One of the most common complaints about Bluehost is the constant “excessive CPU usage” errors that occur with their hosting service. The reason that Bluehost sucks in this regard is that they oftentimes don’t provide you any ways to reduce your CPU usage or give you any warning before putting your site offline. For a personal blog, that isn’t such a big deal. But for a site that actually makes money, it can cost you a lot.
It’s not uncommon for Bluehost to kick you off of their servers and force you to find a new host with no warning, and without giving you even an hour to fix what’s causing the problem. This is one of the biggest reasons that Bluehost sucks.
If you’ve experienced these “excessive CPU usage” errors while hosting your sites with Bluehost, post your experiences here.
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Here’s my BlueHost experience in a nutshell:
- I signed up with BlueHost a little under two years ago.
- Everything started off well.
- It took exactly 3 days for things to go awfully sour.
If that sounds familiar, it probably is. I’ve searched around the web and found people experiencing essentially the exact same problems I had with this hosting company.
There were a lot of issues, from features that didn’t work to ridiculous downtimes. What takes the cake for me, however, is the dreaded “exceeds CPU quota” error. I wish I actually did search around the web for complaints against BlueHost because, as it turns out, almost every other grievance I see has to do with this very particular issue.
Various people experienced this under different settings. In my case, it was a Rails code that ran about 4 to 5 times a day. Every time it ran past 20% CPU peak, BlueHost automatically blocked my hosting account for an entire twenty minutes. I called up customer support over twenty times over the exact same issue, getting more or less told that my code is inefficient and I will need to change it.
The thing is, four to five times a day of code that went past 20% CPU usage (for a few seconds each) didn’t sound all that bad to me. Was BlueHost expecting customers to run nothing but static sites on their servers? Apparently, they do, as has been captured in this brilliant screenshot. BlueHost….built for static pages!
It’s gotten around the web quite a bit that Bluehost sucks. But don’t just stop there and figure you’re safe from Bluehost’s incompetent grasp. The thing is that a lot of resellers use Bluehost’s servers. So if you are hosting with them, chances are you are hosting with Bluehost. And if you are experiencing slowness, outages, or crap support, then that most likely can be attributed to Bluehost as well.
Their servers are overloaded and have been for some time. The few that have not experienced any problems yet are simply tempting fate. You can advertise unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage space but it’s all bunk if the server’s CPU can’t handle the demand. Bluehost’s servers are almost all overloaded almost all of the time. Never is a CPU running below full steam. Even if you don’t know much about hosting, if you’ve worked with computers for any significant period of time you should be able to tell that this is just a recipe for disaster.
If you’re looking for cheap hosting for a pet project that doesn’t require a functional backend then Bluehost should work fine for you. But anyone who is trying to run a business or operate a functional website that needs to be up all the time, look elsewhere. By picking a slightly more expensive (but reliable) host, you will be saving money exponentially in the long run. But make sure you know whether you are buying hosting from a reseller, and if you are, make sure to find out whose servers you will be on. If it’s Bluehost then, in the words of Walter Sobchak, you’re entering a world of pain.
I’ve been hosting some Wordpress blogs on a shared plan with Bluehost for the last 7 months or so. These blogs are not particularly high-traffic nor are they heavy on media embeds so they work fine without much hitch. It isn’t by choice, though.
With all the great reviews I’ve heard about BlueHost (mostly, as it turns out, from affiliate sites trying to make a buck), I thought it would be a decent platform for a small image hosting site on a very tight nice. However, it didn’t take long to prove it was a bad fit, as the company apparently monitors CPU load unusually tightly.
Know what happens when 5 users start viewing and uploading images on my site simultaneously? My account gets disabled for a 10 minutes. Five freaking users – that’s all it takes to eat up the maximum CPU load!
A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 and, for some reason, my tolerable blog installs have begun exhibiting snail-like performance. Waiting for the admin panel alone takes several minutes, never mind having to upload an image for your post, forcing me to start using a third-party editor instead. Even with Scribefire, though, waiting for a post to publish takes as much as three minutes.
I manually reverted the blogs back to the previous version so they, at least, work pretty normally now. It’s just odd that Wordpress 2.7, which seems to work seamlessly with other shared hosting accounts I own, would run so badly on a service that claims to handle blogging platforms without any issues. I’ll likely be finishing my one year contract with BlueHost then moving the installs somewhere else. If you’re thinking of hosting the latest Wordpress version on a BlueHost shared hosting account, I’d recommend slamming your head on a wall instead – it’s less painful.
I guess after looking around a bit that I am just another number in a long line of people screwed by Bluehost. I had been using them for a long time without any problems. Then they started with the CPU restrictions that crippled my website. The site was a very simple Wordpress blog that had been around long enough to garner a rather sizable loyal readership. Luckily it was the only site I was hosting with them.
The problem is that Bluehost offers their users tons of bandwidth and storage that they are never able to fully access because they cap the CPU so low on each account. Another analogy for dramatic effect: it’s like a restaurant offering a thousand people free pizza, but they only have enough resources to make 100 pizzas a week. Someone is inevitably going to get left behind.
On top of that, in effort to weed out the people trying to beat the system or engage in unethical behavior, they end up slapping legitimate users who rely on their websites as the backbones of their respective businesses. Random legitimate websites are getting deleted due to Bluehost’s inability to distinguish between the two. I just heard from a guy who was told his site was deleted due to a link to a porn site in a blog comment that hadn’t been up for 10 minutes. He is even speculating (with good evidence I must say) that someone from Bluehost did it intentionally to give them a reason to get rid of him.
Their problems with resources don’t just stop at CPU issues, though. Once you have had the misfortune to feel the wrath of Bluehost’s faulty equipment, you are now faced with the task of explaining to them exactly what’s wrong and exactly what they need to do to fix it. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to more apathetic, ignorant, and generally out-of-touch people than I have when trying to resolve my issues with tech support.
So if you’re running a website with Bluehost that is pulling any significant traffic at all, and have not yet run into problems with their service or their support, I highly recommend you start shopping for new hosting now before you encounter either. Trust me, if your website is experiencing any growth at all, you will eventually become another victim; it is only a matter of time. Bluehost wants its client base to consist of small, static websites. Anything else and you better have a bottle of aspirin on hand.
BlueHost offers 3000 GB Bandwith, 300 GB Space… it’s true, I suppose. You can basically use up to all of that space and bandwidth, if you do get the opportunity. Of course, chances are good that the 600 other sites sharing your server (also promised the same lack of restrictions) won’t allow you to do it. In fact, BlueHost themselves won’t let you – they cap CPU usage at 10%. Don’t try looking for it in the same page that mentions the bandwidth and space numbers, though – it’s somewhere else, where all the fine print thrives.
If you’ve bought into BlueHost’s shared hosting offer, which purported to give 300 GB of disk space along with near-unlimited bandwidth, and planned to use as much of the resources as you were allowed, you probably realized too late how much of a joke it actually is. I know I did.
On the server I was, at least, the sites I hosted were nearly unusable during peak hours. There are just way too many accounts on the same machine and almost everything was affected – email, control panel and all dynamic processing included. I know for a fact that BlueHost has been strict with specific accounts running high CPU loads, having been suspended myself a couple of times for it, but performance continued to border on retardedly slow.
After four months of tolerating the hosting (dis)service, I decided to move most of the sites somewhere else but kept the account since I had eight months left on the contract. I chose to use it to host some large media files instead, which I offered as free downloads to paying members of a forum I was running. These were legit files – royalty-free stock photos and flash animations that I had every RIGHT to distribute.
All files took about 7 GB of disk space, a paltry sum compared to the 300 GB BlueHost theoretically allowed me access to. Within a day, all files were wiped and I received an email from support informing me that I can’t host those files on their machine. I spent the whole day exchanging emails and calls with them, throughout which I proved that I had the right to distribute the files, to no avail. From what I can make of their answers, they basically didn’t want me to use that much of the available resource.
I tried uploading the files again several times and having folks download from the server, putting them back every time they get deleted. Eventually, BlueHost suspended my account and I just penciled the whole thing in as a loss. You host with BlueHost, you lose.
All the growth my upstart PHP-based forum needed was 500 uniques a day and it was already eating too much resources. It’s not like I had anything fancy on that forum either – just the standard forum icons, two advertising panels, avatars and a 3KB logo.
I was on a shared hosting plan and I understood that once the site got too big, I’d have to move it elsewhere. However, never for a second did I think that 500 uniques was too much for what was essentially basic forum software. I even disabled avatars and used a lighter-loading template to no avail.
According to support, “your website eats our server’s resources…blah…blah.” What did it expect my site to do? Use up no resources? One thing the tech told me, however, was what took me aback and finally spurred me to give up on this hosting company. During our conversation, he suggested I consider using a static website instead (with a serious tone like he didn’t even understand the whole irony of it) and even boasted that many of their servers ran well hosting 20,000 clients with simple HTML pages running on it!
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. They are, essentially, hoping that the sign-ups they attract with those “Cpanel with Fantastico, 3000GB Bandwidth and 300GB Storage” offers host nothing but static HTML so they can oversell 20,000 of it for a single server. Unbelievable!
According to a January blog post from Matt Heaton, BlueHost’s figurehead and resident evangelist, the company has finally extended the cap on CPU usage. If you’re not familiar with the company’s services, that refers to the frequent “exceeds CPU quota” error that web sites with moderate traffic are frequently subjected to.
The announcement elicited quite a chuckle inside our office, especially since Matt essentially admitted in the same post that the cap was placed so their old shitty servers could handle a ridiculous number of customers. He further claimed that since they’re now running on upgraded boxes, the cap was no longer necessary.
BlueHost claims up to 90% of the customers who used to suffer through the CPU cap will no longer be subjected to it. I’m inclined to think it is true because, as far as I can tell, all of my customers with their sites still with BlueHost are now seeing slower than usual performance.
I’m not kidding. With the large number of accounts BlueHost packs on its oversold machines now allowed more CPU leeway, page loads have become retardedly slow. While Matt basically wrote that post thinking it was supposed to attract people who were largely turned off by reports of massive CPU usage issues, it really came across to us something else. If you’ve been thinking of hosting with BlueHost, now is the worst time to do it, with their already overextended resources allowed to take even more abuse.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
I just renewed my Bluehost plan four months ago (for 5 years) and is painfully regretting that decision. While service was acceptable before that, it has just turned into a veritable nightmare.
Call me paranoid but I have a feeling they moved my account on another box – one that is oversold with customers falling out through its nose. I mean, how can performance shift the way it has almost over a weekend?
The account’s performance was pretty acceptable in February. While I occasionally got the dreaded temporary disabling due to excess CPU use, it didn’t happen too often. Page loads were decent even during peak hours. On off-hours, all my sites were running fast!
That all changed over the week leading to March. Starting Monday, I noticed page loads turning out unusually slow. I initially ignored it, thinking it was temporary – maybe some sites in the box were getting a surge in traffic. For the same reason, publishing a Wordpress post from the dashboard was such torture that I decided to forego posting on Monday. I resolved to just let the “temporary” problem slide and decided to postpone my posting for the next day.
Come Tuesday, problem stayed the same. Since I couldn’t hold off on posting new content anymore, I decided to suck it in and work with the slo-mo interface. After painful minutes of waiting for pretty much everything while writing my content, I hit “Publish!” Post went through although when I went to check how it looked like, I got the excess CPU use message.
Since that week up to now, my site gets disabled everytime I publish a post from the dashboard. I called up helpdesk to complain whose only answer was that my plugins was throwing my CPU usage into fits. I carefully pointed out that the last time I installed a new plugin was November of last year so anything wrong on that end should have made itself clear back then. Why are the problems occurring only this month?
In short, I never got any answer and was even, at one point, told to “find a different hosting service.”
I have the same problem right now with bluehost.
Im losing a lot of money and a lot of traffic because of bluehost.
I really really wished i can go back and read all about bluehost first.
I spend a lot of money on my site and now
its getting me no where.
Once you ask for help, they will tell you the problem is not on thier part
and its mine, my coding and blah blah, which is i have been using the plugins or the coding since i dont even remember and now everything is wrong??? They really sucks.
Bluehost really sucks
Hi Gie, sorry to hear about your troubles. One thing you can try is optimizing your MySQL tables to see if that satisfies them. Other than that, asking people to stop using plugins is ridiculous. You might want to look into alternative hosting providers once your contract runs out.
It happened to me. Account deactivated because of excessive CPU usage. It seems that they can’t even support a couple of thousand visitors a day.
CPU usage seems to be the biggest problem for all wordpress users. I hope there is a fix for this soon. I’ve gone through at least 12 pages of googled articles and nowhere have I found a clear cut solution.
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