2

I use SiteGround as a hosting service and I received a notice that we are reaching our monthly executions. We also use Wordpress as a CMS. Our site is popular and often has several users on it at once, but it's not bursting with traffic. I am in the AwStats analyzer as this help article suggests, but I'm not sure how to interpret my data.

https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/websiteperformance/reduce-executions.htm

Below is a screenshot with what I'm seeing as my most intensive pages/assets being hit:

AwStats Screen capture

I'm also already using SuperCacher and various other tools to help reduce some of this but I'm wondering if we actually need to purchase the next tier in our hosting to handle these monthly execution.

|improve this question
  • 2
    or use... Cloudflare and let them serve your resources. – Simon Hayter♦ Aug 28 '17 at 15:16
3

The host your using apparently has a limit on number of script executions you can do which is interesting to say the least; not the kind of host I would go with personally but personal opinions aside.

AWStats is telling you the captcha image for your contact form is being trigger/viewed A LOT compared to other pages/scripts on your site. You'll want to investigate why that is; possibly clicking the link on that page in your image will show you more details about the traffic to that page.

I'd suspect that it's bots and spammers that are mainly hitting the contact form causing the high number of views.

As for how to fix it, well you'd need to find a way to view detailed stats on that page about the traffic and people hitting it, mainly trying to get there user agent information which then you can use to block/prevent that page/or script from loading based on user agent matching. Another option is depending where the captcha/contact form is on your page, if it's/or if you can put it below the fold on your page you can use lazy loading on it so it wont show/process as an execution unless the user scrolls down the page and it comes into view, else it'll load/execute as soon as anyone hits your page.

|improve this answer
  • Unfortunately it was a client's decision, trust me I wouldn't have if I had known ;) But for future reference, I added Country/IP Blockers and only allowed access to search-engine bots, both via .htaccess. Comparing the results between two days in AWStats and it cut our hits/script executions in half. Thank you! – Andrea Rose Aug 31 '17 at 14:13
  • Nice; yeah in the world and age we live in now sites are pretty much constantly being hit by bots both good and bad and spammers/hackers looking for exploits. Also I'm surprise there are even host's that still operate that way. – Jeff Wilbert Aug 31 '17 at 14:46

protected by Stephen Ostermiller♦ Sep 30 '17 at 20:35

Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).

Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.