CPU Quota Exceeded: Bluehost admits the problem

I have blogged regularly about the problems with the CPU Quota Limit at Bluehost on and off for over year. I have to say that I am happy that Matt Heaton has reported that they have finally solved the issue. Kudos to him and his team for doing so.

My only issue is why did it take so long? And why have calls in to the tech support about these issues always resulted in blaming PHP applications like WordPress, Drupal, and MediWiki? I’m sure the good news will be generally welcome by the Bluehost faithful, but for me it comes a bit too late and with a certain amount of frustration that all those calls had more to do with their miscalculation than their customers’ gluttonous CPU usage.

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14 Responses to CPU Quota Exceeded: Bluehost admits the problem

  1. Gardner says:

    It’s so rare for any company to ‘fess up at all, much less fix the problem, that I think Bluehost still deserves those kudos. Why did the tech support not speak directly to the issue? Communication is always the biggest obstacle. I don’t think they were deliberately trying to mislead anyone. They may have honestly been looking for answers, and the usage they targeted were plausible answers from their point of view.

    But yes, it’s frustrating. Now that they’ve come forward and done the right thing, though, it’s good to celebrate. Even companies like Apple have had their “denial” phases to work through, yes? šŸ™‚

  2. jimgroom says:

    With such forgiving consumers as you, Gardner, I’m surprised they bothered to fix it at all šŸ™‚

    But, I agree, kudos to them for fessing up publicly and making their service more usable for their paying customers.

  3. Gardner wrote,”Itā€™s so rare for any company to ā€˜fess up at all, much less fix the problem, that I think Bluehost still deserves those kudos.” I say BS. If Bluehost gave a rats ass about their customers they wouldn’t have had a problem with CPU quota lockouts in the first place. No other web hosting company on the net has used such a ridiculous CPU usage policy. Enough Bluehost customers were fed up with being locked out of their accounts due to the exceeds CPU errors and were becoming very vocal about the problem. Many customers were dumping Bluehost for a reliable hosting company. Matt Heaton, CEO of Bluehost, is using the so called “fixing the CPU problem” as damage control.

  4. I am one of their customers. I am still having the Overload issue. They said hey we need to migrate you to get over it. I did and my email was broken for a week. It took them a week to find out that it wasn’t my ISP but a mistake they made in the DNS from when they moved me.

    They still will not admit it to this day and when I complained to a supervisor I got an email back from them saying that if I didn’t like it I could take my mail business elsewhere and see if that helped.

    Here you go. How is this for Arrogance?
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Thank you for your concerns. I have reviewed the ticket, and asked several upper-level technicians involved what your core issues are. From the investigation that I have performed, I cannot determine any persistent issue with our servers.

    Occasionally, our email proxy can have slight delays which is normal, but after examining the logs with one of the Level 3s, I could not find any significant delays or lag times.

    If you feel that our email servers are causing issues, please feel to point your mx records to different email service of your choice to see if that solves your email problems. That would be one way to definitively determine if the issue resides with us, or not. Other customers are not experiencing the issues that you describe.

    Also, please do not cross-ticket reference (ticket #194913) as you did in with Cade.

    I am considering this case closed.

    Thanks!
    Mike Dickson
    Supervisor
    HostMonster.com
    866-573-4678

  5. Daniel Harris says:

    Hello,

    Shared hosting servers are like this though. You should maybe look into getting a VPS, the cost have come down. These things allow you to have your own quota’s for CPU, Memory and such! Check out knownhost.com, tigerservers.com, modvps.com!

    It’s just a matter of time before bluehost tries to can you for hosting an “resource intensive” application!

  6. Richard Blair says:

    Stumbled onto this posting when I was searching for “matt heaton” “bluehost” on google trying to find a direct phone number for him.

    As of yesterday, I was still experiencing the CPU exceeded errors, in fact, my site was down nearly half the day yesterday because of this. Spent 1/2 hour on the phone with a tech who kept telling me the problem was on my end (even though I’ve changed nothing on my site, from an operational perspective, for weeks).

    I’m a network administrator myself. All of the “answers” the tech was giving me were crap (I had the logs up in front of me when we were speaking and I knew more than the tech), and I finally got fed up and asked for second level support. The second guy I spoke with admitted there was problem, that my site wasn’t exceeding CPU usage, and that they were upgrading their CPU usage monitoring software across all 700 boxes. He unlocked the site, and I haven’t had a problem since.

    Bluehost tech support has degraded significantly over the past six months. If you get a tech who can’t quickly answer your questions, don’t fart around. Ask for second level support immediately.

  7. Gary K says:

    BlueHost still has this problem. They did not solve the problem at all.

  8. Omid says:

    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.

  9. Albert says:

    You guys understand that bluehost is a normal web hosting company! They pack a bunch of users on servers and then limit cpu usage, etc.

    Why not take a look at providers like http://www.mosso.com, http://www.uptimehost.com, or http://www.gogrid.com, which are cloud hosting providers.

  10. Damian says:

    Where did you move to and are you happy there?

  11. Reverend says:

    Damian,

    I actually went with a boutique hosting company run by a friend of mine called Cast Iron Coding, and I love them. http://castironcoding.com

  12. Steve Shaw says:

    This issue start popping up for me the last two days, and is costing me cash. I’ve been running the same apps on my site for 5 months, and nothing has changed much outside of a small bump in traffic.

  13. Well, there’s a reason I created my website… šŸ™‚

    They kicked me off for “excessive CPU usage” without any warning… I had no idea installing Magento was causing any problems. I asked them for help and they said, “That’s not our job.” I offered to fix it, they said “No, the decision has been made”.

    Bluehost sucks.

  14. Apollo13 says:

    BlueHost.com they’re liars. They say that you offer unlimited traffic, but if you have a site with more than 800 visitors per day, they will block your site! Do not buy hosting from them !
    I had hosted them a simple phpbb2 forum, and I had 800 visitors per day, and in these conditions just take a look such as server resources:

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