On shared hosting, your account has allocated CPU and memory (RAM) limits. The Resource Usage tool in cPanel shows how much of these resources your account is consuming, helping you identify whether your website is approaching or exceeding its limits.
Please note: Screens and options may vary slightly depending on your cPanel version and hosting plan.
Viewing Resource Usage
- Log in to your cPanel account.
- In the Metrics section, click Resource Usage.
- The dashboard shows current and historical usage for:
- CPU Usage — Processing power consumed by your scripts. - Physical Memory (RAM) — Memory used by your processes. - I/O Usage — Disk read/write operations. - Entry Processes — The number of simultaneous connections/processes. - Number of Processes — Total running processes. - Inodes — Number of files and directories (each file, folder, and email counts as one inode).
Understanding the Graphs
- Green zone — Usage is within normal limits.
- Yellow zone — Approaching limits. Performance may start to degrade.
- Red zone — At or above limits. Your site may experience slowdowns, errors, or temporary suspension.
Common Causes of High Resource Usage
- Unoptimised database queries — Slow queries consume CPU and memory. Optimise your database and use caching.
- Heavy plugins — WordPress sites with many poorly coded plugins can consume excessive resources.
- Traffic spikes — Sudden increases in visitors (viral content, DDoS attacks).
- Cron jobs running too frequently — Scripts executing every minute can consume significant resources.
- Large file operations — Backups, imports, and file scans.
- Crawlers and bots — Aggressive crawling can overload shared hosting.
Reducing Resource Usage
- Enable caching — Use page caching (e.g. WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache for WordPress) to serve cached pages instead of generating them dynamically.
- Optimise your database — Remove overhead, clean up post revisions, and ensure your tables are indexed properly.
- Reduce cron frequency — If you have cron jobs running every minute, consider whether every 5 or 15 minutes would suffice.
- Use a CDN — Offload static files to a CDN to reduce server processing.
- Block bad bots — Use
.htaccessrules or your CMS's security plugin to block abusive crawlers. - Upgrade your plan — If your site has genuinely outgrown shared hosting, consider a VPS or dedicated server.
Tips
- If your site is frequently hitting resource limits, it may be a sign that you've outgrown shared hosting.
- The Resource Usage page is powered by CloudLinux LVE (if installed on your server). Not all hosts use CloudLinux.
- Monitor the Inodes metric — hosting plans often have inode limits (e.g. 250,000 or 500,000). Each file, folder, and email message counts as one inode.
- Check resource usage after installing new plugins or making significant changes to identify any impact.
What Next?
- Improving Website Performance with Caching — Reduce CPU and memory load.
- Setting Up Cron Jobs — Review and optimise scheduled tasks.
