Hey everyone. I’ve been using a shared hosting plan from Siteground for my website:
Their server keeps acting up and the site hits the cpu usage limit inspite of converting images to webp/using sg optimizer plugin to its full extent and also using cloudflare. Looking at moving to another platform. They keep insisting it’s a plugin or the theme but I’ve checked everything and I’m using the bare minimum plugins. Perhaps their ram is too low on the shared server.
Can anyone suggest:
1. Any more optimization one could do
2. A better host. Since the client is a small start-up, an expensive vps might not be possible at this stage compared to what they pay on Siteground.
Answers:
The CPU limit problem happened to me and I moved my sites elsewhere. Performance seems to suffer as soon as you hit that limit too.
I’m facing the same issues with Siteground. My website speed has dropped recently and they blame it on the plugins as well. Given the fact that they doubled their fees and diminished the quality of their service I’m considering switching to Cloudways. Still pondering though.
I’ve observed Siteground’s quality has gone downhill over the last few months. I have moved several websites to Cloudways now (and am moving the remaining by February as that’s when my Siteground account expires).
I can’t even load your website, you need somebody who understands well optimization to look at your site. Changing hosting should be the last step, not the first one. If you have a real issue on it, no matter what hosting, issue will persist in some form.
The shared hosting accounts use an equal portion of RAM, however, your current hosting plan type, StartUp, includes only the first level caching.
If your website is overusing the allocated plan quota, it would be best to check what is causing this based on your account statistics, and the strace logs provided by our Support.
Read More: Best hosting providers Reddit
we managed to solve our CPU resource over-usage. We had a combination of internal (within our website) and external factors as culprits.
I read and followed next posts – the hardest part for me (back then) was to find the culprit. After I would find the culprit – the solution itself for that CPU resource over usage was easier to find:
In our cases mainly there were a “bad bots” issues (external “bot attacks” at our websites causing CPU over-usage due to thousands of those “attacks”) and sometimes it was also a “bad plugin” causing it due to some process running in the background over and over.
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What can be done in the situations like this one is to (what I did, too, for the majority of the below mentioned points):
– look at your usage and see what is draining the most resources: backup plugins, security scanners, broken link checkers, etc, etc.
Know ALL the plugins you have installed on the site, but more importantly: what do they do, how do they do it and how often they do it. E.g. if you are using Yoast SEO, turn off “word recommendations” feature that works in the background
– check if some plugins have conflict(s) between themselves / perform troubleshooting process
– be careful using page editors, as they can constantly drain your resources while editing and updating pages (make sure you only edit one page at a time and try not to have multiple pages in edit mode open in multiple tabs)
– decrease your website’s WP heartbeat
– better setup of your caching plugin (e.g. disable memcache in the SG Optimizer plugin)
– increase your website’s PHP version (and if you are on SG hosting – make sure you are on PHP7.4 ultrafast PHP)
– request to increase the connection limits
– check running some resource-heavy functions, such as backups, security scannings, custom scripts, and disable WP-cron and set a manual request (real cron jobs) via a Query Monitor plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/query-monitor/). You will be able to see all of the processes being queried on your websites’ pages (check the admin bar). In case of any issues, you will see some items in red.
– install StopBadBots plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/stopbadbots/
– disable xmlrpc.php
– install high quality Security Tool with WAF (Web Application Firewall) built in to protect against possible DDOS attacks
– be careful when you do massive promotions with random parameters in the URL like umm-source=mail&id=1238 as that’s a great way to successfully DDoS your site and exhaust all its limitations