A few times over the last month I have exceeded the limits of the server CPU on Bluehost. Three of the four times I have gotten the message above (which suspends my entire account for at least a few minutes). When Ireceived this message I had been utlizing what I think are relatively undemanding web applications (MediaWiki and WordPress) with a class of no more than twenty five students (in one case half that number). At first I thought maybe jimgroom.net is too demanding or I have bad scripts running (which I don’t believe I do), but when the same thing happened on a departmental bluehost account on a similar situation I began to see a pattern with the hosting service, not the individual accounts per se. Has anyone else out there been having similar problems with their webhosting?
I seem to have solved my issues with them, though… I recently had them switch me from a PHP 4 server to a PHP 5 server (a free service) and all of my CPU load issues vanished. It’s most likely because it’s a newer, faster server (rather than being a PHP thing), but it’s definitely something they should look into.
If you’re still on a PHP 4 server, I suggest requesting an upgrade.
I guess upgrading to a PHP 5 server is the next step for I still have been having issues intermittenly. I was thinking of moving to PHP 5 soon in any event, because I was considering a switch to Drupal and the module for bring the WordPress database over is dependent on PHP5, but that is fodder for yet another post.
Thanks for the tip!