Monitoring Your Server Resource Usage
Understanding your server resource consumption helps you optimise your website's performance and determine when it might be time to upgrade your hosting plan.
Resources to Monitor
- CPU usage: How much processing power your websites and applications consume.
- RAM (Memory): The amount of server memory being used by your applications.
- Disk space: Total storage consumed by files, databases, emails, and logs.
- Bandwidth: Monthly data transfer to and from your hosting account.
- Inodes: The number of files and folders on your account.
Checking Resources in DirectAdmin
- Log in to your DirectAdmin control panel.
- The main dashboard displays an overview of your current resource usage including disk space, bandwidth, email accounts, and databases.
- For more detail, navigate to Site Summary / Statistics to view daily and monthly breakdowns.
Checking Resources via SSH
If you have SSH access (available on VPS plans), you can use command-line tools:
toporhtop– View real-time CPU and memory usage.df -h– Check disk space usage across all partitions.du -sh /home/username/– Check the size of a specific directory.free -m– View available and used memory.
Common Causes of High Resource Usage
- Unoptimised database queries: Slow queries can spike CPU usage. Consider adding database indexes.
- Heavy plugins: Some WordPress plugins are resource-intensive. Audit and remove unnecessary ones.
- Lack of caching: Enable page caching and object caching to reduce server load.
- Bot traffic: Search engine crawlers and malicious bots can consume significant resources. Use rate limiting or Cloudflare to manage bot traffic.
- Large log files: Excessive error logging can fill disk space and degrade performance.