Please bear with me here. I’m not sure as I write this what code/information to supply, but please don’t hesitate to ask.

I run a WordPress website that’s hosted by GoDaddy and uses cPanel for the backend interface. There have been two incidents lately where the website’s memory and CPU usage dramatically spiked from relatively low baseline levels to nearly max capacity. The first incident, CPU usage went from a baseline of 14% to 100%. The second instant affected only the physical memory but it also maxed it out.

The first time this occurred, I tried to research as much as I could. A lot of threads suggested that it could be due to malicious traffic. Therefore I installed a firewall from a plug-in and another plug-in that limits login attempts to prevent a brute force login attack. This was about 3 weeks ago. Nothing had occurred until just today where the spike in memory occurred and the site went down.

Any ideas what could possibly be causing this? I tried to talk to GoDaddy tech support, but they kept insisting it’s due to unoptimized plug-ins, but I don’t understand how that causes the random spikes in resource usage?