I have been promising CPU protection for a long time and its finally ready. It has been running on several servers during our live beta testing and it has proven itself to be extremely successful. For those that need the brief rundown again this is what this feature will provide.
1) Guaranteed CPU resources for every user on every server.
2) Protection from heavy users. No longer can a single user, or a small group of users consume inordinate amount of resources causing your own site to fail to load or load slowly (NO OTHER SHARED HOST ON THE PLANET CAN SAY THIS WITH ANY VALIDITY – WE ARE THE ONLY HOST THAT HAS THIS TECHNOLOGY AT THIS TIME!)
3) Extremely sensitive CPU resource allocation – CPU time is calculated in 200 millisecond increments. This means our servers will always respond quickly and users won’t be exposed to slowness due to sudden bursts of CPU usage.
4) CPU Statistics – We can now tell you exactly how much CPU you have been using each 24 hour period. More importantly, we can tell you how often your domain was throttled or capped if your site experiences “bursty” CPU usage. No more guessing on what you are using, now we will tell you exactly.
5) Users can see IN REAL TIME if their account is being throttled for any reason.
6) Users can see IN REAL TIME exactly what processes they are running that put them over the CPU limit.
7) NO MORE CPU QUOTA EXCEEDED ERRORS EVER!!!! (Starting on Tues July 29th 2009) We will be completely removing the code that bans users for CPU overages!!
Processes will no longer ever be killed or stopped because of too many cpu resources. Instead, your site will simply bump up against any cpu limits that we put in place. This will work just like a VPS or dedicated server, but without the high cost!
9) Now able to sell “dedicated” cpu resources (Actually its not in our shopping cart yet, but the technology is there so give us a couple of weeks to build out the site for it). Now you can purchase an entire core of CPU and get speeds FAR FASTER than a dedicated server for 30-40% less.
10) Ability to purchase instant CPU upgrades. If you decide you need double the CPU that you currently use we will be able to do that for you without you having to deal with the maintenance and headache of a VPS or dedicated server. FINALLY!
11) ALWAYS have some idle CPU resources available to service incoming requests. We will never allow the general pool of CPU usage to become saturated so that no resources are available to service requests. Again, no other shared hosting service in the world that I know of has this technology.
12) FREE – FREE – FREE – There is no cost at all for this feature. The only cost would be for those users that want higher dedicated cpu resources. We will most likely offer 3 different choices in that regard. Mostly likely we will sell CPU in increments from 50% of a single core (CPU), up to as many as 4 cores of dedicated resources in a shared hosting environment. This has all the benefits and cost savings of a shared server system with the performance of high end dedicated servers.
We are willing to license this solution to a minimal group (At least for the first 60 days) of other Cpanel hosts if you are interested. The general cost would be $125 per 8 core server for 12 months. The cost is $75 for 12 months if using a 4 core server. This solution does work on dual core systems but is designed to be most efficient with more cores. This cost would include our disk I/O throttling solution as well (Well discussed in previous blog entries of mine). You can FULLY EXPECT to double your user density with MUCH better speeds for your customers with these two solutions in place. This is not marketing hype or extreme case situations. It really works that well.
Requirements for hosts that want to use this product -
1) Must use linux with a 2.6.28 kernel or newer (Sorry, backporting beyond 2.6.28 is a nightmare!)
2) Must be willing to apply a small kernel patch (Wish there was a way around this, but we do have to modify the kernel to make the magic happen!) We will assist with applying the patch if there are any problems.
3) Must be willing to run two binary files that we will provide – cpud (Our cpu controller) and iothrottled (Our disk i/o bandwidth, iops) manager. We will make the source available for eview once we have the legal issues on our end taken care of, but for now it is two binaries.
4) The CPU controller (Once the kernel portion is done) takes about 5 minutes to set up, literally!! And iothrottled takes about 10 minutes to setup and configure.
5) Must trust that Bluehost/Hostmosnter would actually sell a product to everyone else to compete with ourselves 
If you are interested in licensing it or testing it out (Must be at least 10 servers or more if you want to test it out before buying at this time) then please email me directly with your contact information at matt@bluehost.com.
Thanks,
Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com
Checked my CPanel dashboard to see this new feature in action but I’m not noticing anything different. Is this live on all BlueHost servers/accounts yet or something that will be a while coming?
Charging for your kernel patch sounds like a violation of the GPL. Is that portion of your ’solution’ available for free?
Well your fancy new software explains why box500.bluehost where mattheaton.com
{box500.bluehost.com, Primary domain:mattheaton.com, 2009-07-27 13:26:16: Box under heavy load — you may experience degraded system performance} is on is experiencing problems. LOL
July 29th is Wednesday, not Tuesday. Apparently this kernel mod has altered the system clock in some fundamental ways.
I’ll be curious to see how this pans out. It certainly sounds like a huge improvement, but the proof will be in the execution.
CPU has never really been THE PROBLEM with shared hosting. Nor has RAM. Hard drives and I/O ops have always been the bottleneck and may be (or may be not) that will not change soon.
Good work, nevertheless.
I absolutely love the sound of this! I don’t really know much about how hosts deal with things like this, so it comes as quite a shock nothing like this is already implemented! It sounds like a much fairer and much more reliable system, and I love that any extra CPU needed can be purchased and go into immediate effect (reasonably immediate anyway, we can never expect these things to be perfectly instant because the request still has to be processed even when automated
)
I really look forward to being able to watch my CPU usage. I’m expecting it to be very low, lol.
Is this CPU protection based only on the number of CPUs or you have found a way to create slices smaller then one CPU ?
Sounds cool, is this on BlueHost & HostMonster?
Now if you would only get rid of the ridiculously low file count aloud on your hosting packages. 50,000? This is too low for any serious site, and the negativity surrounding this is spreading over the net pretty quick.
You Rock. Thank you for not idly sitting around. Your out of the box thinking and activism is refreshing! I look forward to this and other enhancements.
are you using linux cgroups, or some other magic?
Very exciting news and I am happy to see how eager you are to get this up and running! Keep on pushing for exceptional service Matt!
Speaking of exceptional service. I do have a new issue with bluehost.com around its handling of outages and outage notification. I blogged a post on my support review blog explaining my concerns. I hope to hear back from someone either claiming that the chat rep I talked to was misinformed or provide further detail on why such a lax approach is taken with upgrades. http://ow.ly/iSoY
Cool, is this custom technology? What’s it called?
Anyway that is really cool.
Matt
I’ve used Bluehost for years now, generally satisfied. But I have a small problem I’d pay money to improve if this is the solution.
I’m doing most of my work in Joomla, including my updates and article authoring, on Bluehost. The delays (to open a file, load a picture into an article, etc.) aren’t too terrible, but often are 5-20 seconds even when I have nothing else running and a broadband connection I’ve tested to be very fast. They disapper when I run the same apps on my own machine, but Joomla likes to be host-based.
My load hasn’t usually been heavy – especially after you explained to me that each email becomes a stored file that needs deletion regularly – but something is slowing me down enough to notice. Will this help me?
Advice welcome.
db
WOW Thanks!! that sounds really good.
But I have a question, with this new technology:
No more “Your web hosting account for xxxx.com has been deactivated (reason: site causing performance problems).” whithout previous warning??
I have that experience with an active 500 users registered comunity, and it’s really an unpleasant experience.
Thanks again.!
Is it possible to see the live demo of this technology?
Maybe somewhere on the BH/HM websites?
Regards,
Dave
Off topic: I would just like to say how irritated I am that bluehost discontinued box trapper. I was told users were notified but I presume box trapper caught that email. I had spent around four years compiling lists on box trapper only to find all my files gone one day.
Now I have to pay for Spam protection using Postini. $1 per month per user. You may say Spam Assassin is available but it is so poorly designed and needlessly complex that even after four days of trying to set it up it has not caught one piece of spam.
Matt: glad you are talking security. I have one suggestion and probably one that you will hear more and more from customers and that’s the issue of website security and how you can help your customers deploy protective measures. Honestly I am willing to pay whatever it takes to protect our service from such nasty things but your technicians tell me that they are not allow to help or even recommend anything. Our site has been increasingly troubled by iFrame attacks and we’re totally vulnerable because of clear lack of solution. So I really think that it would be so critical that you get your tech staff up and running on security. I have your blog bookmarked and would love to see if you have plans to help. Thanks Matt. Keep up the good work.
While not quite as efficient, there’s an opensource project called cpulimit that does this in userspace without having to modify your kernel.
This is the sort of innovation that has always made Bluehost stand out from its competitors. Unfortunately, there is another recent change that is going to lose you a lot of customers (several have already moved) that should reevaluate. That is the limit on the number of files per account. There have been a large number of genealogy sites that have moved your way by recommendations from other users. But some of the more significant are those belonging to the USGENWEB Project. These aren’t the sort of applications that eat a server alive. But 50,000 files is just not sufficient. If you don’t revisit this decision, I suspect all USGENWEB accounts (I’m sure there are several dozen) and the personal accounts of those who manage them (probably several dozen more) and likely hundreds of accounts of genealogists who serve as coordinators within USGENWEB will all be gone this year. It might be a drop in the bucket, but it will leave a bad taste in the mouths of those who have been long-term customers and had the plug pulled with a ridiculous amount of time allowed to move or reduce of two weeks. Now that is NOT what caused Bluehost to become the most popular site on the web. I think this change is a big mistake.
Give me prove man…
give screenshot..
give prove where is the announcement?
Hey Matt,
Prior to the new feature, I never experienced any down times due to CPU overage. So I was never banned and there was never any indication of an issue with my site and CPU usage. But,,, now with the CPU Throttling tool, I am seeing warnings that my site is actively using excessive amounts of the CPU. I then take the numbers from the graph add them up and they come no where near the amount being reported in the warning. Is this still in beta? And is there going to be a logfile created to help us webmasters to find what is causing the excessive CPU usage. This looks like it could be a great tool, but is seriously lacking in support for the end user. Providing documentation for the webmaster would be very helpful.
This is a good news for all the Shared Hosted.. But, Is that shared hosting a/c should be bought from Blue Host or any other hosting company? I’m confused..
I don’t think its very gentle of yours to set a throttling system more than one year after i purchased a plan with you. Everything was working fine before. But right now i’m very disappointed with the service. My sites aren’t working well, there are extremely slow and sometimes they never respond, most of the contents never load, etc.
Please, tell me exactly what is causing the problem and how can i fix it without renouncing to my scripts, etc. My scripts worked fine and they’re 100% optimized. The problem is yours and you have to fix it in my modest opinion. I purchased an unlimited plan and i want to have a service that fits with what i purchased, not another one that is causing me alot of frustrations. I contacted you in many occasions regarding this issue and i received many different answers, all of them completely different.
I don’t think the customer has to fit the scripts with your needs instead of you fitting your system to the customer.
This CPU throttling seems a sabotage. If you don’t have enough servers to fit all your customers needs, you have to improve them instead of making this kind of sabotage, or better if you don’t offer this kind of plans Thanks and sorry for my english.
What this means for many users is that their simple wordpress sites (like mine) are now painfully slow and the admin systems are almost unusable. BlueHost’s tech support is almost completely unaware of how to support this and have been swearing to me for two weeks (until late last night) that nothing has changed there. Secondly, the reporting and graphs are painfully broken and the techs have no tools to troubleshoot which particular scripts are causing CPU loads. Because of this “great new feature” and the complete lack of tech support to be able to support it and help users figure out why they are being throttled, it appears I have no choice but to switch hosting providers.
I have brought many of my clients, friends, and associates to Bluehost and now I have had to explain to them what is happening to our sites. I always hate to leave a company I have been with for a while but while this sounds good on the surface, the implementation, communication, and support is completely flawed.
Kerry Garrison
No Longer a Happy Client
I would just like to know how did you get so SMART at such a young age?
and 5 kids too?? Do you think you might be another Kevin Kelly? http://www.kk.org — you both are fascinating.
I am particularly interested in
Do members get access to this information, as it would be essential in maintaining a well run, fas loading blog?
Is this CPU protection based only on the number of CPUs or you have found a way to create slices smaller then one CPU tiffany bracelet ?
I’m not noticing anything different. Is this live on all BlueHost servers/accounts yet or something that will be a while coming?
Howdy!
Very interested to hear how you corral the CPUs.
Do you have occasional problems with CPUs escaping??
It’s fair while I have been experiencing considerable slowdown since then…
I’m hopeful it is an interim state.
Matt, thank you so much for the most recent server updates. I have noticed a very large increase in overall speed on my server due to the new CPU protection!
Is this for Quad Cpus? Nice article
“NO OTHER SHARED HOST ON THE PLANET CAN SAY THIS WITH ANY VALIDITY – WE ARE THE ONLY HOST THAT HAS THIS TECHNOLOGY AT THIS TIME!”
False – Novell had this working in 1976 when SuperSet began working on the Netware Kernel. It prevented runaway processes as well. They’ve been published for it in all major tech mags for years – they also have thread control which I don’t think you would get based on the comment all in caps as though you made a breakthrough. It’s what keeps NASA and OSHA servers working for years without restarting them. Solaris also has a similar solution and their software is free on Intel platforms. Both Netware and Solaris can CPU limit based on user and CPU percentage and priority. You can also download solutions identical to what you just claimed freely on public domain sites even for the PHP server – did one of your developers steal it and now claim to be the author?
BTW – rackspace.com has been doing this for a couple years when you call their support.
This is the reason why you guys rank so good.Your leadership is really an asset at your business
Matt,
Your CPU Throttling (Strangling) sucks!
I have written about it here:
http://www.sterling-adventures.co.uk/blog/2009/10/10/bluehost-strangles-customer-sites-with-cpu-throttling/
My site is a tiny, but popular, site focussed on adventures (mostly rock climbing); hardly a malicious endeavour! So why have you implemented this feature, that “kills” sites, without advertising it? And why do you think it’s okay to change the terms of a service that was purchased under different terms?
Matt – why would someone want to purchase or use your technology or service for that matter when they can download better software and tools from Google and Yahoo for cloud computing? Am I missing something? You make it sound as though you’ve made a huge discovery.
I saw a comment on here from some Novell anonymous user a day ago and brought my friend back to read it – you deleted that comment. Let people say what they think – if you’re right, you’re words will stand.
I’ve been reading your threads – I don’t think you get “Cap and Trade” and other topics and you fear people who know more about it than you yet in the same breath you encourage people to learn more. What is the game here? Encourage them – yes – then tell them what it means or provide links to it such as places like investopedia.com instead of these diatribes. Is Super Dale your brother or something?
Ok – so that guy from Novell was right. Why not look into Rackspace and use cloud computing! You’ll just delete comments like this.
10x for the information.
long life for bluehost.
Question:
is there an option to display disk space used on CPANEL, I can not find it!
No..I think its for i7 or what?
When I added geolocated ads, I saw that this feature was working as expected – after a few hours, things settled down, but on startup others were protected from my server’s load. Neat feature.
Where’d ya go? You haven’t written anything since July?
I am very curious. Hope everything is alright.
God Bless,
Jon
P.S. I don’t think my websites are big enough for the above topic to be relevant to, but someday….
Just a question: Did hostmonster have this feature?
Well, I’m not up on this technology, but bluehost ROCKS!!! I never have to worry about technical issues, the deal just keeps getting better for space and bandwidth (now unlimited!), and you’re obviously keeping up with the latest hosting issues and technology.
Thanks for all you do, my friend!
Cheers
Roger
Your statement about your company being the only one on the planet with this feature is completely non factual. Maybe you should do some research before running your mouth. XO Communications has this feature. Well, technically, it was Concentric Network that first did this back in the Mid/Late 90s and XO bought them. It just wasn’t based on a linux kernel. You are at least 12 years behind. Great idea, glad to see you implemented. Although it sounds like from other comments you did not execute well…
I dont know much about licensing issues, but if all of these is initialised as “Kernel Patch” to linux existing kernel, it sould also be licenced as GPL. Ohterwise you’ll be sued by FSF.
Hi, please explain more about this feature. I’ve found that my site was throttled for 9.5 secs, but don’t understand why. My website is plain HTML, therefore it hasn’t MySQL, PHP or other CPU consuming features.
Can the number of visitors affect CPU usage? I’ve never had a CPU quota problem. Please let know.
Rodrigo
[...] any other competitors hosts. Recently it was announced that Bluehost and Hostmonster launched Shared CPU Protection and this is something that NO other competitor can offer. This is just one example (of many) of [...]
I had to leave Bluehost over a year ago because of CPU issues my site was pretty small and would still trip the CPU issues. We had to pay $20 a month for Bluehost high CPU plan. I finally just got my own server. Alot more work to run my own server and more money but needed CPU power as we got bigger.
[...] wouldn’t have handled it the same way, but BlueHost does look the most promising with their shared hosting CPU protection. If and when I decide to make the jump again, I will probably be giving them a [...]
[...] wouldn’t have handled it the same way, but BlueHost does look the most promising with their shared hosting CPU protection. If and when I decide to make the jump again, I will probably be giving them a [...]
Shared Hosting Always cheap & Reliable, nowadays peoples like VPS & Dedicated Servers. it’s really expensive, if you data & Traffic high, then you could choose Dedicated or Vps Servers.
Thanks,
Kelly