BlueHost & HostMonster User Alert: CPU Throttling

Are you a HostMonster or BlueHost customer? Are you experience slow site loading time recently? Well if your answer is yes, there’s a big chance that your site is being affected by HostMonster’s latest server feature – CPU throttling!

What is CPU Throttling?

Depends on what kind of CPU you are talking about – the term “CPU throttling” is used to describe the process of reducing CPU usage to avoid the computer processor getting overheated and damaged. Such technique is also used by Intel chips to optimize energy consumption.

CPU throttling in hosting

However the term has a different meaning when it comes to web hosting. When your website on a shared server is pulling “too much” CPU resources at one time, the CPU will freeze (or slash down) your account CPU usage. At this particular time, your website will respond extremely slow and your jailed website will only be released when the staffs think it is okay. Such hosting feature was not seen before until Matt Heaton spent thousands of hours (according to himself) developing the system and introduced this so called Hosting Nirvana (One might argue DreamHost has been doing this for some time – but technically, it’s not the same at all).

Who is implementing CPU throttling now?

So far from what I know, BlueHost and HostMonster (they are under same management).

Is CPU throttling a good thing?

Well, apparently the web host will tell you that this feature is “for the good of all shared hosting users”.

But don’t you think this is such a convenient excuse for the web hosts to push away their responsibility; and blame their users for not using the server “properly”? Would the president of BlueHost (with over 1.5 million websites hosted on it!) spent thousands of hours developing this new system just because he wants to “change the hosting world for good”?

(Sorry to be such a cynic but things just look too fishy and I can’t help but keep doubting their real intention of doing so.)

WebHostingSecretRevealed.com is affected! Website loading extremely slow occasionally.

At this time of writing, this little blog is throttled about 30 minutes daily. According to reader Troy of alterego-of-pwi.info, my blog took up to 45 seconds to load (it normally takes less than 3 seconds in normal time)!

CPU throttling at Hostmonster

What has been done so far to handle this problem

FYI, I am now in the mid of discussion with the HostMonster supports to solve the issue. They’ve been very friendly and helpful so far but they just can’t explain some of my questions. For example they told me that the throttle could be caused by buggy scripts or heavy MySQL errors – but from my observation, my site still get throttled on the day where no error was logged! Is the site throttled because HostMonster couldn’t handle the amount of traffics I’m getting? Why are my other sites (with bigger databases and a lot more web applications) are working perfectly with Hostgator and FatCow but things look so screwed up with HostMonster?

Sorry for the slow load time!

Apologizes if you experienced slow load time with my blog recently. Please bear with me for this – I’m trying as fast as I can to investigate the matter and come out with the right solution. I’ll keep things posted here.

Big thanks to Troy T. Hall

To Troy who wrote me long emails explaining the situation – million thanks! And, I wish things are working smoothly with your site right now.

How to check if your hosting account is throttled or not?

Login to your BlueHost or HostMonster cPanel account, scroll down to the ‘Log’ session and click the ‘CPU throttling’ icon (see figure).

CPU throttling at Hostmonster

Click in and you can check your site status from the popped up page.




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44 Comments for "BlueHost & HostMonster User Alert: CPU Throttling"

  1. avatar Matt Heaton Says:

    Bluehost.com and Hostmonster.com do not throttle “inadvertently”. There is ALWAYS a valid reason to being throttled. The current running configuration does not limit MySQL in any way (Although this will change in the next week). And we never allow an account that is being throttled to go below 33% usage of a single core. This means you get AT LEAST 1/3 or a core all the time, and 99% of the time our “throttled” account average double that amount. If you are being throttled for 30 minutes in a day there is some serious cpu usage going on with something you are running. It could be a simple plugin or something far more serious.

    Also, please note that being “throttled” does NOT mean your site is running slower. It CAN mean that, but 90% of the time it doesn’t. It only means that you have been flagged as a site to put in the cpu throttling environment (Which lasts anywhere from 2-10 seconds at a time with our current config). I know this isn’t a great description, but its just far too complicated to explain on a blog comment.

    Thanks,
    Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com / Hostmonster.com

  2. avatar Jerry Says:

    Matt, I am surprise your reply came in so soon. And as you’d probably reading this, I’ve to tell you that what you’ve done with the Linux kernel modification is superb and in fact I was damn excited to learn what you’ve achieved at the first place.

    Nevertheless with all due respect, I am not convinced that your support team knows the valid reason for my blog to be throttled. For example, in one email with the support, you staffs told me that it’s about my plugin and MySQL database (and you were telling me that the configurations do not limit database so far); on another email, I get this:

    It could be a plugin or a theme that is causing the issue with your site or just having a lot of content.

    The replies I got from the supports are contradicting to each others and no one can answer my question directly. Why does my site still get throttled even though there’s no error logged on the day (Oct 3rd)?

    Or perhaps this recent ‘support’ email explains everything?

    Dear Customer,

    As with most shared hosting companies we put a correct amount of accounts on each server an as accounts grow we will move them from one server to another to accommodate them to a point if you fill that you need a high cpu server you can purchase on at the rate of $19.99 a month as these servers have a lot fewer accounts on them it does give you a little more cpu time.

    Thank you, Tim
    Hostmonster.com
    866.573.4678

    Everything seems so ‘conveniently’ in the favor of HostMonster/BlueHost. It makes me feel that the supports are actually BS-ing me about the plugin and database errors; and at the end of the day, the solution is to BUY MORE from HostMonster/BlueHost.

    And on top of everything, why we, the customers of HostMonster and BlueHost (I’m using both!), were not notified properly when this CPU throttle feature was introduced? Why do I need a reader to write in, telling me that my site is loading extremely slow in certain time frame? Why isn’t my host, which I had just renew for another 24 months subscription, drop me a notification email on that?

  3. avatar Troy Hall Says:

    I agree Jerry at this second, the notification of throttling is not even in the TOC’s. ( least wasn’t 7 days ago ) at one point I was told “Well if you don’t have content on our servers then you won’t be throttled”. Since “Joomla” is VERY database heavy and has relatively few static pages I would expect that kind of a site to experience zero throttling. But infact its not so. Keep up the good work.

  4. avatar Buck Says:

    Explains why web site has been so slow lately at Blue host. Sometimes the web page won’t even load. Other times parts are missing like the background or links won’t work. Everything worked fine before they started this throttling thing. Thanks for the info. Now looking for a new reliable web host.

  5. avatar Jason Says:

    I have similar problem recently and I thought it was due to my recent upgrade to “web pro” account. But after looking at my CPU throttling graph I think this “feature” is the root cause. I got response from hostmonster support saying that I am over the threshold of 40 sec per minute of CPU time, and therefore I am penalized. I don’t remember I signed up for this when I choose this host.

    I found some interesting log in my mysql-slow-queries file. Some very simple query takes more than 2 seconds. Would it be possible that the mysql DB slowed down because it is shared, and that affecting my CPU usage?

    [~/tmp/mysql_slow_queries]# cat 20091008-13.log
    # Thu Oct 8 13:32:11 2009
    # Query_time: 2 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 0 Rows_examined: 0
    use crosspo2_tiwi1;
    select `fromPage` from `tiki_links` where `toPage` = ‘CrosspointIT’ and `fromPage` not like ‘objectlink:%’

    mysql> select `fromPage` from `tiki_links` where `toPage` = ‘CrosspointIT’ and `fromPage` not like ‘objectlink:%’;
    +———-+
    | fromPage |
    +———-+
    | The Team |
    | HomePage |
    | Desktop |
    +———-+
    3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

    mysql> explain select `fromPage` from `tiki_links` where `toPage` = ‘CrosspointIT’ and `fromPage` not like ‘objectlink:%’;
    +—-+————-+————+——+—————+——–+———+——-+——+————-+
    | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
    +—-+————-+————+——+—————+——–+———+——-+——+————-+
    | 1 | SIMPLE | tiki_links | ref | toPage | toPage | 162 | const | 3 | Using where |
    +—-+————-+————+——+—————+——–+———+——-+——+————-+
    1 row in set (0.00 sec)

    I think there is some problem in their CPU throttling algorithm. Please fix and I want to get back my snappy site.

  6. avatar Pete Says:

    So glad I found this post!

    It’s clear to me that this is a ploy to drive more sales of higher CPU accounts. There is nothing in this for customers; just the host! When I experienced the same thing, knowing that nothing had changed on my site and therefore that the change must be at the host end, the support people didn’t even admit that they had changed their setup. They said it was my site that was at fault! Clearly not the case; they have changed their config, they have not advertised it, and they are now trying to force my hand by stealth! Poor! Very poor!

    When I bought a service under a specific set of Ts&Cs I expected it to stay like that. Not one day to suddenly, without warning, get ham-strung!!!

    A very annoyed BlueHost customer,
    Pete.

  7. avatar Sterling Adventures Blog » BlueHost Strangles Customer Sites with CPU Throttling Says:

    [...] web host (BlueHost) has introduced… Read on to learn more. It wasn’t until I found the BlueHost & HostMonster User Alert: CPU Throttling article on another blog that I had my suspicions confirmed. There’s a reasonably detailed [...]

  8. avatar Jason Says:

    I am over it. I had the same issue a few years ago with mediatemple, that is why I moved to blue host. And here we go again. I don’t have time for this. I just want a host company that does what I pay for, and isn’t micro managing my CPU, and trying to squeeze every cent out of all of the accounts.

  9. avatar Todd Says:

    I’m having the same issue with Blue Host. This is absolutely nuts. They have destroyed my traffic on the site and I’m getting unbelievable complaints from my readers. Nothing has changed on my site EXCEPT for BlueHost and their deceptive changes recently.

  10. avatar Kathy Says:

    What, no response from Matt? I am a web developer with literally over 100 websites on BlueHost. Same probems. Contradictory answers from their tech support, and now I have sites going down. When even the BlueHost site went down this morning, with an error screen with their logo, their tech support tried to tell me I must be having internet problems. Uggghhhh. I once had a brand new client whose site went down for 4 hours on the day it launched. When I called them, they said they were doing software upgrades. During business hours, I asked? The smartass tech support guy told me that their Japanese clients were more important. I was not amused and closed the account. Looks like I may have to switch all my clients

  11. avatar John Rocheleau - Zen-Moments Says:

    Same issue here with BlueHost

    I get a WebCeo host monitoring report once a week. It alerted me to several time-outs occuring each day last week. I then looked at the CPU Throttling chart in my BlueHost admin and found that my account is being throttled nearly all the time (last 24 hours) with a few huge spikes of throttling interspersed.

    The things is: I have only two sites with them. One is a static html site http://www.JohnRocheleau.com and the other is a wordpress blog http://www.zen-moments.com . The traffic between them is less than 60 uniques a day. I used to get up to 1200 uniques per day on the blog but have let it die out for the last few months. Time outs were never a problem when I had higher traffic, so I can’t understand why I’m being throttled now with such low traffic. Neither site has any resource intensive scripts (no chat, forums, video, etc.). The WP blog has only a few, popular plugins and no new ones.

    I called support and they said that perhaps someone hacked into your site and inserted some script that is causing the resource usage. Pretty unlikely though as I have kept my WordPress versions totally up to date and no strange site issues have been reported.

    I think they need to do some self-examination before advising clients to check for any strange scripts that hackers may have inserted into what should be a secure installation of WordPress. I can’t imagine how long it would take me to check every file for something added (assuming I would recognize it if I saw it).

    Perhaps Matt is still reading this and taking notes. Is there a way for instance to track the exact source of the resource usage?

  12. avatar Eric Says:

    I too have a similar issue with Bluehost. When I was Farked earlier this year I was throttled to the point of essentially being shut down for a half an hour.

    They also said that Bluehost management frowned upon sites that get Farked and if it happens more I would be booted out of Bluehost.

    During this same phonecall they then complained to me about having things wrong with the MySQL database (and claimed that I wasn’t being throttled), but couldn’t elaborate anything else.

    I didn’t touch the MySQL. Never before, never since have I noticed an issue with MySQL.

    Since then I’ve had issues with Bluehost over their helpdesk, or lack thereof. I reached a level 3, or 4? for something and the end result was “I don’t know what’s happening and another developer will get back to you” I never heard from another mysterious developer or had a reply from the higher level folk.

    Overall, AMAZING!

  13. avatar Eric Says:

    Well I’m “glad” I’m not the only one… The Website included with this post is the only active site on 1 of my bluehost accounts. Simple html homepage with coppermine modified to browse-only. Still, 3-5 users at the same time and account throttles. I’ve been investigating to see my processes real-time with SSH while it throttles and I only have time to see some 0.1% (of CPU power) to rarely 0.4% and never last more than 1 second. I’m truly wondering how this can get 40 out of 60 secs of a core?!? Also, like Matt said, I start feeling the throttling when it lasts for 30-40 secs and up, BUT can’t find what’s eating up THAT MUCH CPU on my account, if it really is…

  14. avatar Eric Says:

    I’d like to add that I’ve done this procedure on all of my accounts without any success. And Matt, in my opinion, your tech guys are too “always answer positively” and “I always know what I’m saying”. This results in me now feeling I’m going to lose my time everytime I need to talk to support, which is totally the opposite of when I used to write to you (Matt) directly in the good “old” times.

  15. avatar Morgan Says:

    I’m a bit incredulous. I’m a customer who has looked into this as well, and from what I understand, even when you’re “strangled” you’re guaranteed 33% of a processor at a minimum. For a shared hosting service that’s pretty generous, if that’s not enough to run your site, then I’d say it’s time to either get off of $5/mo web hosting or take a good hard look at your code. I had a few things that I fixed, and I think perhaps there were a few bugs in their system that they’ve since worked out.

    You might want to ask them exactly how much CPU your stuff is using, or SSH in and look yourself rather than deflecting the blame. From what I understand, a user has to monopolize an entire CPU for awhile before their system kicks in and says ‘hold on there, let others have a chance’.

    A lot of “load and go” software, especially PHP stuff like wordpress and its plethora of poorly written plugins, is notoriously inefficient and cpu hungry. They’ll churn and grind on the CPU just to spit out a few dynamic elements. My guess is that beforehand, 5% of the users were monopolizing 90% of the CPU and ‘strangling’ everyone else. Now bluehost is ‘strangling’ those 5% (as opposed to the alternative of telling them to find another web host) and allowing the rest to breathe. Naturally, the 5% are going to complain.

    It can’t be easy to make sure everyone gets their fair share on such a system, especially when some users are trying to get by on cheap hosting when they require dedicated resources.

  16. avatar Sam Says:

    Jerry, I appreciate your complaints about Hostmonster, but I think that you are at least partially misunderstanding the explanations given by Matt and Hostmonster support.

    You say that they are unable to tell you why your site is being limited but that isn’t quite accurate. Your site is being throttled because it is using up too much CPU time. How much is “too much” is up to the hosting provider, and I am not claiming that whatever limits they have set are reasonable, but the question of whether or not you are exceeding those limits should be fairly black and white.

    The thing that the support staff is not able to tell you, of course, is why your site is using up so much cpu time. This is only natural, since to know the real reason they would likely need to test and debug your code, which is clearly not their job. They can only guess that it may have to do with a poorly written plugin or a database problem. Also note that the kind of problems we talking about here are not the kind that will show up in an error log. The code may be perfectly valid and functional, but just run slowly. The same goes for the setup of your database.

    My website was also throttled by Blue Host, and it did turn out that it was making much larger than expected demands on the cpu. WordPress by default is already known to be rather inefficient (see http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001105.html), and on top of that I had made some modifications that were querying the database an excessive number of times. In my case, I was able to fix the problem by clearning up my code and most importantly, installing WP Super Cache.

  17. avatar Mikko Says:

    This must be the worst case ever. I am getting CPU throttling of 35-40 secs each minute with my WordPress blog when just browsing around the blog without any other client accessing the site at the same time. And before I installed caching plugin I got even worse results. I have 50 unique visitors each day and I have already got suspended twice this fall. Already looking for new provider.

    I just woder how many sites they are trying to squeeze on one server anyway…

  18. avatar Palveluntarjojalla tökkii | Takapiha Says:

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  19. avatar Miscellaneous updates on Hostgator Says:

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  20. avatar Old Virginia News» Blog Archive » Old Va is being throttled by Blue Host Says:

    [...] Read about the isssue and some other unhappy customers. [...]

  21. avatar Peter Karl Says:

    Basically, it is better to slow done sites temporarily instead of closing them totally.

    If this is done good enough by the throttling function like described here, is a difficult question. I am a Hostmonster customer with several sites, only static content, so I have no problem risk.

    I had problems like described from Tikiwiki CMS software with some other hoster – good quality hoster, no hoster fault involved. There was close to no user traffic…

    I found out that 2 East Asian search engine crawlers created excessive traffic by dropping in some kind of infinit loop. I had to fine-tune the robots file up to a high level to get this 99 % of site traffic halted.

    I stated at this occasion: While Tikiwiki is high quality, it is suffering like others from a significant volume of code execution and DB look-ups for basic user functions.
    (I only like Tikiwiki and Typo3, do not like WP or Joomla or so.)
    All this software is perhaps not enough speed-optimized?

    My final solution – which can not solve the problems of most others – was to drop for CMS all use of external software,
    to run my own proprietary PERL CMS software on the local PC and to generate over FTP, Javascript (Browser..) and other functions some kind of working / looking like dynamic content.

    I am squatting external services – like RSS, advertisers etc. – in a way that I do not need / use any piece of software on the shared hosting account.

    This should work fine with many hosters – including hostmonster, where the main system of this type is runnig fine. But I do not consider this as a generally helpful way out of the problem risk.

  22. avatar Drew McManus Says:

    This has been an enormously useful post and subsequent discussion thread – thank you very much for making this conversation possible.

    I can certainly understand that sloppy code via WordPress plugins can lead to unnecessary CPU usage. What I wish hosts like Bluehost could provide is a way to determine which scripts/plugins were using the most CPU so I could easily make judgement calls or modifications (if possible).

    I think that’s the responsible thing for an account holder to do but why not focus more time and energy on making it as easy as possible for responsible users to do the right thing? Right now, the process is hopelessly convoluted and includes digging around in the MySQL database records and is a huge time drain.

    In an ideal world, it would be much easier if I had a list of each WP install and subsequent plugins and a graphic meter measuring CPU use.

    I’ve been using Bluehost for years and my accounts are throttled about 21 minutes per hour!!! I am now launching a new website design service that includes hosting and I need to decide if I should place all new accounts at Bluehost or consider other options such as Inmotion.

    I contacted tech support about this and asked if there was some sort of guarantee they could provide that demonstrates the minimum improvement of moving to a High CPU server (a jump up in monthly price from $6.95/mo to $19.95/mo). After checking with several superiors, the tech support rep said there was no written guarantee or even written example illustrating the minimum level of improvement for an account moving to a High CPU server. Even using my existing account as a reference point, they wouldn’t provide any sort of quantifiable improvement.

    I would love as much feedback as possible here as well as suggestion. Thanks in advance!

  23. avatar nlxj Says:

    Yup. Been with Bluehost for yearrrrrs. But it’s really getting aggravating. My site is being throttled, dont know how much or how long. I’m a writer and artist and videographer, not a code expert and I don’t have time nor know-how to get deep into the back panel and figure out “scripts” etc. I try to do my best to find errors and do what I can, but it’s just not my area. I refuse to buy more CPU, as I don’t run huge site, it’s a modestly sized blog. Yes, I have a lot of plugins, but I know nothing about what they “use” or “Queries” or anything. So I’m sort of stuck and either have to just disable a number of plugins–I guess–or suffer the throttle. Or hire someone, as they advised me, hire a “web developer.” I dont have money for such a thing. Oh well. But its very aggravating. I think I’m going to look for another host who has not introduced this nifty crap device of “throttling” or who at least can help me figure out what’s wrong so I can fix it.

  24. avatar Brian Brown, Ph.D. Says:

    I will be canceling my bluehost account when it expires in 2 months!

  25. avatar David Pye Says:

    Well, according to my “throttling” stats, “During the past 24 hours your account has been throttled for a total of 44280.535 seconds”.

    Now I have had the same site with Bluehost for about 4 years, I don’t use any mysql, don’t use “off the shelf” scripts, don’t use chatrooms, wordpress or anything else that is CPU intensive. I found out long ago that none of this can be used on shared hosting.

    I have about 3,000 – 3,500 unique visitors a day and use very simple php scripts that I wrote or adapted which use very little CPU time. It seems that I am being throttled simply because of the amount of traffic I have. What happened to “unlimited bandwidth”!

    My guess is that Bluehost are putting far too many sites on each server and since we are all “supposed” to have unlimited space and bandwidth – we all know that this is not possible. Bluehost has become just another greedy monster where money is the main focus.

    I have seen the change over the years, as my site used to run with next to no downtime and now it’s being throttled almost 50% of the time – and my site scripts etc haven’t changed!

    Customers aren’t important, except as a way for money hungry people to make lots of money.

  26. avatar Your site is down, what should you do? Says:

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  27. avatar RobertT Says:

    Funny how I found your blog post after a serious fight with my developer. I noticed “blank pages” instead of regular pages on my HM website (not listed here, I don’t want Matt to get any ideas before I pull it out) and blamed our code for flaws.
    It turns out that HM can limit the allowed run time on individual php scripts from someone’s accounts (or so it looks, since the overall reported throttling of this account is below 400s / day), without as little as popping out an e-mail or at least an error message.
    My only regret is that I have endorsed HM for over 3 years to our clients and that making us leave is exactly what they wanted with this tactic – save their resources for small websites with no traffic and no headaches. This after deleting all the e-mails in my personal account once (they blocked it because I was getting too many confirmations from a mailing campaing that was run through a 3rd party – maybe receiving up to 100 e-mails/hour for a few hours a day), when they told me that in order to reactivate the account I need to delete it and recreate with exactly the same name (pure bs, they use qmail or something similar, the effect of that was wiping the files, if they had not already been wiped by sloppy tech support).
    Enough ranting, time to move on – get VPS or dedi servers, people, if you have an online business, move to more respectable companies (strangely, not the case with them) if you are willing to postpone for another year or two until they too become greedy, and just put it to experience. At least you can stop paying for low quality service and put your money in some other shop who appreciates your business. Good luck to all former BH/HM customers!

  28. avatar Toy+Life Says:

    I’m with HostMonster – have been for years and never had this issue before until now. I have a Magento site that is perpetually being throttled. I was told it was the CSS files (c’mon) and also got the MySQL bugs / too many databases. My first question to the various tech support people was “why support Magento via Simple Scripts then?” and that never went anywhere. Overall the only response I got from them was that there was “something” on my end that was consuming memory and my option would be to rescript everything or to fork out an additional $20 a month for their premium service. Huh, sudden throttling and the offer to pay more. What I also bring up is that my magento site was about 99% live for months – the throttling only is a recent issue. I said that there hasn’t been any code change in months, to which they said there wasn’t anything they could do and would end the live chat.

  29. avatar I Might Need a New Host - Chris Wiegman Says:

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  30. avatar Chris Says:

    I admin a popular WP blog on bluehost and have some news for you folks ;)

    I regularly do 40k pages a day (about 2-3 times a month) and normal running load is 6k pages a day, we see about 30-100 comments per post and /feed/ hits at the 50k mark.

    So here are my tips!

    Understand the throttle… The throttle applies “nice”ness to your running processes & does not affect apache’s user. Knowing this, it’s safe to say that serving static files is not CPU limited… and can’t be.

    Wordpress -> latest version. [wordpress did many improvements to sql in 2.8 don;t be an arse about running the old one!]

    Installing wp-supercache [serving static files avoids the throttles!]
    minify js and css. [don't forget all the plugins and theme crap]

    Watch out for things that bypass the cache – wp-greet-box in js mode sends long SQL queries to make the other page suggestions and has no caching.

    So some pages take 4.5 seconds to generate for users with a cookie. The way to avoid being over throttled for this is to switch to FastCGI php method, so your script is running and stays compiled ready to go. with this change we took 4.5 seconds to 0.6 seconds average. (It uses more cpu but only a single thread and does the heavy lifting only once so in total you use less CPU!)

    Your awstats/webalizer etc cpu usage counts towards your account so do that off box if you have a metric truckload of logs! (~30mb/day uncompressed or more)

    Our last Kludge: When things get busy then we turn the greetbox suggestions off.. I gotta fix that someday, but for now… Meh! ;)

  31. avatar Will Says:

    I just wanted to share in the pain with Bluehost’s throttling here…

    I have some very small blogs, none of them are pulling in more than 1,000 uniques a day regularly. In the last couple of months I have noticed an absurd amount of slowness. After talking with support over email (for FAR too long), they finally told me about CPU throttling and sent me to the support page.

    My acocunt is being throttled regularly, and I can’t find out how to stop it. I think I’m going to have to leave a bluehost, which is a real shame.

    Will

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  33. avatar Joe Oliver Says:

    it appears bluehost and hostmonster have an excuse for just about every thing they do.. as I type this though, their true colors show. For over an hour we have been waiting in chat for acknowledgment that we are even in chat.. without any what soever. Here is a transcript ( partial as we are waiting to see just how long it does take )

    R. Clayton: [1:51:56 PM] Welcome to our real-time live chat. Please have your domain, password, and a detailed description of your problem; please note that I am chatting with several other customers as well, so my responses may be delayed.
    CCMurphy.com: [1:51:56 PM] phpmyadmin?????? whats up with the login for phpmyadmin when you click on the link from cpanel? No matter what PW is used – the database or the account, it will not login
    [1:52:36 PM] we used to just click on that link from cpanel and go right into phpMyAdmin
    [1:53:44 PM] also, went to setup a new hosting account soft-vision.com – said you already had soft-vision.com. Impossible, I own the domain and have since 1996
    [1:59:59 PM] 7 min 50 seconds – no response?
    [2:01:26 PM] 9.00 min no reply Arvixe is starting to look like a good choice for me and future referals
    [2:03:43 PM] I will post this chat save on any site I setup that compares hosting accounts and service, along with other chat sessions I have saved to show this is not an isolated experience with Hostmonster.
    [2:04:14 PM] 12 minutes and no reply…
    [2:05:00 PM] Just took a screen shot
    [2:07:12 PM] 15 minutes – no reply
    [2:13:31 PM] 21 minutes
    [2:16:57 PM] is Matt Heaton in?
    [2:17:24 PM] 25 minutes and no reply?
    [2:22:59 PM] 30 minutes I just emailed this transcript to Matt at bluehost.. I hope it’s a wakeup call and your sorry butt is canned.
    [2:27:44 PM] 35 minutes
    [2:42:36 PM] 50 plus minutes
    [2:52:04 PM] Now monitoring “prabhareddy.com” (the primary domain for “hostmonster.com”).
    [2:56:20 PM] 1 hour and 4 minutes
    [3:15:07 PM] 1 hour 22minutes no response. Gives me time to visit sites that are not owned by you ( you know all them review sites you have seeded the web with ) and post this transcript.

  34. avatar M. Says:

    Another angry HM customer here… I manage a few sites, mostly for various charity events.

    We’ve (finally) started getting some traffic on one of our WP blogs (latest version, little more thank Akismet instlled in plugins) and we’re getting ~2000 seconds a month of throttling….

    Found out only because a site took ages to load and I started investigating…

    The worst part is I’ve been recomending HM for years now… time to move methinks… Sad though, they had a good think going and now they’re screwing it up!

  35. avatar Robert Says:

    Hello
    Same here,3years no problem,now the squeeze is on ,just when I start to get some traffic! my email reply was………….
    “On 06/11/2010 09:43 AM, Hostmonster Support Team wrote:
    > The slow responses on your account are due to CPU usage, which is attempting to do more than a shared hosting environment is typically capable of. We are working to keep the site active, while preventing any other accounts on your server from being affected.
    >
    > While Throttling can occasionally speed up site performance that does not appear to be the case on your account. In this case the CPU core we’ve have your account on is not enough to handle your accounts’ needs.
    >
    > I recommend removing any plugins, modules or extensions you don’t need and enabling caching on your scripts.
    >
    > If you are unable to reduce CPU usage on the account and are unable to tolerate the slowdown you’re experiencing your only option is to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated hosting solution, which we do not provide. You can find options for that type of service through a simple Google search.
    >
    > If you’d like you can read more about CPU Throttling at http://www.mattheaton.com/?p=208
    >
    > One more thing there really is no way for you to run a “live” TV connection on our servers. It will use way to much of the CPU and your account will continue to be throttled. I would suggest looking into the above mentioned VPS Virtual Private server or even a dedicated server to fit your needs.
    >
    >
    > Thank you,
    > Charles
    > Technical Support Engineer
    > Hostmonster.com
    > 866.573.4678
    >

    so i’m in your club too! I thought I had it about all automated but now look like may have to start over!
    me

  36. avatar Robert Says:

    PS
    I had an Iframe with live tv and removed it and still same results,it wasn’t that at all still choking to death at HM.
    me

  37. avatar Robert Says:

    You know that old song by Steppenwolf called “The Pusher”? well sing it and replace “The “Pusher” man” lyric with “The “HOSMONSTER” man” and a MONSTER they have become!,Im ready to quit!,,whats the use?,,,I will park all 29 of my domains at SEDO and maybe even sell them over there.Why? because this CPU Throttling has become a Disease! it is spreading and it will dominate all Hosts ,,,,,Soon you will pay for hosting just like the old 1200 baud dial-up connections,you will pay for everything and it will be metered and billed to your CC. NO ESCAPE! ,.All because the HOSTS are too cheap to re-invest and add servers when needed. And thats it, all of it,in a nutshell!
    Poooey!
    Robert

  38. avatar Lessons Learned : Lawyers, Guns & Money Says:

    [...] of key issues and prevented the meltdown that eventually occurred.  For example, it was apparently no secret that Bluehost could have problems with a site of this size; a more careful evaluation would have revealed this [...]

  39. avatar RollPunga Says:

    Well they should be called “Down The Road Hosting”
    because that is where they are going to be because I’m leaving them. I don’t need to write a review because for the most part I’m experiencing what everyone else is. These companies start out good and customers love them then they pull a slight of hand, get the dollar sign lust in their eyes and then you end up with this garbage.
    Bigger companies have fallen for a lot less. And yes they told me to pay more but no guarantee’s. I find it quite peculiar that it only started happening a few weeks after sign-up, considering that we have not had an increase in traffic or made any changes to our website. Furthermore, I am thoroughly disapointed with this as I truly believe that it is more than likely the amount of hosting accounts that have increased on “their” cpanel server forcing it to cpu throttle us now as opposed to before. Quite frankly the fact that bluehost is not capable of keeping 99.9% uptime while hosting a simplistic wordpress website with less than 3000 hits a month is pathetic. Modifying wordpress because my hosting provider has oversubscribed the cpanel server I’m using is not an acceptable answer.

  40. avatar Lyn Says:

    I’m actually willing to pay more for a better and preferably less crowded server (A LOT MORE actually…). I didn’t even know Bluehost had such a premium hosting package until I read some of the comments here. So, how exactly do I upgrade? :3

  41. avatar Andre Says:

    I`m Also moving all my websites from hostmonster to another host.
    Some of my sites are static content but most of them run joomla as well as other CMS`s too. Some of them are getting 100,000 page views/month.
    CPU Throttling is really lame. Since HM implemented it my websites are taking forever to load.
    I also had some serious security issues with HM. Some of my websites were hacked, they didn`t had a back-up, and told me I should find if any malicious script was inserted in my files.

  42. avatar Rifta Says:

    @ Lyn, I wouldn’t, because you will still get throttled it is not worth it. Go somewhere else for hosting. You will pay more and to say the least you will be unhappy

  43. avatar Rifta Says:

    Unhappy with bluehost that is

  44. avatar Jeff Says:

    I just switched with my 24 domains and websites to hostgator and everything works like it should. I just pay a little more now, but having no trouble at all is worth it.

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