Comments on: BlueHost & HostMonster User Alert: CPU Throttling

By: Lyn

Lyn — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:33:39 +0000

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

By: RollPunga

RollPunga — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:37:37 +0000

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.

By: Lessons Learned : Lawyers, Guns & Money

Lessons Learned : Lawyers, Guns & Money — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:14:36 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Robert

Robert — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:10:51 +0000

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

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:29:39 +0000

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

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:27:26 +0000

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

By: M.

M. — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 23:19:23 +0000

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!

By: Joe Oliver

Joe Oliver — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:15:21 +0000

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.

By: BlueHost?CPU??-CPU Throttling | ???????

BlueHost?CPU??-CPU Throttling | ??????? — Thu, 13 May 2010 00:21:44 +0000

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

By: Will

Will — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 07:05:26 +0000

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

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:05:27 +0000

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!

By: I Might Need a New Host - Chris Wiegman

I Might Need a New Host - Chris Wiegman — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:02:21 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Toy+Life

Toy+Life — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:19:01 +0000

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.

By: RobertT

RobertT — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:15:50 +0000

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!

By: Your site is down, what should you do?

Your site is down, what should you do? — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:57:51 +0000

[...] 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 [...]