Site disabled by HostGator

[Troloff]

So I woke up this morning with an e-mail from HostGator saying that they disabled/blocked my account due to my account "abusing" CPU resources. I'm on a shared hosting plan. I don't understand how this is possible because I hardly have any traffic yet. I just launched my site officially 2 days ago. Looks like maybe someone search spammed me or something? Anyone have a clue what I could do to not hog so many resources? I'm not ready to upgrade to dedicated. I don't even have a community built yet.

This is from the e-mail:

CPU Seconds used in the past hour: 2606.4, 73% CPU
Tue Jul 4 10:01:50 CDT 2017
Running Processes:
291946 32.0 0.0 334192 35284 ? RN 10:01 0:00 /opt/php56/bin/php-cgi /home4/public_html/hiphophippo.com/index.php

Running Queries:
*************************** 1. row ***************************
USER: ****
DB: hhh
STATE:
TIME: 0
COMMAND: Sleep
INFO: NULL

Open connections

Current Site Requests:
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=141974
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=141974
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=142275
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=142275
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=142311
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=142311
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=145438&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=145438&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=145451&p=1
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=145451&p=1
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=145458&p=5
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=145458&p=5
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=30049&p=5
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=30049&p=5
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=57557&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=57557&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=57772&p=3
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=57772&p=3
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=57778&p=3
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=57778&p=3
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=59073&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=59073&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=59246&p=6
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=59246&p=6
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=59833&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=59833&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=68444&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=68444&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=68627&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=68627&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=69299&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=69299&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=69983&p=3
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=69983&p=3
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=70029&p=1
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=70029&p=1
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=70293&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=70293&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=70516&p=4
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=70516&p=4
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=70595&p=1
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=70595&p=1
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=70710&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=70710&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=81670&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=81670&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=81754&p=6
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=81754&p=6
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=82487&p=3
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=82487&p=3
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=86023&p=4
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=86023&p=4
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=86079&p=4
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=86079&p=4
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=87699&p=2
66.249.65.98 hiphophippo.imgetting.com /search?r=87699&p=2

Reference: ui
Server: gator4074.hostgator.com
Brand: hostgator
Srv. Type: cpanel
Created: Thu Aug 18 17:38:52 2016
Acct Type: Shared

Current load: 10:01:51 up 13 days, 8:37, 0 users, load average: 0.02, 0.00, 0.00

[Dave]

That's Googlebot crawling your forum. You could block it by creating a .htaccess file or robots.txt file if you don't care about SEO or people finding your forum through Google.

Honestly though, vBulletin + shared hosting + HostGator is not a good combination from my experience. I highly recommend you to just get a cheap VPS (which is almost the same price as shared hosting these days), that way you have a lot more resources dedicated to your forum and this issue shouldn't happen.

[Troloff]

Thank you Dave. Do you have any recommendations for a cheap VPS hosting company? How hard is it to backup my forum and blog & reinstall it elsewhere? Doesn't sound fun.

[Dave]

Some examples are DigitalOcean, Linode, Scaleway, Vultr.
Note that they are un-managed servers so you'll need some Linux knowledge to set everything up.
Setting up everything by someone experienced could take a couple of hours (installing/configuring webserver, MySQL, etc.)

[noypiscripter]

I use Linode and A2 Hosting and I recommend both. I'm using unmanaged plans but as Dave said you need Linux knowledge. They also both have managed plans and the A2 Hosting is the more affordable one.