HTTP Error 508 Resource Limit Is Reached is being shown when visiting web pages

You might occasionally see one of the following messages in your browser or website logs when visiting your own website:

  • Resource Limit Is Reached
  • HTTP Error 508
  • Resource Limit Reached

This is because your website is currently maxing out the server resources that are allocated to it.

If you are using one of our hosting plans such as Silver, Gold, Business Platinum, WP6G for WordPress or Unbundled, your hosting account securely shares a server and its resources with other clients' websites and email.  The vast majority of websites hosted with us consume no more than their fair share of server resources.  To protect our hosting clients and infrastructure from websites which occasionally or regularly hog server resources, there are limits in place on how much of the server resources can be used.  These limits are proportionate to the hosting plan you are on, and they don't affect the storage and data transfer amounts which are included in plans.  The limits are generous but necessary.

If you have VPS hosting with us, you'll see this message on your websites if you have installed server resource management facilities, such as LVE which is included with the CloudLinux operating system. Refer to the documentation for the resource management facilities to find out how to allocate more resources to a particular website.

In any case, it's important to make sure your website runs as efficiently as possible so it doesn't become an inadvertent resource hog.  Inefficient websites can consume far more resources than are necessary.

Here are some tips on working to make your website as efficient as possible:

  • Review all custom code - your theme/template, any custom-built plugins/modules/extensions and any code running on other servers which might interact with your site, to make sure it’s all coded efficiently and doesn’t unnecessarily hog resources. An example is repeated or inefficient requests to the underlying database.
  • Make sure there are no opportunities for bad actors to tie up your website with deliberately resource-hogging requests. For example, make sure a web application firewall is installed on your site, such as Wordfence if you use WordPress.  Another example is also in WordPress, where people can run a search for an empty string, which means that the database looks for everything.
  • Review all free and paid-for plugins/extensions. Are there any that you don’t need? Are there any which have features switched on that you don’t need? Multiple plugins doing the same thing? In systems such as Drupal and WordPress, every time a page loads, it hooks into most plugins to see whether they need to do anything. Some can take up considerable processing time.
  • Install a measurement plugin such as Query Monitor in WordPress to see which database queries and other events are slowing down the site. You can then revisit the previous step and remove "bad" plugins.
  • If you run a WordPress site and are on our shared hosting, review the recommendations in WP Toolkit in cPanel. Some of these may help with performance.
  • Consider an intermediate proxy/gateway to serve some resources from their end and help remove more “bad” traffic before it hits the server. For example Cloudflare.
  • Review the database. Use a database scanning/cleaning tool to help get rid of unnecessary database entries. Also, remove products, orders, customers, posts, logs and so on that are no longer needed. As an example, there are plugins on some sites which store complete logs of clicks, visits etc going back many years. It all takes up database rows which need to be searched through every time a page loads.

As a reminder, it's only a minority of websites which hit resource limits, but they are there to protect everyone.  Ultimately, there are some sites which are too resource-intensive for the hosting plan that they are on and if you find you and your site's visitors are seeing this message a lot and you have ensured your site is as efficient as it can be, it might be time to consider more powerful hosting, such as a higher shared hosting plan or a VPS-based package. As you will see above, there are some steps that you can take to make a website run better before getting to the point of needing a more powerful hosting plan.

 

 

 

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