Huge spike in traffic causing my site to crash

[ShadWilliams]

Just a little background, I was originally on a simple shared hosting plan with Ipower for $99/yr but my site would keep crashing and my emails would get caught as spam because of other sites on the same server. They recommended I upgrade to a VPS for $800+/yr. They never mentioned that they don't provide support for VPS. Plesk is a lot more complicated than the Cpanel I was used too so I'm kind of lost when using it. Anytime something goes wrong they told me to restart the containger but thats not helping with this problem

For several months my traffic log was under 1GB/day and in the last 3 days has spiked to 13GB/day. Its crashing my site and email every few minutes causing "slmmemory limit" alerts. I called support and they told me I needed to upgrade to a server with more memory (and more money) which they're doing now but they couldn't explain the huge spike it traffic. I'm certainly not seeing an increse in sales or emails. Does anyone know where/how to find out where this traffic is coming from? Any help or advice is much appreciated. Thanks

You can see screenprints of my traffic log & resource alerts here:
http://i39.tinypic.com/11qi6tg.jpg
http://i44.tinypic.com/1z3aw6h.jpg

Parallels Plesk Panel version 9.5.4
Operating system Linux 2.6.18-028stab092.1
CPU GenuineIntel, Intel(R) Xeon(R)CPU E5410 @ 2.33GHz
Average load 0.21; 0.18; 0.09

 

[trialotto]

Shad,

The SLMmemory parameter is a Virtuozzo container setting, limiting the amount of memory for a container.

The real issue of the site crashing is not the traffic, but the limited memory in the Virtuozzo container.

The issue of the traffic is a separate issue: it can be due to some bots, or other (non-human) traffic, or just a lot of visitors.

From the logs you should be able to get a clue what kind of traffic it is.

Kind regards....

PS $800 dollar per year is too much for a VPS, you have wonderful dedicated servers for that (you can always mail me for that). A dedicated server will, in your case, resolve the problems caused by the current hosting provider (!) and/or give you enough memory on a dedicated server to have your site running properly (!).