I want to understand what socket connections are and how do I recover from this error?

[Muanza]

This is the message I received. This account/site was automatically suspended for making more than 10,000 socket connections per month and has been suspended.

[Greenreader9]

Can you share the exact message?

Because I think you hit the hits limit, not some socket limit.

What does the hits limit mean

One of the limits InfinityFree enforces is the “hits” limit. This article explains what a hit is, how you can control your hits usage and what happens if you exceed the limit. What is a hit? A hit is a simply request to a file on your website, which can be a HTML or PHP page, an image, a CSS file or something else. A hit is not the same as a page view, visit or visitor. Visitor can visit your website multiple times, a visit can include multiple page views, and a single page view can include mu…

[Admin]

I see that you’ve already been given some quite elaborate explanations in the replies to your ticket.

In general, these “socket connections” are connections made from your site to external services. Socket connections themselves are perfectly normal of course, but excessive outbound connections are suspicious. That could point to someone trying to use our hosting to try to hack other sites or services, which we don’t want to happen.

For this reason, we track and count these external connections, and take actions if there is any unusual behavior.

In the ticket, it was alluded that your usage of indexing plugins to push content to search engines could be the cause for this. You could try to check the settings of these plugins to reduce the number of index pushes if possible, definitely avoid using multiple plugins that may push the same content multiple times, or maybe stop using these plugins entirely.