Hint, it’s not what you think it is!
What is a Noisy Neighbor?
In a shared hosting environment (this is the most commonly used hosting solution), limits are set on the number of resources a single website may use. These limits are somewhat elastic – within reason. When a website uses, on average, more resources than other websites in the same shared-server array, the hosting provider will flag the website as a Noisy Neighbor. When this happens, the website could be relocated to a special restricted server environment where limits on resources are strictly controlled. This will have an effect on the performance and user experience of the website – not good.
Why does this happen?
There are many reasons why a website might use excessive resources. bad code, heavy server-side activity, and very high traffic. One reason we have seen quite often is very high traffic from bots and other non-human user agents.
This type of traffic can bog down your website making it run slow and it can exhaust your shared server resource allocation – really fast!
Unfortunately, most hosting providers do not provide the tools to mitigate this issue. They will usually advise you to upgrade to a plan with more resources or even your own dedicated server, this can get quite expensive and will not solve the problem.
What can we do to mitigate this problem?
We implement 2 types of firewalls; end-point firewalls and cloud firewalls. They each perform slightly different functions and operate in different places in the segmented infrastructure. When properly implemented, these firewalls offer the best protection against many types of security and resource issues.
