My website was suspended by my hosting company for CPU abuse for 24 hours.

I did have a warning a couple of weeks ago and thought that I had addressed the problem by caching my site and deleting a plugin that was causing problems.  It turns out that that plugin was not properly deleted??!!! and was continuing to use resources.  This has now been addressed by adding code to the .htaccess file.

I have contacted the plugin crator to inform him of the problems I have experienced – it looks like he has removed this plugin from his current product range.

The really annoying thing about this is that there is no way to monitor CPU usage so I don’t know if the amendments I have made have addressed the problem adequately.  I am happy to sort any problem out, if I can understand the root cause.

In my experience, this is just one of the costs of doing business but the timing could not be more embarrassing because my whole business revolves around my website.  I now know why it is a good idea to have your own dedicated server but that is relatively expensive.  Of course this expense has to be measured against the potential loss of business.

The real problem is that the technicians speak in code – here is an example of just one line of code thrown at me – of course there were at least 100 more lines of code – what do you make of this:

CPU Usage: 183.8% (warning)

MEM Usage: 9.5% (warning)

Processes: 25 (warning)

 LimitPHP: Limit file exists. (warning)

 markc  6298  1.2  0.4 287056 67076 ?        SN   14:59   0:02 /opt/php53/bin/php-cgi /home/markc/public_html/index.php ……………………………

So from this code, I am supposed to work out what is wrong.  I’m sure it means something to someone but which business owner has the time or knowledge to decipher this?

My website is somewhat plugin intensive which does not help with CPU usage but I use all the plugins on my site and deactivating some of them will cause problems with my content.

My host recommends that you use only 5 plugins but I am currently using 23!!  If the problems continue I may need to prune this number radically but I don’t want to do this if I can avoid it.

These sort of incidents always make you stronger in the long run because they are a learning experience but in the short term they are extremely painful, embarrassing and frustrating.

So much of life is like this when you are growing!

Anyway, if you were trying to access my site within the last 24 hours, I apologise for the fact that my website was suspended.  For the time being, normal service has been resumed.

Update

I have been informed of a method for monitoring CPU usage and I’m setting this up now.  The only question in my mind, is will I understand the output so I can address any further problems?