Help! My new Laravel application development project keeps hitting 'Too many connections' error after deployment.

hey everyone, hope you're all doing well! i asked a question recently about getting better laravel support for my new app, and thanks for the advice. i've been trying to implement some of it but now i've hit a pretty big roadblock with my Laravel application development project.

the problem is, after i deploy my app to shared hosting, everything works fine for a bit, maybe an hour or two, and then i start getting a "Too many connections" error. it makes the whole app unresponsive and i have to wait for it to clear up or manually restart some stuff, which i'm not even sure i'm doing right.

i'm using laravel 10, and my database is MySQL. i'm on a pretty standard shared hosting package, so i'm wondering if that's part of the issue. i thought shared hosting would be okay for a small app, but this connection thing is really bothering me.

i've tried a few things:

• i checked my .env file to make sure the database credentials are correct (they are).
• i tried searching online and some people suggested increasing max_connections in MySQL config, but i don't have direct access to that on shared hosting.
• i also tried to see if i had any long-running queries, but it's a pretty simple app right now.

this kinda what the error looks like in my laravel logs:

[2023-10-27 14:35:01] production.ERROR: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1203 User 'your_db_user'@'localhost' has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections (Connection: mysql, SQL: select * from `users` where `id` = 1 limit 1) {"exception":"[object] (Illuminate\\Database\\QueryException(code: HY000): SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1203 User 'your_db_user'@'localhost' has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections (Connection: mysql, SQL: select * from `users` where `id` = 1 limit 1) at /var/www/html/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php:712)
[stacktrace]
#0 /var/www/html/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php(672): Illuminate\\Database\\Connection->runQueryCallback()
#1 /var/www/html/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php(359): Illuminate\\Database\\Connection->pretend()
... more stack trace ...

i'm really new to this deployment stuff, so i'm not sure if i'm missing something fundamental. is there a common pitfall for Laravel application development on shared hosting that leads to this? or am i just doing something wrong with my database connections? any tips on how to properly debug this or what to look for would be super helpful. should i be closing connections manually somewhere? or is it more about a connection pool?

help a brother out please...