Resource Abuse Policy

Positive Fusion allows Perl and PHP scripting to be used on all Virtual Servers. Perl and PHP can be resource intensive however, and because a Virtual Server must be shared with other users, we must limit resource consumption by any one account on a shared server.

  1. What is "Resource Abuse"?

    1. Any site whose scripting is using excessive amounts of system resources. Excessive amounts is defined as any amount that results in substantial degradation of server performance. Positive Fusion is the sole determinant of what consititues degraded server performance.

    2. Movable Type versions prior to 4.x are prohibited due to the nature of the comment and trackback systems.

  2. Why does Positive Fusion have this policy?

    Server Speed and Fairness to others

    A Virtual Server is shared. As such, there are many accounts per machine. In all fairness, Positive Fusion cannot allow one or two clients to use all of the system resources on a shared machine and have all other clients on the machine suffer because of it. Excessive resource usage by one or more clients causes extreme slowness in many areas such as FTP, Email, and serving of web pages. If the resource usage gets too far out of hand, all sites hosted on the machine will return errors and not be accessible.

  3. What happens if I violate this policy?

    All accounts that are found to using excessive amounts of system resources will receive an email warning from Positive Fusion. This warning will inform you that there is too much Perl or PHP running and it will provide options for reducing the usage. If you do not reduce the usage within 24 hours of the email being sent, your scripts will be disabled.

    1. Emergent Resource Abuse

      In instances where the resource abuse is causing imminent harm to quality of service the website may be taken offline temporarily to return server load to normal. At such time a notification will be sent to the user by Positive Fusion with instructions as above.

    2. Resource Abuse Prevention

      We limit the number of page requests per second, otherwise known as throttling. Under normal circumstances this procedure is completely transparent. We do this for the following reasons:

      1. Global attacks on content management systems are on the increase. This type of attack generally has a rate limit (pages requested per second) considerably higher than that allowed and thus they are prevented.

      2. The Slashdot Effect: A website can become overly popular and thus by virtue of that popularity it ceases to function, bringing the server to a halt along with the websites of all other server neighbors.

      3. Over-zealous bots and website copiers. If they fail to maintain a responsible rate limit a degradation in service quality can result. Ethical search engine bots used by commonly recognized companies, e.g. Google, use responsible rate limits and are thus not problematic, nor are they throttled.

      When our resource abuse prevention (throttle) is being utilized any request after the set limit will receive a "503: Resource Temporarily Unavailable" error until the situation has been resolved.