I am NOT A FAN of Hostmonster’s CPU throttling scam, so I moved my site to HostGator. My site gets about 40,000 uniques per month and 240,000 pageviews. The switch was simple – I signed up for a baby account and wanted to go to a hatchling account and add dedicated IP and other features. HostGator would not allow IP or the other features without going to VPN, so I left it on baby. The speed improved and got even better when I added CDN.

After two weeks, HosGator shut down my site with no warning for excessive CPU usage. The site was offline for 24 hours and I had to spend 6 hours of BS wth their support team to get them to allow my site back. There are three steps to getting your site back.

I would rather have CPU throttling slowdown than being shut off without warning. I have asked HostGator for my money back from their 45 day no hastle refund. 48 hours and still waiting for a refund.

After some research, I have read that they’ll do the same with VPN and dedicated server clients too, so watch out and use with caution.

HostGator came highly recommended, even on this blog, but I wouldn’t go through them with a 10 foot pole.

There has to be some good hosts out there somewhere… anyone?

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

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……

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.

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.

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.

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.