HTTP 509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded — Unofficial Status Code

Overview

HTTP 509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded is an unofficial status code used by some hosting providers when a website exceeds its allocated bandwidth.

Key Details

• Not an official HTTP status code — not defined in any RFC
• Used by Apache extensions (bw_mod) and some hosting providers
• cPanel and shared hosting commonly use this for bandwidth overages
• The website remains accessible once the bandwidth resets (usually monthly)
• Some providers also use 509 when disk space is exceeded

Common Causes

• Website traffic exceeded the hosting plan bandwidth allocation
• Large file downloads consuming bandwidth rapidly
• DDoS attack consuming all available bandwidth
• Hot-linked images or files being served to external sites
• Sudden traffic spike from social media or news coverage

Steps

1. 1Contact your hosting provider to check bandwidth usage and limits
2. 2Upgrade hosting plan for higher bandwidth allocation
3. 3Implement a CDN (Cloudflare, CloudFront) to offload bandwidth
4. 4Optimize images and enable compression to reduce bandwidth per page
5. 5Check for hot-linking: configure .htaccess to block external image requests

Tags

More in 5xx Server Error

Frequently Asked Questions