HTTP 503 / 508

¶HTTP 503

HTTP 503 errors can occur when a web hosting plan has used all the memory available in the selected product, or when a script times out.

¶HTTP 508

This error occurs when an individual web hosting plan has too many concurrent PHP threads running.

A web hosting plan can experience this error if it is under attack or if the web hosting plan is not optimised well enough to handle many concurrent visits, e.g. from crawlers.

¶What you can do

You can follow your web hosting plan's current resource usage under the "Website" menu item in our Control Panel. Here, under "Resource usage", you can also find more details on what you can do to resolve the problem.

Check the logs under "Webserver logs" in our Control Panel to see whether your site is under attack or whether a crawler is causing the problem.
We do not have any more logs than those already available and presented in the Control Panel.

¶Optimise (with caching)

The problem can occur if poorly performing plugins are installed, or if there are heavy SQL calls being executed that the PHP threads are waiting for.

Always make sure to activate and install cache modules and other features that can reduce your web hosting plan's resource usage.

¶Optimise WordPress

If you use WordPress, you can try to optimise WordPress through our WordPress tool, which you can find in our Control Panel.

¶Purchase more resources

Often, however, the cause of the error code is simply that your site is "outgrowing" your current hosting plan with us, and you can therefore upgrade to a larger plan with more resources to resolve the problem.

You can upgrade your product to a larger plan, with more PHP threads, thereby raising the resource limit. Upgrade your product through our Control Panel.

¶Restart PHP threads

A temporary solution to the problem may be to restart all PHP processes/threads on the web hosting plan. This is done under the "Website" menu item in our Control Panel.