Probably not.

Maybe.  But probably not.

Should you put in a support ticket with your hosting company it’s likely (based on my personal experience) that the very first response they will have is to tell you “you are using too many resources.”

Because if the problem is you, not them, they don’t have to do any work.

You may ask “What are these resources I’m using too many of?”  Good question.  For the most part these resources are:

1. RAM
2. Virtual Memory
3. CPU Time

There are other things you can use “too much of” such as bandwidth and disk space.  But the “you are using too many resources” excuse is usually tied to those three.

But wait, it gets better.  When you use “too many resources” your website will be throttled.  This means the hosting company will limit how much memory and CPU time your site can use.  Thus your site will run slower.  Maybe even so slow it will not work.  We’ll look at the implications of this in part 2 of this series.

This post is about how your hosting company may use the “too many resources” line even though that has nothing to do with what’s really wrong.

One of my clients was getting 500 and 502 errors on his website.  This client has a maintenance package with WordPress Art And Science so I went to work on the problem.  The emails will tell most of the story.

Hello. I manage this account for the owner. We have both been getting many 502 Gateway errors and much site slowness.

Also Jetpack has reported the site going down many times (in excess of 20) over the last 5 days.

In the last 24 hours things have seemed stable and normal, and I know there were some problems with this server about a week ago – I contacted your support via Twitter and they said the situation was a known issue and being investigated.

Can you take a look at things on your side and confirm all is running normal with this account & server.

Thanks much.

And the response.

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Technical Support.

Unfortunately, there was temporary server maintenance issues recently. In order to solve the issue, our administrators had to block the service. However, the issue has been resolved now and the websites are working fine. We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused. I completely understand your situation and I know that it can be very frustrating to have your domain unavailable. I sincerely apologize for the problem you experienced. In future, we will try to make sure that the best possible service is provided to you.

If you need further assistance with this matter, please feel free to reply to this email. If you have other issues we can assist you with, please open a new ticket.

Thank you,

Yogini
Level 1 Tech Support Engineer
BlueHost.com

Okay. They had some hardware problems. That happens. Regardless of any crap I read in the sales section of a hosting company’s website I never believe in 99% up time.  Computer hardware breaks. Deal with it.  If tech supports tells me something is broken and they are working on it I say “thank you” and go outside in the sunshine.

Yet . . . the problem persisted.

I sent another email.

Hello, the temporary issues are still occurring.

The site has gone down twice in the last 48 hours. We have been getting
502 and 504 errors.

At this moment things appear to be working normally.

Please investigate the recent outages. Thanks much.

And the reply.

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Technical Support.

Getting bad Gateway means Having many processes, you’re using too many resources. You need to optimize and clean up the account

So your account appears to be throttled due to it using too many of the server’s resources, you can read about what throttling is and what causes it here
https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/564

To decrease your load times I would definitely recommend using the free service CloudFlare

https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/cloudflare

Some other things that can contribute to this are: page size, how much content is on a single page and how much data it has to load on that page, image size/resolution, video/audio/media size. Database size, database optimization, long queries, erroneous queries, non-cached sites, broken scripts, and much more.
The best way to start, is to disable all plugins, and navigating around the site. If it’s significantly faster, you know one of the plugins you are using is definitely causing the slowness.
Then re-activate the plugins one by one, and navigating around and seeing how it does after each one you activate.
When you activate one that causes the site to become super slow, you know you found the plugin causing the issue.
The following articles will help you work through many of these issues.

http://gtmetrix.com/wordpress-optimization-guide.html (This site will analyze your pages and help you optimize)

http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Optimization (This site deals specifically with WordPress optimization)

https://www.bluehost.com/cgi/help/000496 (This deals with a very simple repair/optimization on your databases)

https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/435 (More advanced, not required, but great optimization nonetheless)

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. We are available 24×7.

Those should be able to help you in optimizing your sites and increasing the overall speed of your entire account.

Thank you,

Navya
Level I Tech Support Engineer
BlueHost.com

Important note: Optimizing your database is a real thing.  So is not having too many plugins.  So is image size/resolution.  But not in this case.

Let the silliness begin.

Greetings. Responses below.

On 04/26/2016 04:29 PM, Bluehost Support wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Thank you for contacting Technical Support.
>
> Getting bad Gateway means Having many processes, you’re using too many resources. You need to optimize and clean up the account

No, it does not. Here are the error messages I’m getting right now
attempting to view and log in to the site.

500 Server Error
A misconfiguration on the server caused a hiccup. Check the server logs,
fix the problem, then try again.

and

ERROR 502 – BAD GATEWAY
Why am I seeing this page?

The server that your request has reached is acting as a gateway or proxy
to fulfil the request made by your client.

Web Browser => Web Front-End => Web Back-End

This server (Web Front-End) received an invalid response from an
upstream (Web Back-End) server it accessed to fulfil the request.

In most cases this will not mean that the upstream server is down, but
rather that the upstream server and the gateway/proxy do not agree on
the protocol for exchanging data.

This problem is most commonly caused when there is a problem with IP
communications between the Web Front and Back-Ends. Before you attempt
to resolve this problem you should clear your browser cache completely.

Our support staff will be happy to assist you in resolving this issue.
Please contact our Live Support or reply to any Tickets you may have
received from our technicians for further assistance.

————————-

> So your account appears to be throttled due to it using too many of the server’s resources, you can read about what throttling is and what causes it here
> https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/564

No it is not.

From

CPU Throttling History

No CPU limiting factors (throttling) have been placed on your account in
the past 24 hours.

>
> To decrease your load times I would definitely recommend using the free service CloudFlare
>
> https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/cloudflare

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloudFlare

CloudFlare was ranked in the 7th rank among the top 50 Bad Hosts by Host
Exploit.[31] The service has been used by Rescator, a website that sells
payment card data.[32][33][34]

Two of ISIS’ top three online chat forums are guarded by CloudFlare but
U.S. law enforcement has not asked them to discontinue the service.[35]

An October 2015 report found that CloudFlare provisioned 40% of SSL
certificates used by phishing sites with deceptive domain names
resembling those of banks and payment processors.[36]

On November 2015, Anonymous discouraged the use of CloudFlare’s
services, following the ISIS attacks in Paris and renewed accusation of
providing help to terrorists.[37] CloudFlare responded by calling their
accusers “15-year-old kids in Guy Fawkes masks” and saying that they
consult “actual anti-terrorism experts” and that they “abide by the
law”.[38]

Additionally, adding more scripts to the website will not make it
faster. That will make it slower.

>
> If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. We are available 24×7.

You have been contacted. Here are some specific times the site has gone
down to help in trouble shooting. This are reports from Jetpacks site
monitoring.

Your total downtime was 18 mins, but your site was up again as of
Wednesday, April 27, 5:28 pm.

Your total downtime was 23 mins, but your site was up again as of
Tuesday, April 26, 8:53 pm.

Your total downtime was 2 mins, but your site was up again as of
Tuesday, April 26, 1:53 pm.

Your total downtime was 1 hour, but your site was up again as of
Saturday, April 23, 3:53 am.

Your total downtime was 3 mins, but your site was up again as of Friday,
April 22, 12:33 am.

Your total downtime was 3 mins, but your site was up again as of
Thursday, April 21, 8:18 pm.

Your total downtime was 13 mins, but your site was up again as of
Wednesday, April 20, 7:53 pm.

This site has been active for over a year and this is the first time
these problems have occurred. No additional plugins have been added
since the site went “live” on April 1st, 2015.

I clean out and optimize the database on a regular basis.

The site averages 60 hits a day. I realize this is shared hosting and
at some point the site may outgrow the capabilities of shared hosting.
60 page views a day is not that taxing however.

Thank you much.

And smackdown.

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Technical Support.

We apologize for the inconvenience you are experiencing. I can understand your problem.

I have checked your account, now it is working fine from our end. If your still facing same problem kindly contact our chat or phone support.

Main phone number

US (toll-free): 888-401-4678
International: +1 801-765-9400

We appreciate your business. If you need further assistance, please feel free to reply to this email. If you have any other issues, please open a new ticket.

Thank you,

Vidyananda S
Level I Tech Support Engineer
BlueHost.com

The moral of the story:

1. Know what error messages mean and don’t mean.
2. Have evidence to support what ever assertions you are making.

In the defense of technical support people who work at hosting companies:

You must realize that 97% of the people the hosting company techs deal with are technical idiots.  Thus the techs tell everyone “too many resources” regardless of the problem.  Most of the time people don’t know any better.

It’s up to you to know better, to expect better, and if you don’t receive better take your business elsewhere.