This piece aims to explore potential causes of account suspensions and provide actionable steps to rectify them promptly to restore your website’s functionality.
Why was my account suspended?
If you have been redirected to this page by our system administration department, it’s likely that your account has caused issues on the server due to excessive usage of system resources. However, account suspension can also occur due to a billing issue or a violation of our terms of service. This article will mainly focus on resource usage, as billing or terms of service issues can be resolved more efficiently by contacting our support team directly.
Billing Issue – If your hosting subscription is due for renewal, and we are unable to charge your credit card on file, your account may be suspended until payment is received. You can update your credit card information by contacting our billing team via phone, email, or live chat support.
CPU Usage – If your hosting account consumes an excessive amount of CPU usage, causing performance issues for other accounts on the server, we may temporarily suspend your account while we work with you to resolve the issue and reduce the usage to a normal level. In some cases, upgrading to a higher level hosting package may be necessary.
Terms of Service Violation – Our terms of service prohibit adult content and copyrighted material. If your website is found to contain such content, your account will be suspended until the content is removed.
What is high system resource usage?
When a user requests a service from your website, the server utilizes a small amount of “resource usage.” This usage pertains to the finite CPU and memory resources available to all users on the server.
In some cases, if your account utilizes more than its fair share of these resources, it can cause inconvenience to other users on the server. In such situations, our system administration team may temporarily suspend your account until the issues causing excessive usage are resolved.
Our Terms of Service emphasizes the reason behind monitoring account’s resource usage and taking necessary actions:
“IMH Personal & Business Class hosting are shared hosting environments, so to ensure fast and reliable service to all of our clients, accounts that adversely affect server or network performance must correct these issues or will be asked to upgrade to a virtual or dedicated server.”
What can cause high resource usage?
Multiple factors can contribute to high resource usage on your account, but most of them can be optimized or adjusted to avoid further problems.
However, in some cases, depending on the nature of your account activities, you may have exceeded the limits of your current hosting platform. In such situations, it may be necessary to consider a more suitable platform that can handle your resource usage levels, such as a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a dedicated server.
What options are available to solve resource usage issues?
There are two mindsets when it comes to tackling a resource usage issue:
- Optimizing your website and applications to work within the resource usage constraints of your current hosting platform.
- Upgrade to a more appropriate hosting platform for your activity, where more robust resource usage allotments are available.
Optimizing your account
Application specific optimizations
Joomla – How to Optimize Joomla
Gallery2 – Gallery2 Performance Tips
Magento – The developers of Magento have warned about high resource usage, indicating it could be difficult to run on shared hosting.
General optimizations and best practices
There are several online tools that can help you benchmark your website and provide some good starting points for general optimizations:
Dynamic page caching is a useful feature that can be found in many website applications today. These applications usually have a PHP/MySQL back-end that dynamically pulls content from the MySQL database for the website. To cut down on duplicate database calls and improve resource usage, most applications have some form of database caching either natively or through a plugin. This allows websites to serve more static HTML content, which is faster to load for visitors and less demanding on the server’s resources.
Search engines and automated bots can also generate high amounts of traffic to a website. Unlike human visitors, these bots do not wait before requesting the next page, leading to excessive resource usage. To control how search engines crawl a website and what sections they are allowed to index, website owners can use the robots.txt file. This is especially useful for sections of the website that may require high resource usage or contain content that the owner does not want to be publicly available.
As a database gets more usage over time, there may be additional overhead that requires optimization. The easiest and quickest way to optimize a database is by using phpMyAdmin available from the cPanel. However, sometimes a manual re-structuring of the data or indexes may be necessary to keep the database queries fast and efficient. If a developer notices hanging queries or a sudden increase in resource usage coming from the database activity, they may need to review the site’s code or database design. Before attempting any optimization, it is recommended to learn how to export and import a MySQL database with phpMyAdmin to ensure that a working copy of the database is always available in case of accidental deletion.
Upgrading your account
As a website grows, it will require more resources, and you might need to upgrade from shared hosting to a VPS or dedicated server. This is a good sign that your website is receiving a good amount of visitors each month. However, if your resource usage is higher than what shared hosting plans allow for, it could indicate that something in your site’s code is inefficient or that your website is performing intensive tasks.
Typically, customers start with shared hosting and upgrade their hosting plan as their website and business grow. A VPS is generally enough for most small to medium businesses, depending on their specific needs. Our system administration team can analyze your account’s resource usage and recommend the best hosting solution to handle your current requirements and future growth. You can choose between a VPS or dedicated server, and we can handle the upgrade from our end, resulting in minimal or no downtime for your site.
A VPS is a virtualized container that offers higher resource usage and customization options than shared hosting. It comes in three different tiers based on the level of memory or hard-drive space required. On the other hand, a dedicated server is a physical server that offers full access to all the hardware and resources without sharing them with other users. We also offer three tiers of dedicated servers based on expected resource requirements. For more information on VPS and dedicated hosting, you can visit our VPS Hosting and Dedicated Hosting pages.
Conclusion
After reading this article you should now have a good understanding of some of the common issues that could possibly lead to an account suspension, and how to correct those to get your website back online. We will be constantly adding to this page to try to provide our customers with the most up to date information on how to avoid account suspensions. If you feel there was something that we missed which in your case would have helped you understand things better, please comment below so that we can be sure to get that corrected for the next person having similar issues.