
- You went with an unlimited web host – this warning is the unlimited hosts way of telling you that your website is using too much disk space or bandwidth. You actually believed they would let you fill up their server for $5.00/m?
- You went with an overselling web host - You know the plans – 1000GB of disk space and 10000 GB of transfer for $3.00/m. Come on now, that’s ridiculous!
- The CPU warning is legit - If your website is too popular, no shared web host can allow your popular website to effect the other 100+ customers on the server.
What are your options?
Luckily there are some other options for you that won’t burn a whole into your pockets:
- Find a better hosting provider – Find a host with a reasonable offer. Something like 2GB of disk space and 40GB of transfer for $9.99/m sounds good. This host would be less likely to shut you down because they can afford to put less customers on a server than unlimited and overselling web hosts.
- Upgrade from a shared web hosting plan to a VPS plan - If your website is a popular one that is resource intensive, this is your only option. Yes it will cost you a lot more than a shared plan, however a VPS plan will be less expensive than going straight to a dedicated server.
What is a VPS plan and how much is going to cost me?
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. A VPS provider will divide up a dedicated server into 5-10 partitions. They provide you with a guaranteed amounts of disk space, bandwidth, and most importantly CPU and RAM resources. This is perfect for your resource intensive site. Even if you reach your max amount of allowed CPU/RAM, your host won’t shut you down. The end result will just be a slower loading website when you reach your limit. After all, a slower loading website is better than no website at all, right?
There are two types of VPS plans – unmanaged and managed. Unmanaged plans range from $20-$40 a month. If you know your way around a Unix based machine, this will be perfect for you. However, if you have no clue as to what you are doing, you will need to go to a manage VPS solution. These will be more expensive than the unmanaged plans because now they have to devote system administration to you as well. Expect to spend $50/m + for a quality managed VPS plan.
90% of the time the dreaded CPU warning is a unlimited and overselling hosts way of telling you to go somewhere else. There are occasions that your website could actually be too popular for a shared web hosting environment. If this is the case, I suggest you upgrade to a VPS web hosting plan. This will solve your problem, atleast for awhile…
Oct 16th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
i went through this some time ago, and went from shared to VPS, on Media Temple. now i have a dedicated server with 4 GB of RAM.
Nov 17th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
how about VDS ? I saw some companies offer virtual dedicated servers,are those servers also have cpu limits?
The vds price is much cheaper,and I can have admin permission,it looks so good.
Nov 20th, 2008 at 7:14 am
This is what people don’t understand. Shared hosting is for small websites, under 1000 visitors per day, mostly static or a joomla cms at best. We’ve had people expecting to run large custom scripts and web applications on shared hosts. This just doesn’t work. At best your account is suspended and you get treated like dirt by your hoster, at worst you keep wondering why your site is so damn slow.
Dec 31st, 2008 at 5:36 pm
This is a big problem for a lot of folks out there that are using a shared hosting account. They get to have to many sites and then none of them work at all. Bad hosts!
Jan 18th, 2009 at 6:29 am
You get what you pay for with hosting, providers who offer the world for nothing tend to deleiver nothing. Cheap VPS hosting also has limits on CPU usage which I have hit in the past with some high traffic sites also.
Mar 13th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I’m always tring to keep on top of the industry. And sometimes it’s hard to find good information on the web. Thanks for the good input.
Mar 20th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
We did used is. We manage a VPS platform and had it installed for a client. It worked fine. What will be the new standard in vps hosting in lets say 5 years from now?
Apr 5th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
This is a big problem for a lot of folks out there that are using a shared hosting account. They get to have to many sites and then none of them work at all. Bad hosts!
Apr 10th, 2009 at 5:15 am
By the way, a while back, I discovered an incredibly important and simple key to optimizing MySQL databases. I had a query that was taking 45 seconds to run on my local development server. I tweaked and tweaked, and couldn’t improve it much. Then, I discovered that when queries join tables together, for example, using the Id field on one table and looking for a matching field in another table, those fields need to be _exactly_ the same type. In my scenario, the Id field on one table was an unsigned int and the corresponding field in the joined table was a signed int.Making these fields all exactly the same type made my 45 second query run in under 3 seconds.If anyone wants help reviewing a database design for this, let me know. It doesn’t have to take a long time.
May 22nd, 2009 at 7:56 am
another problem when migrating from a shared web hosting to a vps/vds means changing your ip/nameservers which will drop your rankings in google and thus decreasing traffic. always think ahead and make your hosting plans accordingly.
Jun 28th, 2009 at 10:15 am
This happened to me awhile ago, I was fortunate that when I checked with my hosting provider I did not have to shift to another plan or dedicated server.
I just contacted my host provider helpdesk and they solved the issue for me almost immediately.
Jul 25th, 2009 at 8:37 am
I don’t think that $3 a month is the problem, that causes the speed loss. I believe this is rather related to the amount of websites and to the amount of databases you can host.
If you have a webhosting package with a maximum amount of 5 mysql databases, everything is fine.
thank you for the post