BlueHost Web Hosting Package

A few days back, ReviewBluehost.com has its first outage and was down for more than 3 hours.

I didn’t really know the actual down time because I was not tracking closely on the website but it’s confirmed to be more than 3 hours. All three MySQL databases with my Bluehost account *disappeared* (thus the connection error). I wasn’t sure why that was happening but it scares the hell out of me.

Without any delay I emailed Bluehost and yelled for help.

The first the support staff I encountered wasn’t what’s happening but he quickly referred me to the upper level. In his own words – he’s referring me to their company ‘engineer’. The folks at support department was professional and didn’t do much ‘PR talks’. After about an hour of silence from the supports, all three databases were back and ReviewBluehost.com is back to normal.

At first I had the feelings that my databases were accidentally removed but Bluehost refused the possibility of that. I tried to ask for an explanation after everything is fixed but there were not much to be told. MySQL server down was the official explanation for the incident:

Dear Customer,

The databases are not deleted they just wont show up if the MySQL Server goes down because cPanel and your scripts wont be able to connect to them. It should resolve usually with in 5-60 minutes depending on what has to be done.

Thanks
Brandon O.
Level 2 Scripting Specialist
Bluehost.com
866.573.4678

Well if this is true, I hope you are not hosting on the same MySQL server with me coz this means your site/blog could be down at that time as well.

Bad news Bluehost, bad news. Recently I’m seeing server usage getting heavier and heavier with Bluehost. It’s pushing the limit and the server load is closing to its max for my hosting server at Bluehost.

An overview on Bluehost server status shows that the server CPU and hard disk usage are abnormally heavy.

Look closer, the hard disk usage is at a worrying level and what’s worse is the CPU load had exceeded it’s comfort zone.

At this time of writing, red light is shown for the server loads where the numbers are 18.12 (8cpus). This means there are 18.12 processes in queue – which is over 2 times of CPU capacity. I’m sure such high server loads will cause website delay from time to time and it’s really a bad sign for a good host like Bluehost.

I’ll be monitoring the situation more closely for the next few days and hopefully the problem is just short term. I’ll definitely contact Bluehost support in case of necessary and keep you updated on the latest status.