All this is sad, as in 2005, 2006 you could call their named knowlegable techs and they’d be on a terminal working though the issue in real time over the phone. They were the best, but whoever owned them grew too big without investing in the needed hardware or staff.

Now it’s only my laziness (and five domains) that keeps me from moving. I’d be interested to know what other companies others have moved to…

You hit the nail on the head. In my experience, when working with WordPress for a class of anything above 10 students on the site at once we would unfailingly get the CPU error message. And while I agree that BlueHost affords some unbelievable possibilities for experimenting with web apps, it is ultimately junk hosting for anyone who has a site that gets any kind of traffic whatsoever.

The idea of all this storage and bandwidth overshadows the idea you point to, having 400 processes running at once does not equate to anything remotely practical for hosting a site with traffic. I heard today that WordPress.com is giving its users 3 gigs of storage for free! Add the $10 or $15 a year to buy a domain and map it you have a far better and easier publishing solution than you would on Bluehost, in my humble opinion.

It’s all CPU exceeds limit errors. 2 weeks after sending in my ticket, support emails me back and states I can only have 400 processes in 1 minute or they shut it down. So what is that, like 25 concurrent users? That’s pitiful. I’d be better off using blogger and mapping my domain.

I don’t really understand the CPU thing…. So maybe there is something wrong with Wordpress. But heck, I just installed it! If it doesn’t work on my site, it won’t work on anyones!

UMW is doing a lot of different things. Some of them still work well on Bluehost. Others don’t. Clearly we needed something more robust and tailored for UMW Blogs to scale and function the way it has. Cast Iron Hosting seems to have worked very well for us. That said, we took three years to build to that point, and we’d have never gotten there without Bluehost. I do feel we’ve gotten way more than our money’s worth out of our business with them. I know I have.

I think “crap” may be a bit overstated, but we all know that I’ve been known. And I think you’re right when you suggest it can be outgrown but is still a valuable sandbox. However, I do get frustrated at times with the bloated promises and the fact that it balks if you have anything resembling traffic, and that doesn’t mean a lot. Perhaps I am just frustrated that these sites were down for a number of days without me knowing anything about it, at least until I got the e-mail from a frustrated user. Also, I think that the commodity side of Bluehost and its tremendous growth makes it quite a different service than it was over two years ago.

But, I guess you know I have the obligatory snarky e-mail with Bluehost every so often, because I don’t think it is actually the best service for what UMW is doing, but that’s me.

Curiosity question: did you try to escalate your tech call?

I’ve had the CPU Quota Exceeded experience too, and so far it’s been traceable to MediaWiki spam. (I go into Awestats and look for unusual activity on inactive wikis.) I’ve got a bunch of MediaWiki installs on my BH account, and the spammers have gotten quite ingenious about finding unlocked pages. Every time I think I’ve found and locked them all, I find a “talk” page linked somewhere that I’d overlooked, and the little boll weevils are sitting there, all blue and linked up and ready to exceed my quota. Talk about blue meanies….