Typically, the reason for this could be because your website is;
- Overloaded due to visitor numbers - Your website is suddenly receiving a very high amount of traffic (hits) - whether malicious - e.g. DDOS (Denial of Service attack) or not - e.g. you or your business appeared on the front page of Time magazine! Your website will show the error until the traffic subsides or is mitigated, or the resources for your account are increased.
- Overloaded due to a badly bahaved script or app - If your website has a poorly coded or outdated script or app installed (e.g. an old version of WordPress or an outdated Plugin), it can be a "timebomb" because at some point, other core software on the server are likely to be updated and that can trigger the outdated app or script to malfunction. In this situation, it is common to find that the script / app becomes highly "resource intensive" (e.g. is continuously running and stuck in a loop, trying to suck all the server resources with it!), which in turn can spike the resources associated to your account, leading to the error page. Your website will show the error until the app is terminated or your account's resources have been increased. This is partly why we strongly recommend keeping all apps up to date via our maintenance plan.
Generally, both of the above will require our System Admin intervention, so please open a support ticket and we will be able to assist you.
Things to try
- Please open a support ticket so that we may investigate.
- Login to you hosting account cPanel and check the resource usage stats for your website. Navigate to > Analysis & Log Files > Resource Usage Overview - where you can display performance charts.
- Look for any warning messages which should provide some basic information on what's going on (e.g. Memory Exhausted or CPU limits reached).
- Check that your website software is all up to date.
- You can also check the document root of your websites for any "error_log" files, if you find an error_log file, you should take a look at the recent entries .
- Optimizing your database (if any of your sites are MySQL driven) via PHPMyAdmin is also a good way to keep things running smoothly.
- Running error free, well coded websites will vastly reduce the resource usage on your account and lead to a much more stable hosting experience.
- You may need to Un-install any old software programmes / apps / plugins on your website, that could be malfunctioning.