Hosting gone bad
I’ve been using BlueHost to host DavidMeade.com (and several other websites) for some time now. I’ve brought friends and family to BlueHost and championed BlueHost in the videoblogger community. I liked them because they had decent support.
I’m sorry to say recent events have changed my opinion of BlueHost. I will no longer recommend them, or offer them as an alternative when hosting options are discussed in the videoblogger community. As I doubt anyone at BlueHost is going to concern themselves with my issues, I expect that overtime I will move all of my domains to some other hosting provider. After seeing their sympathetic shock and anger upon hearing my story, I expect my friends and family that I regrettably introduced to BlueHost will take their business elsewhere too. While losing 10 or so accounts and whatever referrals might have been had will probably not cause any real concern for BlueHost, I can assure you that their profound ignorance on how to provide hosting and address even the simplest of user issues will lose them far far more.
If anything is more shocking that their complete inability to respond to support requests in a timely manner, it is there AMAZINGLY inept and arrogant response when they finally bother to offer one.
If you’re shopping for a hosting provider, take note …
Not so long ago the president of BlueHost (Matt Heaton) sent out a whole series of emails letting his customers know that they were aware of the serious performance issues on their servers and were actively working on it. These emails were soon followed by emails that essentially said ‘things should be much better now’.
Unfortunately for me, you, and this site … DavidMeade.com was still suffering from debilitating server issues. So, i sent an email to BlueHost support. I got an auto-response saying we can’t email support anymore and had to use the web ticketing system. Frustrating but so far no big deal, I copy and pasted my email into their web form for them:
My server has been unavailable ALOT lately, and when its up its incredibly slow. I’m getting alot of “whats up with your website” reports now. Most people saying its ‘offline’ and many saying its painfully slow. I myself often cant get the site to load, or have to have to alt-tab away and do other things for awhile to give the a page time to load.
I’ve gotten the update emails BlueHost has sent regarding larger issues, and appreciate the fact that you’re actively working to improve performance across the board but I’m hoping there is something you can do for this particular server in the meantime.
Most of the big stuff on my site (videos, audio files, etc) are hosted elsewhere (podcasting services) leaving mostly pure HTML/CSS/PHP at BlueHost. My site is essentially a WordPress blog, with some simple custom code here and there.
That code is basic database calls in PHP pages, so I’m pretty sure its not MY site that is dogging the server. (although if there is anything I can do in my control panel to help or anything just let me know).
Again, I appreciate that you’re working on such issues at an architecture level and eagerly await the results … but if there is anything you can do to help keep my site up and responsive in the meantime … it is in need of such help.
Yesterday the server responded with a page that said the server was over its CPU Quota.
Thanks in advance,
– Dave
Two days later my site was still nearly unusable and nobody at BlueHost had even been assigned to read my ticket. Concerned I added an entry to my ticket.
I’m trying to be patient given all the work that is apparently going on there, but I’ve gotten several “things should be much better now” style mass-emails and … they aren’t.
Not only are my users complaining, it’s next to impossible for me to make even simple updates to my site most of the time now-a-days. To top it off my google ranking has dropped (no doubt because timeouts prevent google from indexing the site now except for the occasional “over cpu quota” error message).
I really need to have this looked at. I like BlueHost, but my site is a very simple WordPress blog … There MUST be something BlueHost can do to keep such a simple set of php pages up and available.
Again I like BlueHost and am trying to be patient, but there’s only so long I should have to deal with visitor complaints and dropping google rank … I’m not asking for a load balanced enterprise level eCommerce site … its just a WordPress blog.
My server (despite recent ‘things should be much better now’ emails) still shows a RED led graphic for CPU in the control panel. I don’t know if this is directly related to the sluggish nature of my site, but it may be a helpful place to start from.
Two days later still, constant timeouts and server CPU errors had made accessing my administration pages impossible, corrupted one file, and made uploading a fix impossible. It was now 4 days since my support request and still nobody at BlueHost had been assigned to the ticket. I added the following to my ticket:
Two days later, now 6 days out, the server issues were now a little more intermittent but definitely still present … and nobody at BlueHost had responded … nobody was even assigned. Desperate to be able to ftp to the server reliably again I added the following to my ticket.
Another 2 days passed and the server issues were now much more intermittent … but were of course still causing problems. To ftp up a simple page would require half a day of retries. I was pretty angry at this point. More than a week of suffering and I just knew that if they ever bothered to respond at all they’d likely load my page during one of its now more frequent good moments and conclude nothing was wrong.
Now I wanted them to address the server issues and their inability to provide any support whatsoever for over a week of SERIOUS server issues. (I mean I could get hosting far cheaper if i was willing to put up with that level of support). I added the following to my ticket (not really thinking anyone would ever bother to read it).
my server is still getting red led status on the cpu, pages take MINUTES to load, FTP times out, pages are broken because FTP craps out and I can’t update them (cause FTP craps out), visitors are giving up, google rank is dropping, I’m not allowed to email support, and the web ticket isn’t even looked at.
would someone please explain to me:
1) Why a simple wordpress blog should be taking MINUTES to load
2) Why a simple wordpress blog should timeout on FTP updates nearly every single time.
There HAS to be something you can do for me other than suggest I pay 3x the monthly fee for a high CPU account … I am NOT the person on this server eating up so much of the CPU … I cant be, its a simple WordPress blog (which honestly doesn’t get that much traffic) … I shouldn’t be punished because someone else is.
SOMETHING you’re doing there, you’re doing wrong. I don’t mean that to be mean, but the simple truth is that other similarly priced hosting companies don’t have such widespread problems hosting simple blogs.
… I’m betting they also read/assign support tickets in something less than 7 days.
A few days later I actually got a response from BlueHost support. After apologizing for the delay, they told me that slow sites are often caused by links to things like pictures on flickr, and that before they could work with me they suggested I remove any and all links to pages not local to my site.
!?
I was dumbfounded. After a week … They were seriously telling me that they as a web hosting company can only provide support for those sites which don’t link anywhere?!?!?!
In the interest of full disclosure here is their exact response:
In looking at your page and doing a site analysis on www.websiteoptimization.com, I noticed you have some links to other websites like blip.tv, farm1.tatic.flicker.com and some others. When sites load slow, it can often be the case that they are slowed down because they have to pull content off of different servers from different locations. You can test this by taking off all links to images and files on other sites and only have the content from the server and see if it loads much faster. If you take off the external links and still have problems, reply back so we can run some tests and make sure it’s not trying to pull content off of other servers that may be slowing it down.
Sincerely,
Mike Johnson
BlueHost.com Support Team
I just couldn’t believe what i was reading … I added the following to my support ticket:
… a picture from Flickr taking a long time to load would not account for the BlueHost server giving CPU Quota errors.
… a picture from blip taking a long time to load would not account for FTP to my BlueHost server timing out 99 times out of 100.
… a text link to an MP3 would not cause the page to take MINUTES to load.
… linking to a resource hosted elsewhere would not cause cpanel to take 10 minutes to load or the CPU LED status indicator to turn red.
**** I’m telling you: My issue is not that other sites are slow. It is that BLUEHOST IS SLOW. *****
OTHER sites being slow is NOT the problem … but for the record:
In general I am not including large inline off-site resources … I’m including TEXT links to off-site resources.
In the few cases where I am including an off-site image or something … they are hosted at services like Flickr and Blip which are RARELY slow by ANY measure … and even if they were, it would not account for the problems I’m seeing on the BlueHost server.
I’m not sure you understand that issues I’m seeing. (I frantically explained them in further detail in the various replies to the original post) My issue is NOT “Hmm this page that has alot of pictures is loading slow”, its “My entire server is next to dead. I cannot upload FTP, I often cannot get to cpanel, and the server is giving CPU errors.” (Yes, I’m still seeing them even after the “everything should be much better now” emails that were sent.)
I mean come on … I’ve been suffering for over a week with visitors giving up, feed subscriptions going stale, dropping google rank, inability to update my site … and after a week of begging someone to help, the response I get is essentially “Don’t link to anything elsewhere on the internet”?!
Just so we’re clear: The DEFINITION the World Wide Web (“WWW” or simply the “Web”) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet.
**** If you’re telling me that in order to provide hosting BlueHost recommends its users not link to off-site resources … that’s just insane … and frankly it’s not a troubleshooting step I’m willing to take — Especially since BlueHost servers being unresponsive is a currently KNOWN ISSUE!!! I have emails from Matt Heaton saying so! ****
My problem is not that resources at other locations are loading slowly. My problem is with the BlueHost Server.
A few days later (after finding several other hosting options in case the worst happened) I got a response from BlueHost … and the worst happened:
If troubleshooting by taking off images and files pulling from another server is out of the question for you. Then the best that we can do is try to make sure that our servers are up and running. Please let us know if you need anything else.
Troy Stephens
BlueHost Support Team
Graveyard Supervisor
I sat horrified and amazed at the response. An entirely new “support” agent had responded and endorsed the idea that BlueHost could only support performance issues for sites that did not link to pages elsewhere on the internet.
Naturally I’ve no intention of conforming a webpage to this bizarre 1985 style of offline content.
The true irony in all of this is that the president of BlueHost had throughout this nonsense a post on his blog pondering why some companies seem to go out of their way to frustrate their customers … there are those in his own backyard who could provide some valuable insight on this.
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David Meade ... Indianapolis based vlogger, geek, rock star, protector of innocents, defender of the weak, role model to millions of children everywhere.
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