What happens when a site hits its resource limit

Only that account is affected. It is held at its share until demand drops. Your other accounts carry on exactly as before, and so does everybody else on the machine.

Reading the symptom

Which boundary you met determines what you see, and that is genuinely useful information:

• Processor: pages drag while things are busy, then behave normally when they are not. No error appears anywhere.
• Memory: a sudden failed page rather than a slow one, because something was stopped mid-work.
• Simultaneous requests: readers wait in line. Frequently this is a slow-page problem wearing a different hat, since slow work holds its place longer.
• Disk activity: pauses during archives, bulk imports or heavy queries.

Look at the right number

Your panel reports both consumption and how often a boundary was actually met. Consumption on its own misleads badly. A site sitting comfortably high all day with nothing recorded against it is thriving. A site barely registering on average but bumping the ceiling several times daily is being pushed by something scheduled, and that is the one to investigate.

Work through it in this order

1. Confirm caching is enabled and genuinely storing pages. For editorial sites this removes most of the demand by itself.
2. Push scheduled work away from busy hours, and give each site a different minute so they stop colliding.
3. Hunt for background activity: extensions that call home or write to the database on every single request.
4. Only then think about buying more.

Is this a warning about my account?

No. Nothing is being held against you and nothing needs explaining to us. The boundary exists so the machine stays predictable, including for the rest of your own sites.

Will I be charged for going over?

No. Reaching an allowance slows that account down; it does not generate a bill or a penalty. Nothing needs settling afterwards.

How do I know it is not the server?

Compare with your own other accounts. One account struggling while its siblings are calm is that account's workload. Every account of yours struggling at once is usually something applied to all of them, such as an update sweep or your own crawler working through the estate.

Will you tell me if it keeps happening?

The figures are yours to read at any time, and if something looks persistent you are welcome to send us the numbers and we will look at them with you before you spend anything.

If boundaries are met daily rather than occasionally and caching is already doing its job, the workload has genuinely outgrown shared hosting, and a VPS with reserved resources is the honest next step. Detail in Platform and Limits.