Applies to: All plans (Self-Managed and Managed).
Every Maxinodes hosting account runs inside its own CloudLinux LVE (Lightweight Virtual Environment). An LVE is a ring-fence around your account that caps how much CPU, memory and disk activity it can use at any moment. This page explains each limit in plain English, lists the numbers for each plan, and explains why we do it.
The short version: these limits keep one busy account from slowing down everyone else on the server, and they tell you when your site has outgrown its plan.
Why we isolate accounts
Shared hosting puts many accounts on one physical server. Without isolation, a single site under heavy load — a traffic spike, a runaway plugin, a badly written database query — could starve every other account on that machine. CloudLinux gives each account a fixed slice of the server's resources, so your site's performance depends on your usage, not your neighbour's. This is the foundation of stable, predictable shared hosting.
When your account briefly exceeds a limit, requests are queued or momentarily rejected and visitors may see a 508 "Resource Limit Reached" error. This is not a full outage: it clears as soon as your usage drops back under the limit.
What each limit means
| Limit | What it controls | What it feels like when you hit it |
|---|---|---|
| CPU / SPEED | How much processor power your account can use, expressed as a percentage of a CPU core (100% = one full core). | Pages render more slowly while you are throttled; heavy scripts take longer. |
| Physical memory (PMEM) | The maximum RAM your account's processes can hold at once. | Scripts that ask for more memory than allowed fail (one common cause of the WordPress white screen). |
| Entry processes (EP) | How many requests can be actively entering your account at the same instant (each page load in flight counts as one). | Extra concurrent visitors are briefly queued; bursts of traffic can trigger a 508. |
| Number of processes (NPROC) | The total processes your account may run at once (PHP workers, cron tasks, shell sessions). | New processes are refused until older ones finish. |
| IO | Disk read/write throughput in megabytes per second. | File-heavy operations (large uploads, backups, big imports) slow down. |
| IOPS | Disk operations per second — how many separate reads/writes you can perform. | Many small file operations (some plugins, large media libraries) get throttled. |
These are all momentary limits — they apply to what you are using right now and reset constantly. The one cumulative limit on your account is disk space, which is set by your plan rather than by the LVE. We do not apply a file-count (inode) limit.
Per-plan limits
These are the LVE limits configured for each plan. The live values for your account are shown in cPanel (see below).
| Self-Managed Lite | Self-Managed Plus | Self-Managed Pro | Starter | Growth | Business | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU / SPEED | 100% | 150% | 200% | 150% | 200% | 250% |
| Physical memory (PMEM) | 768 MB | 1 GB | 1.5 GB | 1 GB | 1.5 GB | 2 GB |
| Entry processes (EP) | 20 | 30 | 40 | 30 | 40 | 50 |
| Processes (NPROC) | 40 | 60 | 80 | 60 | 80 | 100 |
| IO | 2 MB/s | 4 MB/s | 6 MB/s | 4 MB/s | 6 MB/s | 10 MB/s |
| IOPS | 1024 | 2048 | 3072 | 2048 | 3072 | 4096 |
Every allowance scales with the tier. Note that the two lines run on the same platform, so Self-Managed Plus and Managed Starter get identical resources, as do Self-Managed Pro and Managed Growth — you are choosing who operates the server, not a bigger or smaller machine. Managed Business has the most headroom. Enterprise runs on dedicated hardware, so its limits are sized to the quoted build rather than the figures above.
Bandwidth is unmetered under fair use — the real ceiling on traffic is your IO and IOPS allowance, not a transfer cap.
How to check your own usage
cPanel shows your live resource usage, so you never have to guess:
- Log in to cPanel from your client area (open the service, then Log in to cPanel).
- Open the resource-usage tool — the Resource Usage option (and the CloudLinux statistics view), usually under the Metrics section.
Result: You will see graphs and a snapshot of CPU, memory, EP, IO and IOPS against your limits, with any recent moments where you were throttled flagged.
Storage is not part of the LVE. Your plan caps disk space, and there is no file-count (inode) limit — see How to check your disk usage and file count.
What to do if you keep hitting a limit
If you are throttled occasionally during traffic peaks, that is normal and self-correcting. If it happens often, you have two paths:
- Reduce usage. Enable caching (the LiteSpeed Cache / LSCache plugin pairs with our server-level cache), remove unused or heavy plugins, optimise slow database queries, run a modern PHP version (e.g. PHP 8.x is usually faster), and clear out stale files to free disk space.
- Upgrade the plan. If your site has simply outgrown its current tier, moving up gives you more CPU, memory and headroom. You can change plans yourself in client area -> Services -> My Services.
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