Is RAM usage usually included anywhere in a website owner's logs? Alot of website plans tout high bandwidth allowances but complain if you use too many "resources." Is this measure transparent? Or do you just have to take their word for it when they make this claim?
Not in the logs and in a lot of cases it's not even possible to pull up the actual ram usage of a specific site accurately. You could measure a persons memory usage on their PHP scripts but not how much of the web server they're using. The same can be said about MySQL it is very difficult to determine that as well. There are ways to do some of it but I doubt very many hosts are compiling their own versions of the software and maintaining time to pull 100% accurate data. For the most part though the too much resource usage comes from PHP and/or MySQL and not static traffic which a web server can easily handle.
Depending on the control panel you might be able to figure it out there. That is why I use ServerPronto though. For $29.99 a month I get a full dedicated server and do not have to worry about shared access issues.