Bluehost.com and Hostmonster.com have a CPU quota limit in place to try and mitigate the server problems that a single user or a small set of users can create. This is custom software that we have written ourselves. I know of no other shared host that has this ability to limit cpu quota by user for Linux.
The problem has been that our software was written at a time when single or dual cpus were the norm. This was the case when Bluehost first started. However, our current servers have at least 8 cpu cores. Most of our cpu intensive software is also multi-threaded and can be effectively distributed across multiple cpus effeciently.
Because modern cpus in general have more cores, run at a lower frequency, and most of our hosting software is designed to run in this type of environment it has become VERY apparent that we needed to update the way we calculated “cpu usage”.
Effective immediately (Actually as of Friday January 25th) we have altered the way we calculate CPU usage. Each user’s cap is now approximately double what we had it set to previously. Many users have complained lately that our cpu quotas were overly restrictive. I believe these changes should reduce the number of people that run into this problem by about 90%. We will continue to tweak our settings to stop only the most abusive of users on the system. This was never meant as a way to limit functionality, but rather a way to guarantee resources for servers that are shared by many users.
This should make life MUCH better for those users that have been bumping up against this limitation.
Thanks,
Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com – Hostmonster.com
Now this IS good news! Thank you!
Can you please tell us what’s the new limit? In terms of how long a process can run on your servers without being stopped?
I’m half afraid to say this but I haven’t had a cpu error since 01/24. My last call to tech support about it was less than satisfactory – the first time I’d ever spoken to a rude/unpleasant bluehost tech support person. I came close to leaving BH right then but decided not to let one bad experience dictate my next move.
I’m happy I chose to believe you when you said you were working on this. How about you convey these things to your level one tech support in the future. Miss Heather didn’t think it was a BH problem at all. Clueless. If you Google cpu exceeded errors, you’ll get massive amounts of returns, almost all referencing Bluehost. Yet Heather didn’t know?
Anyway, thank you for keeping your word. I’ll be blogging this wonderful news so others will know. I’ll also post this on the forums where people were badmouthing you these past several months.
FINALLY!! Any time I’m doing much developing and testing, I end up exceeding the CPU Quota. It was very frustrating. We were just about make plans to jump ship to another hosting company. Now I think we’ll stick around. Thanks for solving this problem for us.
This is great news! Prior to this change, I was forced to use a wordpress caching plugin so that I didnt’ receive this error.
This is good news indeed. I had already figured out which processes caused this problem on my end, but I did notice today that pressing them no longer gave me the dreaded error. It is very nice to know that the hosting provider is responsive to its clients’ needs.
I’m a little concerned about the messages that I’ve been reading regarding limited bandwidth. Last night I switched to your service on the advice of one of my developers. Now I’m concerned… I seriously hope that this fix is going to be suitable. At this point, I’m not afraid to move to a different host…
I’m glad to hear that your company is expanding. Please make sure that your organization keeps up with your new customers.
This is very welcome news indeed! But with an issue that has caused pain to quite a few customers, where’s the public notice of this change?
It’s such a great opportunity for positive press and to illustrate to customers the actions being taken to improve the service.
And while I enjoy reading your posts, I suspect most Bluehost customers are not reading your blog.
As I and others have noted before, one of the most positive improvements Bluehost can make is to improve its communication both internally and externally.
Personally, I’d like to see a prominent spot on the home page that points to service improvements and scheduled upgrades – something visible to existing as well as potential customers.
Hmmm. I wonder if this is why the server load has been hovering between 30 and 50 for the last two days (at Hostmonster). I’ve made 2 calls to tech support and been told both times it will be fixed within the hour. The server gets bounced, but server load goes right back up to where it was.
My support tickets haven’t been answered.
I called again this morning and get a busy signal. Three times.
Matt, I was one of your biggest advocates. But I’m beginning to regret it. I simply can’t afford to have hosting that I can’t count on.
This is really good news because I was becoming very frustrated with that error every time I tried to use PHP’s gd library to manipulate my photos and create thumbnails on the fly. I was actually thinking of moving to another host but this is good.
I will need to do simple tests to see if the error message is gone for real because it was very easy to bring it up with very simple things. The threshold must have been very low I guess.
Excellent thanks. Now please do something about the long customer service wait time. My cell is my main phone and the long waits are eating up my minutes and patience.
Just thought I’d follow-up. Although it was a painful three days, things have returned to normal on my account. I’m so glad I can remain an advocate!
Matt – just some input. The support people I spoke with over the last few days were cordial, but not really helpful. They never really gave me the impression that things were under control. If I’d have heard when all this started that there were some known issues and that people were actively looking at the problem, I would have been much less frustrated. There was a noticeable lack of transparency, which just makes it easy for your customers to start considering their alternatives.
Over the last few months I’ve noticed that transparency is also an issue in other areas. For example:
1) I didn’t realize it at first, but BlueHost and HostMonster are the same company. BlueHost has a link to this blog and forums on the homepage. Why doesn’t Hostmonster have the same?
2) When transferring a domain from another hosting company, the emails I received about it were from FastDomain.com. This came out of nowhere, and the domain transfer was delayed while I tried to figure out who I was doing business with.
3) Robert I. (in a comment above) wonders why you haven’t done more to announce the CPU quota changes. A thread on HostmonsterForum.com wondered the same. Your post seems to indicate it’s a major improvement – and I’m sure it is for many customers. So where is the communication with the customer? Here I agree completely with Robert.
Aside from this week’s performance issues, these are the things I’ve noticed over the last few months. I hope you take it more as advice and less as criticism. You have a good thing going here, and I’d like to see Hostmonter/Bluehost even more successful. Thanks.
So while reading up, does this explains why my site has stopped to a crawl while it was pretty damn fast for months in terms of proccessing scripts and loading times?
As much as I like the openess, my site relies on fast proccessing to handle user requests or else I might aswell relocate to a dedicated server as close as possible where my applications requests originate from (SF USA)
Please get it fixed, my home server in Holland is reachable many times faster from SF then *.123
These are good news, but I’m still concerned about the so called Digg Effect. I was just reading some news and I tried to open this link
http://www.thewisdomjournal.com/Blog/12-things-i-learned-by-42-that-i-wish-i-knew-at-22/
When I got the CPU Quota error.
My question is, is really Bluehost Digg-Effect proof?
to late Matt! I left bluehost few months ago because of that!
That’s not a problem I have but I’m glad you resolved it.
I just wish that Bluehost would support Subversion. That would make my life a lot easier, and it would help me manage more easily the various bluehost hosted sites I manage.
Oh, that’s the reason for the improvement. I noticed the site was faster and CPU quotas limits have disappeared lately. Normally when I uploaded data to my db, I was frequently prompted with that message. Frankly speaking, I had been looking for a new web host because of this annoying limitation.
Btw, one of your major competitors doesn’t have the CPU quota limitation. But they are a tad more expensive but capabilities are comparable.
I had to remove my search engine scrip on a sunday, whcih has been included at 239 website, mainly with the bluehost banner to sell your webhosting. I have 11 domains witn you, 3 private. Let me tell you that I will never forgot this sunday when my domain and acces to http://www.dugle.net has been blocked with a message on it, like I haven’t paid.
I paid a second year for http://www.dugle.net, but my 8 new domains like http://www.chaleeduthel.com, http://www.marleneduthel.com I have registered elswhere and gues what? Look at http://www.duthel.in, hosted in India , runs the same search engine as I have on http://www.dugle.net and we have it now at 876 domains( todays date) and NO PROBLEMS. OK, this is the script fact, every hosting company is different, but the fact that my website has been blocked without any advice or question and only has been released after I prommised to remove the search engine. believe me such an act kicks you in the face.
In my last Magazine , you may I write books with Lulu.com, I must tell you that I have removed Bluehost.com from the TOP 100 Webhosting companies.
There are many thing which are very perfect with Bluehost, amazing , but client service, assistance is at the same level like lycos or Yahoo. DOWN
All the best Matt, and enjoy your Bike, I do.. in Spain next months
If I had known about CPU limits when I joined Bluehost, I would have set up things differently. In fact, I wouldn’t have taken out sub-domains, and I might have bought more Bluehost accounts to host each site and script separately. The main trouble with CPU limits is that you only learn about them when you run into them. It might be better to be just a bit more upfront about this limitation when people join. Anyway, Bluehost does provide amazing value for money and a pretty reliable service.
Oh, can I mention a problem ? Have you made a change to fsockopen ? For the past week, every time my wordpress blog tries to contact an outside service (akismet or google site maps) I get an error message. I still have an open support ticket on this.
I have four blogs hosted here. Last April 2007 I tried upgrading a wordpress version but had dbase problems. The one who replied to my query re my spa and wellness blog was helpful so he was able to bring back the old database.
For my travel blog however, it was or is still a nightmare. I will soon celebrate the first year of not being able to access admin.
BLUE HOST CUSTOMER SERVICE HAS DETERIORATED!
That is GREAT news. However…
Our spa’s website runs on Drupal (heavy php), and the CPU errors were the least of our problems with Bluehost. We would get them about once every few months, and the site would come back within a few minutes. What KILLS me (the webmaster) is site outtage from heavy server load. We’re on box 282, which seems to be CONSTANTLY down, and every time the server goes down, the site’s out for at least 1 hour.
We do appreciate the fact that you guys have server admins monitoring 24/7, and even on Christmas Eve when the server went down, it was back in 2 hours. Sure, my boss wasn’t happy about that, and I nearly had an ulcer over Christmas Eve dinner, but you guys were still there to fix it. And we’re not going to switch hosting companies for now, because you were always there even tho the server goes down 1-2 times a month, for at least 1 hour at a time.
We are considering moving to a high-CPU server as per your customer service rep’s suggestion. I don’t know if it’ll solve our problems, but we’re willing to pay a few dollars more a month.
What we’ll LOVE to see is an ETA time on your server status page. What drives me nuts when the server go down is not the fact that it’s down – it’s not knowing when it’ll be back up again. I would get on your live chat, or call your service line, and wait for an eternity, only to hear your service rep say something like “1 hour”, “30-45 minutes”. Why can’t you put that on your server status page, instead of having us call you just to hear that?
We have faith in Bluehost, and I hope you guys pay attention to what we have to say!
well done and good news!
CPU limitation is very important for the stability of web server, I suggest never cancel this limitation!
Thank you for the increase. I only hit the cap once (due to a server side problem that the bluehost team fixed), but it’s nice to know that I can be rafting or rock climbing and not worry about the web server.
Thanks for keeping your clients concerns first. Looking forward to hearing more about your virtual server plans for when I am ready to expand.
Also the only improvement I can see that would personally help me a lot is allowing wildcard domains for WordPressMU. Can you give any insight as to why this is not currently allowed?
Thanks again,
Joe
Very good news for all of us, thanks for keeping your clients concerns!!
Bluehost.com is really cool!
Just found, this, thank you thank you THANK YOU!!! I must admit, I have been searching for another provider for a while, because it was getting rediculous. However I did notice it was much better lately, now I got confirmed it might actually be solved. In July my account is due for renewal, the choice has been made easy now
Thanks again!
Matt this is good news, but I had a CPU Quota error on 3/13. It was only my second day at Bluehost, and I only have one blog… so it was quite a shock. Tech Support said it was my WordPress theme and that I needed to change it. I loathe to change it because it is tailored to my blog perfectly. I find it hard to believe that Bluehost couldn’t handle a certain theme… I got rid of a few plugins, but I am dissatisfied with what happened, to be honest. I;d heard so many good things about Bluehost, and the day after I sign up they can’t handle my 500 visitors?
Do I REALLY need to change my theme, or was this just a CPU fluke problem that will go away?
It is good news for all the customers. Bluehost rules!!
It would be nice if you made your CPU monitoring code open-source and freely available off SourceForge, for example.
As a heavy user of open-source operating systems and applications in your business, you have gained a lot from open-source. Why not give something back.
I’m sure there would be a lot of interest in it from a variety of Linux users who host multiple users on their servers – not just web hosts.
This is great, my site http://dpc.org.au is hosted at bluehost.
It was having cpu exceeded errors EVERY DAY, it is a joomla site.
I have not had one CPU exceeded error since the change.
Thanks!
I wish there was a way for us to pay for more cpu usage.
Thanks to you Matt,
Now we are having multiple CPU Quota Error everyday & BH Tech support was giving us hell.
We host our little community forum on BH for more than 2.5 yrs.
Our max user ever online was less than 70.
If BH don’t allow 70 ppls can’t use unmodded phpBB forum without this CPU error, we are forced to move somewhere else.
Guys using joomla and phpbb … you’re software is just _awful_ , can you read that ? literally awful when the optimizations and design is taken in consideration. if you don’t believe me, just “pop up the hood” and read it yourself. a nice book about data structures and algorithms doesn’t hurt either, neither does a sql optimizations book.
matt, can you give a number to the people how much cpu time exactly it is that people are allowed to use before running into cpu time limit ?
How odd. I’ve used BH for about 2.5 years or so and never had this problem until this year. I changed themes on my blog twice, thinking that might be the problem, but it wasn’t. Tried getting rid of plugins– no help there. In the last couple of months I’ve been getting the CPU message multiple times per day, and in just the last couple of weeks it’s gotten bad enough that my users are complaining about it.
I dread the thought that I might have to move to a new host– it’s such a pain– but if the problem isn’t solved that’s what I’ll have to do.
[...] of great things about Bluehost. They have always done right by me until now. I sat through the CPU issues last fall that all of us Bluehost users were getting and being told by support that it was us and [...]
I too am having CPU error issues again and it seems that the support people dont’ know what is going on. I don’t want to flip hosting accounts but I can’t have my sites going down daily either!
http://mythoughtsideasandramblings.com/2008/08/20/bluehost-woes/
I have the same problem.
I am getting CPU EXCEED error many times. Even not able to work on my site. It is affecting my business and my visitors. My site is on blue host. http://www.readgujarati.com
After contacting to help desk and support, I optimized database and repaired the database but still situation is as it is. I read so many things to solve it, but not any one worked.
I have only wordpress blog and no extra design pages. Help people says optimize the code. How the end users can do that ? I do not have own pages. Just wordpress blog only.
do not know what to do.
I agree with Mrugesh..
I am having the same issue. Its been happening since long.. Support people once changed something in PHP hoping that will fix it, but it didnt fix anything and it messed up the emails I get from wordpress for comments..
Even I upgraded to latest wordpress version – but still the issue is same. Support people keep giving credit for this to wordpress and php and database and all.. I even repaired the database, but dont kow how much that would help.
I STILL get this error! I Use mambo, Cache is Enabled, but i think it is not code or database error. code and database and online visitor counts is static! but some days I recevie this error!. i think when a server f*cked up cause the problem. for exmaple one of 800!! domains on a server f*cked server with illegal use and every 799 other domains fall down with cpu usage error.
The Exceed CPU Quota error is the one-and-only factor that forcing me to change host. I only have phpBB3 forum actively running, I run Optimizer and Repair of mySQL weekly but the situation doesn’t improve. I even requested to be move to the High CPU server and is willing to pay a higher monthly premium for it but the sale people said Blue Host is thinking about terminating the High CPU Server altogether.
Matt,
I know you’re one busy man but this Exceed CPU Quota problem with no possible solution from Blue Host does impact your long-time customer. Anything you can do? Thanks…
We are also suffering this problem with Bluehost.
We are very satisfied with Bluehost but if this problem continues, we will be forced to move to another hosting company
You guys are using a shared web hosting service. The customers that are experiencing this should consider moving off to a cloud hosting service such as mosso, uptimehost or gogrid. You might save yourself the hassle and embarrassment.
Sorry, Matt. It’s good to provide QoS limits, but substituting a nasty page (“This site has exceeded its CPU limits”) is ugly and demeaning. If you’re going to have limits, you need to (1) provide email warnings when levels are getting high so that site owners are aware that their sites are getting close to the trip point; (2) notify site owners via email when their sites actually hit the trip-point so they are aware that it’s occurred; (3) possibly allow sites to provide a custom page that you can point to instead of the the default page you use, so at least a site doesn’t look so stupid in the event that an unexpected cap CPU usage occurs; and (4) if it can be implemented, implement a “throttling” function as opposed to the “kill switch” function you now use, so that sites don’t go completely nonfunctional, i.e. slow their response time down so they don’t exceed their quota (the more the traffic, the slower the specific site runs, just like on a dedicated server). Meanwhile, I’ve moved away from HostMonster’s “unlimited” service to Hurricane Electric’s limited bandwidth — but unlimited CPU utilization — service, which is likely to work much better for my site.
I never tried using bluehost before but one of my friend using it..
I am maintaining his website We are new bluehost user so far I havent encountered any problems yet..
I have been a Bluehost customer for 5 years.
I recently experienced severe CPU throttling of the only real site I have hosted.
After weeks of calls to support, (several call were one-hour plus) there was absolutely no solution. The problem is that nobody in support (many friendly helpful people there) has any diagnostic tools that can tell me which process is hanging up the CPU. They could only tell me CPU throttling was on – YES/NO. I said tell me which process, and I will solve the problem. I tried turning off all plugins off and I was still being throttled. It was a blind guessing game.
Well, I finally changed hosting providers. Funny enough, on my first day I had the same CPU problems. I called tech support and on the *very first phonecall* they identified the process and I solved the problem. That’s pathetic Bluehost.
I was happy to comply with any informed direction. The problem was your crew does not have the tools, or ability, to diagnose the problem. When we asked around many other bloggers said they had to leave Bluehost for the same reasons – throttling.
You lost a paying customer. You need to give your people better diagnostic tools. You should also consider offering scaling services because I had – no upgrade path – possible as my site grew in traffic.
I am really disappointed in Bluehost. I am now paying another company 400% more than I was paying you because they have better support.
It was unpleasant having weeks of my time wasted.
Thought you should know.
Michael
I’ve just gotten hit hard by your throttling monster Matt.
I’ve gotten a lot of answers from your tech people. All wrong so far!
I’ve been a very happy customer for a long time but this is unacceptable.
Today, I disabled all my plugins, no change. Removed RSS feeds, no change.
Maybe if I just have a page of text I won’t exceed the usage.
I wouldn’t count me as a Happy Customer anymore.
[...] Heaton, president of Bluehost, writes about CPU throttling on his blog: This was never meant as a way to limit functionality, but rather a way to guarantee [...]
[...] BlueHost的CEO，Matt Heaton，宣稱這技術對所有共享主機資源的使用者來說是好的，而且認為有90%的使用者會滿意這項技術，參考本文（“CPU Quota Exceeded” – Not anymore…） [...]
Moved from siteground to bluehost years ago.
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had server slowdowns something like 1 morning out of every 3. I don’t really get that much traffic either, few hundred hits per day.
This is really embarrassing for me, as I’m an affiliate and I’ve sold a few bluehost accounts for you.
Here’s the problem: I need to know what I can do to not get CPU throttled. And “removing plugins” and “getting a web developer” are not the right answers. Those are cop out answers.
Burying the information in your support area is not the right answer.
You guys need to get the word out. I can’t in good faith recommend bluehost anymore, and that makes me unhappy. Really unhappy. Because I’ve been a staunch advocate in the past.
I suggest the following: find a people like me who have these issues, work with us directly to solve the problems, then publish these as case studies. In fact, you could post detailed solutions on ezinearticles for syndicated distribution and charge it off to the marketing department or something. I dunno. You’re smart, you can figure this out.