Your site has been limited within the past 24 hours

It is not uncommon for website owners to see the “Your site has been limited within the past 24 hours” message in cPanel → Resource Usage section. Regardless of the amount of traffic your site gets, this message may pop up every once in a while.

But what exactly does “Your site has been limited within the past 24 hours” message imply? In this article, we will explain the same.

Understanding cPanel Resource Usage

In general, such messages happen on every web hosting environment that might be running CloudLinux. To get a clearer picture, we first need to understand how resource allocation under CloudLinux works.

In a shared hosting environment, every hosting account is given a fixed quota of CPU and memory resources. The best thing about CloudLinux is that it limits each user account to its particular quota — even if one particular user account gets too much traffic all of a sudden, or sees a burst in memory usage, the other accounts on the server are unaffected. This is primarily due to the fact that CloudLinux imposes limits on CPU and memory usage for each hosting account and no single account can surpass those limits.

As such, in a CloudLinux-based hosting environment, each user account gets a fixed share of resources to ensure server stability and optimum performance. The cPanel → Resource Usage section displays your account’s usage of these very resources. As a result, 100% of CPU usage here does not imply that your account is using 100% of the overall server’s CPU; instead, it means you are using 100% of the CPU quota provided to your account.

Why Does “Your site has been limited within the past 24 hours” Message Pop up?

To begin with, let us be clear on one aspect — the “Your site has been limited within the past 24 hours” message is not an error. It is simply a notice informing you that your site was using 100% of its share of resources, be it CPU or memory or both, in the past 24 hours.

Now, a question might arise as to why your site was using 100% of the resources? This generally happens when your website’s script, such as WordPress or Drupal, needs to perform a database-intensive operation quickly. For instance, deleting too many posts, or bulk updating of blog posts, accessing multiple media files at once, and so on. In such cases, a surge in resource usage is normal and expected.

Alternatively, heavy amounts of traffic may also cause such a message to show up in the Resource Usage section. Multiple visitors accessing your site at the same time can cause CPU load to rise up.

Sometimes, repeated “Your site has been limited within the past 24 hours” message implies that you need to better optimize your site. Each page load causes memory and CPU usage to go up a bit, and a poorly-optimized site may very well lead to overconsumption of server resources, even if the traffic is negligible.

Will My Site be Slower/Unreachable if This Message Shows up?

Not really. Just because site resource usage limits are reached once, it does not imply your website will be slower from that point onwards.

However, you need to know that if resource usage limits are hit, your site is throttled temporarily to prevent misuse of resources. That said, such limits are generally reached only for a small fraction of time — ranging from seconds to few minutes — and as such, you are not likely to even notice any fall in website performance.

If, however, resource limits are repeatedly being hit, you should consider upgrading to a bigger plan for better website performance.

How to Fix “Your site has been limited within the past 24 hours” Message?

To clarify, it is perfectly normal if your site is hitting the resource limits every once in a while. Such surges in resource usage can be attributed to normal day to day operations that are performed on websites.

However, if you are getting the “Your site has been limited within the past 24 hours” message too often, there might be a different cause behind it.

For most users, this happens when the website is poorly optimized. CPU and memory resources are often thrashed when a site is optimized properly. You should consider using a caching plugin, and performing other optimizing steps such as CSS/JS minification, and so on.

Alternatively, the “Your site has been limited within the past 24 hours” message may also be due to the fact that your site has overgrown the current hosting plan. In such cases, you will need to upgrade to a bigger hosting plan with more lenient resource limits to avoid seeing the message “Your site has been limited within the past 24 hours”.

For pro WordPress users, it might be a good idea to use the Query Monitor plugin to see if the resource usage is caused by a faulty plugin. Read more about the Query Monitor plugin here.

If you are currently a customer with us feel free to open a support ticket and we’ll be happy to troubleshoot the problem for you.

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