For the last three days, I have been experiencing CPU overload, WP error and all kind of problems with the blogs I have hosted on Bluehost. The funny thing is I didn’t add any new WordPress plugin or do anything to those blogs.
So, I tried logging in during the downtime and I cannot even access my cpanel. And I cannot submit a ticket because if I don’t login, I cannot submit a ticket and if I don’t submit a ticket, I cannot communicate with Bluehost. Doh…
Those blogs on Bluehost are smaller blogs and therefore, they are not as critical as those blogs I have hosted with Bryan on VPS.
Any other Bluehost clients facing server unavailability these few days? I regret that I have just renewed another two years of webhosting with Bluehost. I paid USD165 for two years. It is not entirely expensive and moreover, Bluehost never gives me problems in these last two years.
14 thoughts on “My Bluehost hosting is driving me nuts”
tunepal
(October 9, 2008 - 6:30 am)i see. maybe you can ask them clearly about that first.
pablopabla
(October 9, 2008 - 10:19 am)Either that, or your neighbours have eaten up the bandwidth. These guys put us with donno-who and the donno-whos might have monster bandwidth eating sites :P
Jys
(October 9, 2008 - 12:30 pm)I’m using bluehost too, so far no problem. One thing I don’t understand is that, how come everytime when I contact their live chat support, they will need to ask for my password. If I don’t give them, they said i’m not the owner of the hosting and won’t provide any support to me!!
Dave
(October 9, 2008 - 1:30 pm)I’m getting exactly the same problem of CPU exceeded since 4 or 5 days and I wasn’t getting any since january before.
It happens a lot when I publish a post with WP.., just after publishing I can’t access my site for 5 minutes because of that error.
I too renewed my account for 2 years in august :/
Hillary Chan
(October 9, 2008 - 4:49 pm)Did you try their Livechat support? I chatted with a guy there, he helped me to install WP-SuperCache and I never had the same problem ever again.
Watch Anime Online
(October 10, 2008 - 11:08 pm)Go to your phpmyadmin select your DB and select all your tables select “Repair” from the droplist from the right, After finishing repair progress, select “optimize” from the same part. It will be ok
puppy
(October 11, 2008 - 5:40 pm)There are lot of reason why I have changed the blue host for my site.
chris
(October 13, 2008 - 7:57 pm)Well, I used to get those at least 10 times a day, and I was totally pissed with BlueHost when they totally shut down one of my high-traffic blogs about a month ago, without even giving me a prior notice.
I received a notification email right after my blog was shut down, telling me that it was due to increasing traffic to my blog over a long period of time that degraded their server performance and they had to shut my blog down.
I was extremely unhappy about it but I maintained composure and chatted with one of the live helpdesk guys, but he sounded like they don’t really care about my business. I then switched to a vps immediately after doing researches and ask-arounds for two days and it’s a hell of a job learning from scratch on how to transfer the whole blog from BlueHost to my VPS, not to mention downloading and uploading the whole thing to my VPS. It took me 3 sleepless nights and goddamned days to complete the whole transfer.
I used to recommend BlueHost to my friends and family, but after this incident, I only have two words for BlueHost, “FxCK YOU”
Brazilian Directory
(November 15, 2008 - 12:42 am)I got the same problem of CPU exceeded when my site was hosted with Bluehost.
They said maybe it was a connection to mysql left open. In fact, i don´t find out any problem in my scripts.
Frank
(December 26, 2008 - 9:35 pm)i faced this problem as well on the 24th of december 2008…doh! I am using wordpress and third party plugins. In the end i found out that it was a combination of a surge in my traffic and a plugin called Statpress reloaded. Once i deleted such a plugin, swithed to php5 fast CGI, reduced the quantity of posts on the frontpage and reduce the quantity of widgets on the frontpage everything went back to normal. Before i used to have around 10 slow mysql query a day. Now, I dont have anything. Bluehost is just protecting other blogs in the same server. The downside is that i had to chat with the support. The first two guys i spoke with didnt really care about what happened. I am not into php and script and i asked them to explain what was the script or plugin that was causing the mess.They said it was my business to find out what it was….wow…nice support! I was very polite ( as usual in my life) and they just didnt give me a shit! They could have said: ” hey, have a look at your plugins”. these 4 words could have solved my issues. Instead nothing! The third guy I spoke with was very, very nice and it helped me a little bit. I reviewed the error log in the server and i said to him if i was right to suspect statpress reloaded. He said to me : “yes, that plugin is giving a lot of issues here at bluehost”. in less than 10 minutes i solved my issue but before that I had to speak with two guys who didnt care at all about my business and this toow almost two hours!
Dave
(December 27, 2008 - 4:01 am)I just got trashed from BlueHost two weeks ago. First of all they desactived my account without any warning and when I found out my websites weren’t online, I had already lost some good money.
Since months, the box where my websites were hosted was having constant CPU Quota error and very high server load. I was told by them that my account was the cause of this as I was using too much ressources.. Still, I was having about 10 000 pageviews a day, with WP-Cache activated, so I don’t believe I was exceeding anything.
Anyway, having my account cancelled by them was the best thing I could have, finally. I paid for two year in advance but in fact they should refund me the remaining month. I’m now using two webhost: if something goes wrong, at least all my websites will not be affected at the same time. I’m with HostPapa and WPWebHost and so far I have no complaint. WpWebHost is always having a low server load…
By mean, the server load of BlueHost is still 5 or 6 time higher than my new webhosts, and I can see that I wasn’t the cause for they high server load as when I’m looking at the server status, I can see sometimes very high server load, about 30 or 35 seconds.
The best advice I can give you is to change webhost before they desactivate your account without any warning. I searched on google and I can see there are a lot of other similar case of desactivated account..
StratMan II
(January 13, 2009 - 10:45 pm)Hi,
After reading the comments above, I felt very compelled to voice my opinions about Bluehost.
I’m totally with Frank with his views. I signed up with Bluehost in March 2008 upon the very obvious recommendation (read: paid ad) from the WordPress.com main site.
I installed many plugins and widgets and experienced no issues whatsoever, with the original Statpress plugin. When StatPress’ development was discontinued, someone else took over its upgrades and StatPress Reloaded was the result.
And I installed StatPress Reloaded, thinking that it was an improvement over the original version.
Never once did I think StatPress Reloaded (SP-R) would one day cause my site to be offline twice. The first incident happened in mid Dec 2008 and luckily I caught the notification by email. Since I live in Asia, I opted for the online chat instead of international phone call.
The tech guy told me that my blog’s MySQL was causing performance. True, it was then at 108 MB and rising. He said that my blog was drawing too many queries in an hour and suggested that SP-R was the culprit.
I got my Control Panel access back and my WordPress (then version 2.5.2) online. I emptied the SP-R tables and true enough, my SQL shrunk to a tenth of its original size.
The tech guy said that 100 MB was “too large” for a WP blog database. Following his advice, I re-configured SP-R to clear its history after 30 days (previously 50 days) and turned off logging of bots and crawlers.
I also noticed that Bluehost’s servers were often under heavy load starting from 3rd Qtr 2008.
Today on Jan 13th, I woke up to find that my site had been suspended again. OK, this time I was pretty sure SP-R was the problematic plugin. The tech guy whom I contacted via chat was unfriendly and told me that Bluehost “admin wanted me to contact them for reinstatement through a support ticket”.
Ticket was posted…several hours passed by with nobody attending to the support ticket. In the meantime, I had already made up my mind to change my web hosts, after finding so many references to “Bluehost.com sucks” on Google.
I found another web hosting provider – Fastdomain.com, which is actually a sister company of Bluehost.com, except that they don’t share servers or static IP addresses. The location of Fastdomain’s servers is the same as Bluehost’s.
The salesperson, “Ann A.” whom I chatted with turned out to be more knowledgeable than the support guys at Bluehost.com (oh, the irony of things!). She said that while Fastdomain and Bluehost are related to one another, they do not share their clientele list, therefore privacy of my new account is assured.
Ann also told me that lots of their clients have websites with SQLs over 100MB in size and with 10,000 visitors a day – no problems. But she did caution me that certain plug-ins are known to cause overload on their shared servers due to excessive queries caused by those plugins. (Ah, now I see the root of the problem – StatPress Reloaded). :-)
After one hour on the chat line, I actually learned MORE about MySQL and plug-in issues from someone from the sales dept than a chat with a so-called tech support person! Needless to say, I was sold and immediately opened an account with Fastdomain.com.
At $4.95/mth for a 24-hour hosting plan (thanks to a discount coupon), Fastdomain.com is much cheaper than Bluehost’s in the long term.
Some good news though – later I managed to persuade Bluehost’s tech dept person (a different guy) to reinstate my site. I convinced him that I had fixed the problem (deleting the SP-R plugin via FTP). Fortunately he sympathized with my predicament and at got my site back up within minutes. :-)
Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise. I was about to extend my hosting with Bluehost.com for the next 12 months (my account will expire in early March 2009) and after the two embarrassing downtime incidents, I’ve made up my mind to take my business elsewhere.
Looks like I’ll have to spend the next two or three days migrating my data to the new server (with a different domain). My beef is with Bluehost.com not notifying me via email (I check my emails daily) about my site issues.
I’m sure Bluehost had been monitoring my server box for at least a week, so why can’t they have the courtesy to notify me first? I could’ve fixed the problem ASAP. Server performance degradation doesn’t occur overnight – it takes time to develop.
Bluehost preferred to pull the plug instead and let me sort things out later. Grrr….
One thing I’m sure of now:
– Goodbye Bluehost.com.
– Farewell StatPress Reloaded.
And just to be on the safe side, I will not use StatPress Reloaded again with my new web host. I found out that the little-known AWStats applet provided in the CPanel does the same job too.
thanks for reading,
Stratman II.
http://www.quartzimodo.info
Scott Dennis
(May 13, 2009 - 10:03 am)I respectfully request that you let me post here as I too feel your pain. The whole reason I started a hosting company was due to the treatment, when I too was at Bluehost not only as a customer but also an employee.
I am sorry to hear that all of you Bluehost.com / Hostmonster.com / Fastdomain.com clients are still getting the run around with CEO (Matt Heaton) and President (Dan Handy) and the fact they still do not get it. I was the 38th employee hired, both I am my wife worked for them. I as a level 2 technician and my wife worked in billing, until I tired of their excuses and lies they would force us to push to the customer. For those of you who want the honesty back from your hosting provider. please feel free to move your site to our hosting service http://www.bullfroghost.net.
I would love to have all of you as clients. Please also note that you can request a refund of the unused portion of your hosting costs from Bluehost and they will refund it. This will leave you free to move your site. Our cost is only $3.95/mo ($94.80 for the two year plan.)
I would love to go into detail on all of the issues I have read on this blog but I feel I will only waste my time and yours. If you would like more proof of what I have declared, please feel free to contact me scott @ bullfroghost.net.
NOTE: We are a debt free hosting provider protected by the industries best Firewalls and Intrusion Detection Prevention. We do not play games with your important personal data.
Yours Truely,
CEO Scott Dennis.
Remote Computer Tech
(July 9, 2009 - 9:30 am)its a real pain when that happens, or you get dugg and your host kills the site. Very useful information, thanks for the great post. Site looks great!
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