Host shut us down due to our usage

[pastapiggy]

Hi, I'm hoping somebody can help me here as I am pretty desperate.

I run a small community of about 100 active members (last 30 days), 35 members per day, 5-15 online at most times. Nearly 200,000 posts. Hopefully that gives you guys some idea.

I have had this forum running 3.6 since November 2010 without any issues. Today my host shut us down because we were using some obscene amount of resources (we are on shared hosting). They said they only just realized this now, but it has been happening for at least a month, they say.

VPS hosting is out of my price range, so my only option is to get this fixed. They have put the site back online to allow me to minimize our usage.

Apparently, most of it was coming from showthread.php (?). I'm doing my best to do all the suggested optimizations and stuff. My forum is heavily modded however, and I've never really paid much attention to how much resources the mods are all taking up. I've disabled the majority of my products in the ACP for now. However, my members are very attached to the features, and I'd like to keep as many as I can.

So everything said, I have a few questions.
How can I monitor my usage?
Would this be due to certain mods and if so, how do I find the culprits?
What else could be the problem?
What would you guys do in my shoes to solve this issue?

I'm sorry to be such a noob, but I've really picked up everything about running a forum as I've gone along and this is the first time I've run into this problem. My forum is mainly a little for-fun project of mine.

If anyone could help me here, I'll love you forever. If you need any extra info, just ask.

[Simon Lloyd]

Ok, well you could first show us a list of your mods, secondly you can try installing my Ban Spiders By Useragent and minimise the spiders that are trawling your site and just leave the likes of google...etc accessing it this should help bring your usage down (the mod says vb3.7.x (the version you would download) but should work on any version, if you have trouble with it let me know.

Also ask your host for a list of processes that are taking the usage (they can do this by using the TOP command in ssh or viewing Apache status in WHM) and give that to you so you can analyse it, you'd need a few snapshots over the day to get a good feel for what's creating the issues, also ask your host to turn off mysql persistant connections for you, that might help a little.

[Sage Knight]

Shared hosting companies hate vB, if you have vB Seo installed and the vB CMS & Blog you'll need to find atleast a low end VPS, I'm also currently on shared hosting and I have about 20 members & 40-60 guests at peak time and my site is slow, I get DB errors every now and then and many other issues.

You should uninstall any chatboxes, stop downloading plugins made by inexperienced coders. Just enable debug mode and see for yourself.

I am about to move to VPS later this month. If you can't afford it monetize your forums, ask for donations etc..or just change hosts to another more resources shared package.

[pastapiggy]

Thanks guys.

I'm going to install your mod first chance I get, Simon.
A list of what I have installed mods-wise:

vB Pager (I know we technically shouldn't have this, but my members love it)*
vBadvanced CMPS
vbBannerRotator*
vBIspy
vBCredits*
Post Thank You Hack*
Post Groan Hack*
PassiveVid (YouTube embedding etc)
Dream's Chatbox
Ishop*
Yet Another Award System*
Favorite Smilies
Cyb - Advanced Forum Statistics
Yet Another Mass Private Message System
Miserable Users
nCode Image Resizer
Welcome headers
Poll Write In Vote
Sakera's Hide Poll Results
Mark Threads As 'Solved'
Members Who Have Visited Today
WarLion Online/Offline avatar opacity
Unknown Location

Geez, we have a lot of crap. I put an asterisk next to the stuff we would miss a lot. However, obviously nothing is too sacred in the effort to get our usage normal.

My members like the chatbox but if you think it will help, I'll disable it. It's just the bulk of our issues were coming from showthread.php, they said, and we only have the shoutbox on the forum index. And yeah, i might have to consider moving to VPS.

I'll get that info from the host for the next time I make a post.

Thanks again.

[betterthanyours]

What is your budget exactly?

[pastapiggy]

30 a month tops, Id say.
Do you guys think I'll have to move to VPS hosting for sure?

[Neal-UK]

I keep mentioning these guys but the reason being they support all forums and are very cheap. Cheap doesn't cost them support and customer service which is the best i've ever seen from any host - www.stablehost.com

I run a reseller but have several forums running on them and a links directory.

[BSMedia]

Thanks guys.

I'm going to install your mod first chance I get, Simon.
A list of what I have installed mods-wise:

vB Pager (I know we technically shouldn't have this, but my members love it)*
vBadvanced CMPS
vbBannerRotator*
vBIspy
vBCredits*
Post Thank You Hack*
Post Groan Hack*
PassiveVid (YouTube embedding etc)
Dream's Chatbox
Ishop*
Yet Another Award System*
Favorite Smilies
Cyb - Advanced Forum Statistics
Yet Another Mass Private Message System
Miserable Users
nCode Image Resizer
Welcome headers
Poll Write In Vote
Sakera's Hide Poll Results
Mark Threads As 'Solved'
Members Who Have Visited Today
WarLion Online/Offline avatar opacity
Unknown Location

Geez, we have a lot of crap. I put an asterisk next to the stuff we would miss a lot. However, obviously nothing is too sacred in the effort to get our usage normal.

My members like the chatbox but if you think it will help, I'll disable it. It's just the bulk of our issues were coming from showthread.php, they said, and we only have the shoutbox on the forum index. And yeah, i might have to consider moving to VPS.

I'll get that info from the host for the next time I make a post.

Thanks again.


The ones in bold and of course the red big bold are whats probably causing mopst of your problems.

You can get a level 2 VPS from HostGator for like $21.00 a month, which should be more than enough to run your forum. You can even get 25% off with the coupon code "vbhostingvps". Hostgator (http://bit.ly/M645vK)

[Simon Lloyd]

Also forum statistics can be intensive, make sure you dont allow guests to view chatbox, view statistics, view who's online...etc, minimise what they can see.

[betterthanyours]

You could try liquidweb's shared hosting platform 25/28 $ a month and they are extremely good. Otherwise I can try hosting you on my package...liquidweb are very lenient on usage and considering the shared service is expensive they allow a lot more CPU. However you should always try to minimise your forum footprint and unistall unused gimmicks if possible.

[blind-eddie]

I have been using shared hosting for years... I have 4 vbulletin sites along with a few other forum softwares & a few html sites on one hosting account & 2 vbulletin test sites along with a few other test forum software & many scripts running. I have no issues at all. And I have vbpager installed on every vbulletin site but 4.0 versions. I also have comet chat installed that I host without issue.
Your host has added to many customers to the box you are in & goes after the resourceful sites because they are slowing down the server.... Ask them to move you to a better box.

I have found that only allowing user sigs to show only once per thread page will greatly reduce your usage. Also, allowing members to have live feeds to sigs will slow down showthread big time, so try disabling all usergroups the right to have sigs for a few days to see if that helps.
If you have other sites within your domain space make sure they do not have scripts running at all times.

In your cpanel, scroll to the logs section and click CPU Throttling. Post results here please.

After that scroll down to the Advanced section & click Process Manager. How many processes is your site running and how long have they been running?

You will see a few for vbpager.... I know the pager well & can help you reduce some of the processes with simple default settings & some code changes.
Your issues are fixable so you can stay where you are.

Go to phpMyadmin in cpanel, click on your database & optimise all tables with overhead...

[RSNF]

I think you should get in contact with Leon over at http://www.ufhosting.org/ hosting vbulletin websites is one of his specialties.


30 a month tops, Id say.
Do you guys think I'll have to move to VPS hosting for sure?

[Simon Lloyd]

as Tim (Blind-eddie) says the box may have been oversold, its very common, enter your ip or domain here http://www.myipneighbors.com/ or http://www.myipneighbors.net and it will show you how many sites are on that box (the latter shows whether it's a site that is linked to from one site on the box to another).