2.17.7. Exceeding CPU minutes consumption

According to paragraph 4.2 of terms of service on shared hosting, each hosting account must use no more than 100 CPU minutes per day. The restriction does not apply to business hosting, where guaranteed resources are provided in accordance with the selected plan with no limits on usage time (CPU time).

CPU minutes are counted using a counter in the kernel of the Linux operating system. CPU time is counted in total for the hosting account for all processes running in it. It is unfortunately impossible to determine which specific site or script of the hosting account is creating the load. This is due to the fact that the Linux operating system keeps track of CPU time only by user, and each hosting account is a separate Linux user.

CPU time — this is the time that server CPU spent on processing the task. CPU time depends only on the work performed.

1 CPU minute — is the utilization of one CPU core at 100% for one minute.

Exceeding this limit means that the hosting account's sites are causing increased server load and may negatively impact the operation and performance of the hosting account.

All server resources are distributed among the clients that reside on that server. If one client uses much more server resources than the others, it causes the quality of hosting services for the rest of the hosting clients to drop. Because of this, we have to control the resources that are consumed by the users.

The number of sites and their number of visitors do not directly affect resource consumption. You can create a single page that will use 100% of server resources with 100 visitors per day, or you can create a site that will process 100000 requests per day and create a load of 50 CPU minutes.

The resource limitation process is fully automated and applies to all clients.

On shared hosting — no. The limit of 100 CPU minutes per day exists for all shared hosting plans.

If your hosting account needs more resources, you can consider switching to business hosting, VPS or dedicated server, where there is no CPU time limit — you will only be limited to the resources of the chosen plan or server and can use them without time limits.

However, if a single hosting account hosts several sites at once, each of which individually would not exceed the limits, then as an alternative option you can consider ordering additional hosting accounts and transferring sites to them automatically or manually.

For example, one hosting account hosts two sites, each of which consumes about 70 CPU minutes per day. The total load will be higher than the allowable load, but if you order an additional hosting account and move one of the sites to it, you will end up with two hosting accounts with no excess load instead of one hosting account with excess load.

From the moment the user is notified of an overload, he/she has 3 days to take measures to reduce the load before the hosting account will be restricted in order to keep the load within the allowed limits. If during this time the load is still higher than the allowable load, the account will be gradually (once a day) restricted until the daily load is within the allowable limits.

To solve problems with CPU minutes consumption, we recommend:

• Analyze the possible causes of the problem.
• Take advantage of standard recommendations to reduce load.
• Switch to business hosting.

Please note that the consumption of CPU minutes may depend on many factors, so we cannot provide precise recommendations for optimization due to the peculiarities and complexity of modern site systems and other things. In order to analyze the causes of the load and eliminate the problem with excessive CPU minutes consumption, you should contact specialized experts in the field of site development.

If you have solved the load problem, the graphs and statistics of web server load and MySQL server load should show no excess CPU minutes consumed.

If the load for the last full day does not exceed 100 CPU minutes, the set limits will be automatically removed. The restrictions are not removed immediately, but also gradually (once a day) in the order reverse to their installation. If during this period the load still does not exceed the allowable load, the restrictions will be removed from the hosting account.