thegx.ca/forum
Member
No worries thank you for your advice about the bots etc if anything the resource problem is bots since less than 10 members are active on our forumIt's not just members of your forum--search bots have been known to hammer sites and drive up resource usage substantially. I had an issue last week where a bot from China was hitting a busy forum so hard that when we figured out what was happening and blocked them in the firewall, the visitor count dropped by 1500 in a matter of about 10-15 minutes. Our host saw many bursts of accesses all at once, which was nearly causing us a denial of service attack. (It's a site we have not yet set up to use with Cloudflare.)
It's in the terms of shared hosting agreements that resource usage be within a certain amount. That said, they are not really suitable for something as resource intensive as a forum, especially when traffic ticks upward. Decades ago when I was on shared hosting, I occasionally had sites taken offline due to abnormally high resource usage. It was not pressure to upgrade--it was simply to keep our shared server neighbors from suffering the loads of one customer (us). So they are well within their right to suspend service, especially when the load of one site affects all the other customer sites on the same server.
Some shared hosts offer more generous allowances. I admin a really busy forum that runs on a dedicated server but otherwise, I run a group of sites and forums across three Droplets at Digital Ocean. So I really can't help recommending another host to move to.