Shared hosting means many accounts on one server. To stop any one site affecting the others, each account has its own ring-fenced share of the machine. You can see yours in cPanel under Resource Usage.
The limits you will see
- CPU – how much processor time your account may use. Reaching it does not take your site down; it slows requests until usage drops back.
- Physical memory – the RAM your processes may hold at once. Exceeding it stops the process that asked for too much, which usually shows as a 500 error.
- Entry processes – how many requests your site may have in flight at the same moment. This is not visitors per hour; it is simultaneous requests. Hitting it produces a 508 error.
- I/O and IOPS – how fast, and how often, your account may read and write to disk.
- Inodes – the number of files and folders, regardless of their size.
What to do when you are hitting them
Look at what is consuming the resource before assuming you need a bigger package. A slow database query, an uncached page, a plugin scanning the whole site on every load, or a bot crawling you aggressively will all consume far more than genuine visitors. Caching alone often removes the problem entirely.
If usage is genuinely growing because the site is growing, that is the point to talk to us about a larger package.
