BlueHost & HostMonster User Alert: CPU Throttling

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

[...] 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 [...]

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.

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.

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

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?

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!

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…

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.

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.

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.

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…

[...] on ottanut käyttöön ns. CPU throttling teknologian, joka estää yhtä sivustoa viemästä jaetun palvelimen kaikkia resursseja. [...]

[...] on Hostgator! We were once on Hostmonster but there were some major issues with the hosting service (CPU throttling); and, I think it would be better if I just switch [...]

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

[...] you make your hosting payment on time? Did your website exceed the bandwidth limit? Is your site throttled for some unknown reason? Check your inbox and see if there is any account suspension [...]

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!

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.

[...] been with Bluehost for over a year now, but it might be time to move some of my sites away. The CPU throttling is simply becoming too excessive (up to 600 seconds some hours) and, in my opinion, unwarranted for [...]

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!

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

[...] ?????/tmp/mysql_slow_queries?????????????CPU Throttling?????????Mysql Query ??????HostMonster??????? BlueHost & HostMonster User Alert: CPU Throttling [...]

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.

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!

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

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

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

[...] 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 [...]

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.

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

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.

@ 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

Unhappy with bluehost that is

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.

@Jeff, I have just did the same and couldn’t be happier. I am so glad to be away from Bluehost it’s not even funny. Bluehost has really lost their way and gone down hill fast. The downtime I saw on my site hosting with Bluehost was incredible. I used Pingdom to monitor my site and I am even embarrassed to mention the downtime Bluehost caused me. Good riddance to Bluehost. I have about 6 other people I have convinced to move away from them. Word of mouth is a great thing.
-Rifta

Moral of the story: Bluehost and Hostmonster is a circus, with nothing but a bunch of clowns running it, and the owner(s) is the ringmaster

After making the mistake of getting a 2 year agreement about a year before they made this change, my contract is now finally up next month. I finally get to dump this circus.

We will also be moving all our websites from BH after 5 years of happy /no problem hosting.

I don’t approve their new CPU policy, also we got no prior explanation or warning but plenty of our customer questions

After trying hard with all the suggestions available online, throttling still persists and we feel we simply can not trust BH with our business anymore.

we only have 83 days to “not renew” /find a better host

any suggestions?

Matt,

I’d love for you to spend a few minutes sitting beside my client when her site won’t load and then look her in the eye and tell her… “… 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.”

I have put dozens of clients onto Host Monster over the past 6 years, with never a single hiccup. These are all small internet businesses that rely on Host Monster for inexpensive, but reliable hosting with great support.

In the last 2 weeks, one site that is quite small by any measure, but has a membership group of 40 on it, is suddenly completely locking up randomly, and sometimes won’t even load at all. Last week when I called the usually ultra-responsive tech support team, I was actually told: “Well, the site could be down for a couple of hours — or more. These things just happen sometimes.” Really? Tell clients that, who have small, but thriving businesses and they need a reliable host provider.

Bottom line is that I’m already looking for alternative hosting and will have no choice other than to move all my clients elsewhere if this keeps up.

What a drag. I’ve been a big advocate of Host Monster for years.

Denise

Think its more of an excuse to put more accounts on the same server, instead of that customers gain speed over abuse by other customers.

After the financial meltdown, it’s time that investments are cashing, so that’s what Bluehost of-course is doing. Basically nothing wrong with, that’s how investments and cashing works.

But I experience only problems on my low traffic sites (some high traffic Russian mob spammer I immediately blocked his referrer in the .htaccess). When administering Drupal (resource intensive!), the site fails sometimes, especially now I have really many modules on a test install for further research. Then now Drupal even breaks like modules miraculously being ticked of, because the modules settings are *sometimes* not even processed correctly anymore.

Actually I will move to another host for a second account and that for sure won’t be Bluehost (but I will keep my first account with them; for many things they are O.K.!)

So I suggest Matt the following:

* Allow drawing more resources! Everything can be calculated and when I’m using the serving deep into the night, I should be able to draw more resources as they are available! Then these are incidents for me, so for incidental resource drawing, Bluehost should permit more than for the ones who the whole day draw ultimate resources.

* Be open about how many are on a server and calculate all the resources one is ‘entitled’ to per user. Don’t think Matt wil do this, as these are the biggest secrets in the hosting world that’s just like other business based on marketing instead of pure facts.

I have to respond also to some negative feedback here about Bluehost that I consider incorrect:

There are some periods of time I’m working the whole day and deep into the night working on the server. I have never encountered prolonged server problems. Mostly they were like after midnight for the USA for some minutes up to 20 minutes, mostly for software upgrades, or changing a faulty hard drive. One time is was during ‘Gringo’ (nasty word for only a certain type of USA citizens) business hours; that was because a security and software update done at night was causing problems.

So Bluehost does care about servicing in low traffic hours and in general has very low servicing times and resolve issues professionally. And “Japanese clients” should be treated equal to USA customers, as they pay the same for the account.

The servicing in low traffic hours might be a problem for the region of Chinese, Russian and Indian customers; there it will be somewhere in the morning till noon.

I am comtemplating using using hostmonster or bluehost but I think people are going in favour of monster host. well, will keep an eye on more comments

Hostmonster and bluehost are one in the same, It is HostGator you want.

Seems like we have some plants in the feedback here, as There really isn’t one person in “Real Life” that I have talked to that has positive things to say about bluehost or hostmonster. If someone does go with these under standard hosting providers, I encourage you to use Pingdom or some other uptime/downtime and usage monitor and see for yourself the facts of their quality. It sucks.

I changed from my old host to Bluehost. It’s almost funny because I know little of computing, but I was running my site on one host, but when I moved it to Bluehost, the amount of traffic fell through the floor.

Because of my lack of computer knowledge, I could have many errors and it runs on wordpress, but I do know it is set up the same way with the same plugins.

The other thing is, that the site receives almost no traffic compared to the numbers I see in this thread. Since moving to Bluehost, the closest I have come on any one day is about half what I was getting on my old host.

I guess it’s live and learn.

I was just given a song and a dance by Blue Host about throttling.
When I asked how much CPU time usage by asingle user was too much, I got an evasive: It’s all qualitative. Seems to me one grows to big for their breaches very quickly…Disingenuous?

@Passerby
This is typical of them as they will blame over and over that it is your WordPress and you have it configured wrong, etc and no matter what advice you get from them and even if you disable all plugins your traffic will continue to spiral further down the hole and they will still throttle you to death. Sad they cant even provide good hosting for a simple WordPress. They talk smack that WordPress is intensive in CPU percentage and that it is the root of evil but yet they offer it from the installs.

I am getting serious problems with this and no errors to explain why.
Hostmonster support told me it could be due to other users on the shared IP *rolls eyes*

and all I am running is 1 little phpbb3 forum with a maximum of 7 members at any 1 time.

I am very lucky I have read this!
This thread surely help me to decide on what host will I be subscribing to.
Maybe I’ll try iPage since it has good review

Like others, I used to recommend Hostmonster for hosting sites. No longer. I have multiple WP blogs and the slowdown is getting quite ridiculous. Constant throttling with the same response from support, “It seems your account has heavy CPU throttling. It must have something to do with a script or plugin you are running.”
So am I supposed to go into 30 blogs and start shutting down plugins to see what is causing it?
I got here by Googling, “what is CPU throttling?” The only references in the search are to HM and HG.

I’m technically proficient but not at the server end and don’t have the time or expertise to deal with what is obviously their issue. Fortunately, I’m only on a 1 year contract, which I’ll cancel at the end.

Their homepage reads:
UNLIMITED Hosting Space
UNLIMITED Site Bandwidth
Host UNLIMITED Domains

They need to add, “Unless you are running wordpress or use plugins that might use too many resources. We won’t be able to tell you exactly why. At that point, we will penalize you and dramatically slow down all of your sites so they either load slowly or not at all.”
I can’t wait to deal with the migration! Not only my site but all the email accounts will be a real joy to deal with.

Amen, Paul. I find myself at a crossroads with Hostmonster. There are arguments I understand and don’t understand.

There is no question about it: the positioning of their services is entirely misleading.

I run WordPress with W3 Total Cache, xCache as my opcode cache, have optimized my site so that all JavaScript and CSS is minified and gzipped, along with other page loading enhancements.

When I get a score between 90-100 with ySlow I don’t see why CPU Throttling should be active. If it’s a matter of sites becoming too feature-rich for fast-food like web hosting let us know, but make sure you do it ahead of time.

Web technology has become too sophisticated for mediocrity.

I’m fairly new to this web hosting world, but over the past few months I’ve built a wordpress blog using a well designed theme.

After reading many reviews, I chose BlueHost. My blog has about 17 pages and I have videos (streamed with Amazon S3) on three of them, and the blog portion of the site has not had any active postings on it. I only have about 75 visitors a month as I have yet to promote the site online.

The past 4 months as I have been working on my business, there have been quite a few outages as discussed in this forum and within the last week, I noticed that it took nearly 60 seconds to load a page. I wrote into BlueHost and have had a variety of different responses, including my site may have been hacked, or I needed the lastest WP plugin, or my databases have problems, , plugins, etc. Finally I was introduced to the term “throttling”.

This struck me as rather weird, as I had not had this very slow page loading problem on my site for the past four months, and then all of a sudden, my site is being “throttled”.

If I leave the site alone, pretty soon, like in the evenings, my site loads quickly…like 1 to 2 seconds per page, and that includes the pages with videos. Then I write in to ask why my site is working fine, when nothing has changed? It seems that if I did not “fix” anything that they say could be the problem, then why is my site working fine now?

I won’t bother posting the many responses I got from BlueHost, but the last one said I needed to go over their very long email I got from them because my site is still being throttled, and the email covers all the things discussed in this thread, MySQL data base problems, CPU useage, etc.

I know next to nothing about the server end of things, but to me it makes sense that if nothing has changed on my website, and I have very little traffic, and a small site as well, that the changes have to be on the BlueHost side. It’s like the old days of dial-up…when traffic get’s heavy…just drop the people who are online so the new ones can get on.

I’m very nervous about staying with BlueHost and have had so many problems trying to solve this mystery these past few days, I’m going to have to find a way to move my blog to another host in hopes that I can find a reliable hosting platform that will deliver the results we expect. I realize that I’m only one person, and to BlueHost it’s no big deal…but I am convinced that if you read all the posts above mine, you see a common theme that is not too hard to figure out.

PS. I will say that the support team at BlueHost has been very nice, and responsive, but their advice has been conlficting at best. The question remains…why does my site get throttled, and load slow…and then work well and load quickly…when I have made zero changes….hmmmmm.

Been on the phone for the last few days repeatedly with Bluehost. Told it was cpu throttling ..which I had never heard of. Then told by another tech it was a server problem. Today I was told if I didn’t like it to take my websites elsewhere…now that, is great customer service

Back on December 5th I reported BlueHost was throttling my account. I went through a week of doing everything Bluehost was telling me to do with my WordPress Blog, including turning off plugins, applying the latest WP update, etc. Not to mention a lot of searching on Google, YouTube, Forums etc.

Nothing worked. As I had also mentioned I am fairly new to the web hosting arena, but I am usually very good at troubleshooting problems, so I did learn alot.Even with all my WP plugins turned off, and a basic blog with 17 pages, 70 visitors a month, my account with BlueHost was still being throttled.

I switched to Hostgator…and guess what…my site loads quickly and they handled the transfer perfectly.

One of the things I had noticed just before I made the descision to switch hosting services, was that in my cPanel under “error reporting”, (Under MAIN) there were a TON of error codes that started at the same time that my account was being throttled. I found out that these were not my errors, but errors of other sites on the same shared server that my site was on. Could this had caused the throttling of my account? I was told that no it had no relationship…but then I ask…why does the same site work perfectly, with all the plugins activated (about 8), no errors in the databases, works perfectly Hostgator, but the same site with the plugins turned off, and only 70 visitors per month, gets throttled on BlueHost? Interesting.

A lot of people really defend BlueHost, and even though their tech support was really responsive, I feel like I wasted an entire week at the hands of my account being throttled. I guess that is what the risk of being on a shared server platform is, but it’s too bad that I see nobody reporting their findings about these issues. Maybe I’m wrong here…but I am so relieved that my site is working great…on Hostgator!

I just recommended a company to use host monster. I asked if about 30000 visits a day will effect the site and they said no. The site is in joomla. After 2 days that the site is online it is starting to have this CPU issues. Shall I move to a vps or maybe another good hosting?? Any suggestions? Hostmonstrr is just not good. I have about 15 domains and I will move them somewhere else

Back on December 5th, and December 4th I reported that BlueHost was throttling my account. Here’s an update:(In short I moved my site from BlueHost to Hostgator and my problems went away!)

For a very new WordPress Blog, with few plugins and very little traffic (and I mean very little) I went through all the hoops that were recommended by BlueHost…including deactivating plugins…the works.

Since I was on a shared server, I saw a ton of errors in my server log and found out there were not errors on my site…but in the main server log…which I think what was happening is that maybe there were some new sites with a lot of problems on the same server as my website.

After running all the tests and doing everything that BlueHost, WP updates and checking with the company that did my theme…I decided to transfer to Hostgator.

Hostgator did the transfer for me, and it has been about a month…and guess what…with the same WP blog…not throttling of my account, no errors in my error reporting…and my pages load FAST! Because of the throttling I was getting at BlueHost (for problems that were supposedly mine?) it was taking 60 seconds or longer for my pages to load. But at Hostgator they are loading in 1-3 seconds, and that includes pages with video on them.

Needless to say…I learned a lot about what was NOT wrong with my site…just make sure you choose a webhost that does not throttle accounts on shared servers…you might get a bad apple that spoils the whole bunch!

P.S. I am not an affiliate with Hostgator or BlueHost and this is just letting others know that this was my experience.

Wow. So happy to find this thread. I’ve been pulling my hair out for two days doing everything I can to figure out why I’m being throttled. I’ve optimized and cached everything to within an inch of its life, and BlueHost tells me that it’s a different plugin each time–but it’s not! I’m so glad I’m not going crazy!

I’ve found another thread that talks about how many sites Bluehost has just shut down because of these issues, most with little to no warning. So instead of spending all weekend trying to figure out what else could possibly be causing my site to be throttled (it’s not the amount of traffic or the size of my site, I know that for sure), I’m going to spend it trying to find a new host.

So Stephen, you said Hostgator has been good — still so? And what was involved in the transfer over — how long did it take, was your site down for a while, and were things all glitched when it got moved? And which plan are you using?

I’m using WordPress and was wondering if there were any other hosts that anyone could recommend I look in to?

Thanks a million, everyone!

It’s a good thing cpu throttling doesn’t 404 and just makes the website look like hostmonster’s hosted, but un-developed websites.

So much for slow, I’d take slow over no content. As it is right now, my site maybe gets 1-3 unique visitors a day and maybe twice that in total visitation, aside from myself. (I just purchased it last week and am currently in development)

Bravo

Let’s talk about the multitude of IIS security holes, it has proprietary meta data that is available after hacking it ( security? ), and that during development it is erradic, And routinely you have to run console commands to fix it during development. Errors are horribly undescriptive.

Just an update to all.
I still have NO problems since I have switched to Host Gator.
Wordpress and everything else run flawless.
The Error logs are clean with Host Gator,
unlike bluehost and hostmonsters were. Uptime is Great! I highly recommend Host Gator. After reading the above new complaints, I can see that bluehost and hostmonster are still using the same BS tactics and misleading their customers down roads with no resolution. It’s really to bad their are companies like this who really take advantage of customers like these. Glad I’m no longer with bluehost and have been happy every since I left them.

I appreciate this thread and all the detailed comments. I run a really small web hosting company and we’ve considered throttling certain accounts for the same reasons Matt mentioned. I don’t agree however with throttling simply based on assumptions. If you’re going to engage a new terms of service – you need to be specific about why and warn for when it will take place. We cater to a completely different market – but I’m incredibly impressed that the owner of bluehost would chime right in.

I am going to ask for refund from bluehost today.
They kept me in dark and did not mentioned these limitations any where when i bought there hosting plan.

Got new insight on some limitation from bluehost. They have not published this any where on their website.

Blue Host support said:
We allow each web hosting account a maximum of:
- 8 simultaneous IMAP connections
- 750 emails to be sent per hour
- 40 simultaneous PHP connections
- 15 simultaneous MySQL connections
- 8 simultaneous FTP connections
- 135 simultaneous HTTP connections
- Max 50,000 to 100,000 files total

So total i cannot host more that 15 to 20 joomla websites. As we give clients demo 20 joomla websites is nothing.

Now i have to search for new host

Regards
Amit Patekar
Follow me @amitpatekar

Well comparing with you guys, I was even talked into their higher processor server and still I was suddenly dumped into the throttled jail out of nowhere. It cost me hundreds or thousands for the lost sales, that was after contacting more than 15 of their support staff with both email and live support… Their supporting staff is terrible, can not find even one of them who is nice enough or have a heart to help. All they could say was ask your web developer despite I told them again and again that the developer was long gone after the site was built. Really had enough. So glad to find this post. thank you.

Terrible experience with CPU Throttling… This bird is leaving too…

I’m experiencing throttling on one site with Hostmonster. Not the other. Nothing changed over the past year on that site and suddenly I’M being throttled – then I get an e-mail telling me my account was deactivated because it was slowing down the shared server. I thought I fixed what might have been the problem. They put it back online. But about a week later – deactivated again. ::frustration – banging head on keyboard::: Now I’ve removed even more of the site. This is costing me money but moving would be such a pain, that I’m about ready to just cancel the account and close a 13 year-old website. UGH!

I am a host monster customer. Suddenly today my WordPress admin panel and the blog are loading at a terribly low speed. Is it because of hosting? Everything was working fine. I did nothing to the site. Can you please explain why this sudden slowness?

Exposing the scam of CPU throttling hiding in the name of ‘unlimited hosting’. Let’s UNITE people and petition this. Join the Facebook page for discussions and updates thank you.

Follow this link to access the Facebook fan page | http://on.fb.me/pmfF3N

Hi,

Just stumbled on “BlueHost and HostMonster CPU Throttling sucks!” on facebook and i just had to look at it.I must have though I am the only one having issues with HostMonster.

I have been having issues uploading joomla website esp mysql databases.I also parts are missing like the background and links don`t work.

I also have issues with billing department.I couple of my clients had their domain and hosting auto-renewed and we had specifically set the to renew manually and when i asked for clarification they said all hostmonster accounts are set to autorenew.

I just think there is something wrong going on with these fellows coz i have been thinking of moving a couple of times.

Hope change is coming

Thanks for the info

I am experiencing throtling too and i have changed verry little on a unlimited account that should mean something.

Now that EIG owns hostmonster I am throtled so now I have to look for a new host provider it is not fair or right maybe not even legal what you have done here but the law does not work for free so yaw are safe till you piss off the wrong one with connections then you might pay a little.

P.S. I hope you read this and deside to atleast show in the report what the offending data or any plugin, software, image, video or what ever you believe to be wrong with our site because I think the real problem is this is how EIG earns its money back is by wrenching money out of its customers

P.P.S. I have a right to my openions and I believe we are screwed now.

Currently I’m getting around 700-800 visitors per day I hope it will increase to 2k-3k per day in coming months and my CPU Throttling is 11311.617 seconds do I need to setup dedicated server or need to choose other provider like aplus.net. Thoughts?

My Hostmonster website is a photo gallery utilizing the Gallery Just Better, All In One SEO, and Invisible Captcha plugins. I have about 100 posts and about 2000 photos. I receive about 600 unique visitors daily. My website was deactivated for too much CPU throttling, often by 3600 seconds per hour. I am still looking for solutions.

or each of you above that switch to hostgator, please tell us here, did you switch to Hatchlings, Baby, Reseller, VPS or Dedicated Server? Don’t tell me that you switch from Bluehost to Dedicated Server at Hostgator, because they are NOT COMPARABLE. Just saying switching to Hostgator doesn’t help others here, as we don’t know which plan to go for at Hostgator.

I have been with bluehost for four years. I have had very little problems until recently. I have noticed that my two accounts are both experiencing sloooooow page load up times. Now, I have noticed one account is being throttled. No-one can pin point the problem. I do not have blogs only static websites – pages are around 10 – 15kb.

I have accounts with other hosting sites and have no problems with them as far as page load up times.

I am thinking it’s time to find another hosting site to spread out my domains (I generally work on five domains to an account).

I must say that I am disappointed with bluehost and where they are heading with this throttle thing.

I used to be a happy customer. But now I just want to move on and find a hosting site that will deliver average or above average page load ups.

I am tired after reading all the comments…I am going to sleep now and will worry about CPU throttling tomorrow…

I have been with Bluehost for perhaps 7 years and have been until recently mostly quite happy with the service. Then recently I have been experiencing the following:

1) frequent downtime
2) frequent “garbage collection” ie loss of permanent login sessions
3) database timeouts
4) extremely slow download times – for example to download a backup I get a ridiculous 15kB/s speed – it takes hours to download any type of backup
5) very slow loading pages
6) the throttling thing

Now I have 5 websites on the account and only one gets some low but consistent traffic (a few 100′s a day) while the rest gets very low traffic. I do not feel such slow traffic account should be throttled.

Message to Bluehost: hey if I had a lot of visitors I’d be earning some cash and I’d be moving to the better packages, but if you prevent me from ever getting enough traffic, in the end you damage yourself as well as my business, and then I better move my sites somewhere else! I am really disappointed because in the past I had the feeling you were a good company.

Again, I have not noticed this type of degraded performance in the past but only recently. Something must have changed from the server side.

Would anyone still recommend Hostgator as a better alternative as of October 2011?

Thanks a lot for the informative article in any case.

Thank you so much for this eye-opening thread and especially for the very enlightening comments from so many posters.

I’m with BlueHost, and I can see now it’s entirely their fault. I was completely clueless earlier.

As others have said, they put too many sites on a single server, are too mingy about getting extra capacity and then they penalise the heavier users by CPU throttling (we’re paying too dammit!) – BUT still with no guarantees that you won’t continue to be throttled, meaning they’ll leave you on the same server they crowded you on in the first place and from where they won’t bother moving you.

IOW, if you’re using more bandwidth, you will jolly well pay more, even if you’re still sitting on the same server. They hook you in first with their marketing hype, and then they lock you in by the CPU throttling. It’s worse if you pay more, because you’d still have the same problem, the only difference is that they got you to pay them more.

I just fell victim today after using BH for the last 3 years without any problems. Or at least today is the first time I became aware after a client told me she couldn’t access a site and after reading this blog. I have several websites in my BH account. Hitherto, all my sites were simple HTML pages, the largest had about 30 pages and none used any MySQL databases.

About 2 months ago, I set up a WordPress site, which was done through their CPanel and Simple Scripts (which has, I counted, 93 software/scripts for free and automatic installation). In the last few weeks, I installed WP for another 3 sites and am still setting them up and configuring them. Two of them are still u/c and inactive. I have been heavily configuring the third (live) one the last few days, and today, I couldn’t even login to CPanel, and when I finally did, it was slow in the extreme, with partial or bits of the main CPanel loading and then stopping. I couldn’t login to the WP admin at all. The WP site couldn’t even load, got a 500 server error. So what Matt Heaton said up there about speed not being affected is simply not true!

To BlueHost and HostMonster:

Firstly, WHY advertise unlimited this and that and the other when that is clearly NOT the case? It is far better to respect your customers by being open and transparent with them than it is to hoodwink them like this. Your tactics have already earned you a bad reputation, and you will learn that in this Internet age, a bad reputation soon kills you.

Secondly, WHY offer WP, Drupal, Joomla, other CMS and scripts and plugins in CPanel if you do not like us using them and you use our usage of these software/scripts to penalise us? Just seems like an attempt to deceive us so that we will use these scripts so you can get more money out of us. Again, where is your respect for your customers, from whom you earn your living and who are key to your success or lack thereof?

Because of this thread, I have made up my mind to completely leave BlueHost nor will I ever use HostMonster.

This fiasco almost got me canned…. Site has been so slow all holiday season and I’ve been getting the run around about disabling wordpress plugins and the whole time hostmonster was throttling the CPU speed and that was what was giving me long page load times. Contacted hostgator and they will migrate the site directly including emails, files and sql databases. Annoyed longtime Hosmonster user looking for a new host. Anyone use hostgator’s shared servers? Was thinking about opting for a VPN package too. What packages have you all moved your site to?

Saying goodbye to Hostmonster forever.

We have around a dozen accounts there and host there the smaller Joomla and wordpress sites.
Since September the sites with some traffic (200-300 visitors/day) have been heavilly throttled, are terribly slow to load and get mysql has gone away errors.
we have several VPS hosting other sites we were able to test some of the “problematic” sites in them and I can say that they are neither resource hungry nor badly built by the modern CMS parameters: they are just as any J! or WP site.

Hostmonster simply throttles the sites based on the overall server load and with total disrespect to the “account” load: for example, sometimes we got throttling even by just accessing admin backoffices, without any visitor or crawler on site. Owr accounts are in different hostmonster servers and we can see clear performance/throttling differences between them with similar config/traffic sites.
And the most idiotic thing is that to circumvent CPU throttling you have to disable anything that consumes CPU like fcgi, mod_deflate, gzip, thus making the sites slower anyway.

We work with J! and WP for years now and know how to optimize the sites (yslow 80-90) so, after multiple contacts with their support and hours of investigating the sites, error logs, mysql slow queries, and disabling robot crawling, we decided to move to other hosts.
Some of the sites will be moved to siteground, others to hostgator, others to some of the VPS’s we already have in webkeepers and hostingeurope.

It’s sad that, with falling CPU power prices, hostmonster decides not to provide a service at par with what they advertise and instead provide a level of service comparable to some of the old days free hosting servers. It’s really shooting their own feet.

Now I believe that the MONSTER in their name refers to MONSTER THROTTLING……

Something to consider is that BlueHost as well as HostMonster have been bought out by Endurance International Group, which is known for its below par customer experience. Their business model consists of buying out successful webhosters and making them more profitable by severely limiting the user experience and trying to squeeze additional money out of existing customers. I have been with Hostmonster for almost six years and never had an issue until they were bought out by Endurance International Group.

My next Host will be someone who has no intention of even talking to Endurance International.