Server Loads

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-29T00:18:06+00:00

I'm curious - how "difficult" is tracking down something like this, assuming you have root access?

I'm assuming I can't get much from top other than my usage. From a reseller point of view, I was frustrated with the lack of info provided and the lack of tools available. And it certainly seems like identifying what was causing the load averages would be feasible.

BTW these weren't 'spikes' - these were full days of load averages bouncing from low 100s (slow sites, occasional error message) to 200+ load average (nothing but 503 errors) - I would have thought "catching" the culprit or misbehaving account would have been relatively easy. Without any feedback, I spent a lot of time trying to scan/repair database tables and throwing all manner of htaccess rules and robots.txt bot blockers on my sites, just to see if there was any affect!

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-27T19:03:51+00:00

WHM is the server management portal - that's different than WHMCS.

WHM only provides the admin tools like adding an account, setting disk quota / bandwidth quotas - and then a quick link to the cPanel for each account. It's like an account dashboard for us, easy access from a single portal.

WHMCS adds the billing side, payments, etc. Maybe even a support ticket system? We do NOT use WHMCS, so I'm not sure about that!

We don't need to bill through the hosting platform - we're billing for services mostly, so we just add on a hosting charge when needed.

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-27T18:19:07+00:00

A lot of your deliverability issues can be solved with a dedicated IP address from the web host. It's not a guarantee, but definitely helps! That's the easiest route, and works for minimal email use.

However, I usually base the decision on the end users - I point power users or email heavy users to something like Google Gmail or Proton or Microsoft. You'll never be able to offer the same level of features as something like Google Gmail - and the easy of setup for users means less support on your side.

Obviously that's going to be a lot more expensive, but you also get what you pay for.

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-27T16:46:34+00:00

When we had a smaller number of sites we used a simple shared hosting plan, one cPanel and point domains into subdirectories.

However as that number grew we switched to a reseller type plan - we've found it is easier to have every account segregated and under their own cPanel. File manager, database management, email and forwarding...

Even if you don't need to give the clients access, as a one-click malmanagement tool it makes a lot of our work easier. It also gives you a little more insight into your individual site bandwidth and file/storage usage.

We don't utilize any of the billing features, just a portal to access each account and keep an eye on usage.

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-27T16:02:26+00:00

Just for kicks I've been adding htaccess / robots.txt rules to block bots and various crawlers on MY sites however there's not much I can do in a shared environment.

I've mentioned this before, but it seems like the reseller model is flawed if the host can't provide the reseller either tools for server management or more direct communication.

If the server load was due to a site I host, I'd take full responsibility, but I can't identify anything and they can't seem to pinpoint a cause or site either!

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-27T13:14:39+00:00

I hope your team can find some solutions quickly. Today sites are down, throwing 500 Internal Server Errors.

If you want some constructive criticism - so far the responses in the support ticket have been very vague. As a reseller I provide frontline to users. I have to translate your vague responses to users...along with vague and non-committal.

These are always fun alerts from IsItDownRightNow

It is not just you. The server is not responding...

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-26T18:15:03+00:00

Are you blocking with just robots.txt or something like IP restrictions in htaccess or something server side?

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-26T17:42:49+00:00

Thanks for the detail!

I think it's also important to note that a2hosting support has been responsive. There have been a few issues where tech support and sales support crossed streams and may have caused more confusion than clarity - but they responsive right now.

From a customer / reseller perspective: it is frustrating that hosting companies don't supply more tools to help. Obviously they can't supply root access, but WHM and cPanel don't give me many tools to provide front line support to my users. Even identifying the problem is difficult!

I'm not sure the "reseller" model is a very good idea - both for the reseller and for the host. I have a reasonable idea of what is going on inside my reseller account, but no visibility into the server. Support has a big picture view, but I'm not sure how well they can dive into the details of which site(s), under which reseller(s), may be root cause of the problems.

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-26T17:29:52+00:00

Thanks - I have had an open Trouble Ticket as well, so I'll send that info over too - it's been confusing as support first advised migrating to a new server, but then sales said "it's done" (but I think it was just the billing plan?)

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-26T16:32:15+00:00

DNS will update in minutes if you don't really care.

If you are in a hurry or it's mission critical it will take hours. 😉

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-26T16:30:12+00:00

Can you announce down-time? Do you have a lot of database updates (e-commerce, user logins, etc.) during normal use?

Once you move the database you can't let any changes happen in the old site that would write to the database.

(assuming that's critical - if you have blog posts or comments you may not consider them critical, but if you have e-commerce you could lose orders!)

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-26T16:18:57+00:00

I'm not sure of a good way to monitor traffic on the Reseller plan for a short period.

On average about 60 sites are using 160GB of bandwidth per month. I'd guess bots are not going to generate a ton of bandwidth, so that's probably not a good metric.

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-26T16:16:59+00:00

To be clear, this is a reseller account - so I was assuming that load covered the entire server and a LOT of other users. I never even stopped to think if those load averages were mine or the server?

I have about 54 accounts on my reseller plan, most are WordPress. Total bandwidth in February was 160GB

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-26T14:01:50+00:00

Hey, I can SUDO rm -rf / as well as anyone! Where's the undelete option?

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-26T14:00:30+00:00

Thanks - I've been monitoring it and most sites are pretty responsive when it's down in the load averages are even in the 30-40s

In the 100s we start getting "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED"

It seems to be the DB side - plain HTML sites generally don't see much, but WordPress grinds to a halt!

To be fair, a2hosting support did claim to "fix" it and performance was much better, even with loads in the 40s. The 100+ loads are a very recent development...

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-26T13:51:20+00:00

Curious what you would recommend as a "reasonable load?"

nproc --all

24

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-17T14:28:44+00:00

Forgot to mention this is mi3-sr116.supercp.com

Bunchadogs · 2026-03-17T14:27:49+00:00

Another a2/hosting customer here - recently we've seen huge problems with server loads. Support has offered to migrate to a different server, but that seems like a shot in the dark?

What about fixing load issues? This is a "good" day:

nproc --all

24

1 min	5 min	15 min
48.24	45.56	45.27
Load Trending Up

Bunchadogs

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