A little less than I year ago I was forced to move to shared web hosting after running my own dedicated web & email servers for years. The reason for the move was purely financial — hardware and internet connection costs simply pushed the luxury of dedicated hosting out of reach. When searching for a web hosting service the usual suspects kept surfacing; Bluehost, Dreamhost, FatCow, HostGator, and HostMonster (powered by Bluehost). I decided to go with HostMonster based on their being one of the oldest and largest hosting companies. HostMonster also offered SSH access. Something not many hosts offer but I desired as I preferred coding in terminal. Yea, I’m that hardcore ;-). In any event I thought I was making the right decision. Boy was I wrong.
Shortly after moving my websites & email to HostMonster I encountered atrociously slow load times and a general lack of responsiveness across all of my websites. Load times of 30 seconds were not uncommon. Worse yet, DNS performance was just as slow. Queries to any of my domains were taking several seconds just to resolve domain names to their associated ip. I contacted HostMonster technical support and their staff was very quick to say my websites were not efficient and I had to optimize them in order to gain the performance I desired. In short they recommended cleaning stale records from the MySQL databases and employing widespread caching on my websites. I would later learn, after researching the issue deeper, that this is a canned response given to any user reporting slow performance, but I happily took their advice, performed the recommended database maintenance and implemented caching. Much to my dismay the impact on site performance was minimal.
As time went on performance for my websites became worse and worse. It turns out the *actual* culprit of all this was drastically oversold (overloaded) servers. When combined with an interesting technology developed by the founder of Bluehost known as cpu throttling, website performance is terribly slow. The idea behind cpu throttling is that a servers heaviest users are prevented from adversely affecting performance for other users by limiting the amount of cpu time they have access to. The proverbial slice of the pie, so to speak, is a percentage of available server resources. Great in theory. Perhaps even in practice when applied properly. Not good on HostMonster’s servers. HostMonster so grossly oversells their servers (meaning they put far too many users on a single server) that there are not enough resources to efficiently run a simple WordPress site. So oversold in fact that when not encountering cpu throttling sites still load slow. Enough with referencing load times. How about some solid figures? Here are the server load averages from the HostMonster server My sites were assigned to, taken while writing this post AFTER moving my sites to the new web host: up 20 days, 20:20, 1 user, load average: 41.30, 42.48, 43.52. This article provides a great explanation of load averages for those of you who are not in the know. In layman terms, the load averages above can be compared to driving on the Long Island Expressway during rush hour before a holiday weekend when combined with a religious holiday. Really really crowded.
After receiving several complaints from family who gave up on trying to view some photos in my photo gallery and numerous complaints from customers (for the software I sell here) I tried contacting HostMonster support again. The chat log from this contact can be viewed below.
(click to enlarge)
Since HostMonster clearly did not value me as a customer and offered nothing to resolve the situation I decided to change web hosting companies. I am now a proud customer of WebHostingHub.com. The performance on all of my websites has dramatically improved. They’re snappy even. Hopefully I haven’t lost all of my friends & family as readers. If you stopped checking in because my sites were slow, you have my apologies. I’m welcoming you back with open arms — better performance and all.
Nov 3rd, 2012 at 12:01 pm
Hey. I have same problem here. I guess I have to change the host, too. So, WebHostingHub.com are really speedy or not?
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Chris Schiffner Reply:
November 3rd, 2012 at 1:49 pm
It’s been fast for me. They are fairly good about suspending accounts that degrade performance for other users on the server.
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Nov 18th, 2012 at 7:29 am
Had the same scenario with Hostmonster a few minutes ago. Of course they blame my WordPress plugins. Its taking up to 20 seconds to load my sites. Eighteen of those 20 seconds my browser says connecting. Hostmonster is over their head, they need more servers and bandwidth.
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Dec 22nd, 2012 at 6:20 pm
20 or 30-second load times would be nice. Both last Wednesday and today, the load times for email pages are minutes. Like 2 to 5 minutes to get a page loaded.
Hostmonster is really getting bad. I need a new host.
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Chris Schiffner Reply:
December 22nd, 2012 at 6:27 pm
Just switch hosts. I lost all hope for improved performance on HostMonster. When I started to make an issue of it I received emails stating that upgrades were taking place to improve performance. Nothing ever changed. As you can see they did not value me as a customer, and though they claimed I would never find another host that offered what they did — I did. Schiffner.com is still hosted on WebHostingHub — I don’t have too many complaints. My account was temporarily suspended once for supposedly using too many server resources, but they could never point to a specific cause or prove my account was the offender. It hasn’t been suspended since. I wrote a script that monitors server load averages and this hosts load averages are roughly 18% that of what HostMonsters were. I can tell you other hosts to stay away from…DreamHost, HostGator, BlueHost, and GoDaddy.
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Orange Reply:
December 22nd, 2012 at 6:33 pm
Switch hosts, yes. I’m looking into co-locating my own server box.
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Orange Reply:
December 22nd, 2012 at 6:32 pm
P.S.: I contacted Hostmonster with their chat line, and got the usual runaround. He or she insisted that the pages all loaded fine there, so the problem must be somewhere else in the network. They lie. They always say that.
I showed him/her a traceroute output that showed 7-second delays in two links in their network. So they disconnected me, and the next thing I saw was a questionaire: “How likely are you to recommend Hostmonster to a friend?” I checked the zero rating.
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Jan 16th, 2013 at 10:50 pm
I’m currently using hostmonster and having all sorts of issues. This is my first hosting site – transferred from blogger and made a complete switch in November 2012. Since day 1 I have been having problems. Sure, I have a larger readership since making the switch (I’ve been having my own domain, just switched to a hosting site), but I’m always getting some sort of error and slow load times. I thought it was me til I started doing research. Like everyone else I’ve been clearing cache, optimizing, searching for other ways to clean up the site, etc. As of now I feel like I’m at a dead end and I paid for a 4 year subscription!
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Chris Schiffner Reply:
January 16th, 2013 at 10:54 pm
You should be able to cancel and get a pro-rated refund. Give them a call. As for hosts — Web Hosting Hub has been great.
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Jan 30th, 2013 at 10:40 am
Fast forward to late January, are you still happy with WebHostingHub? I’m currently in the same predicament.
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Chris Schiffner Reply:
January 30th, 2013 at 2:13 pm
I’m still happy. I’ve had one small issue where my account was suspended for using too many server resources. They claimed one of the email accounts was too large. I had to call them but the account was immediately re-enabled. This site is still hosted at WebHostingHub. I have no immediate plans to move.
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Feb 14th, 2013 at 6:47 pm
I’m about ready to make a move away from Hostmonster as well. I have a WordPress blog and have had it for almost three years.A couple of months ago, I was unable to login on my site and it was nerve wracking. They told me there was some type of maintenance going on and it shouldn’t take long. Well it did. If I can’t get on that means my readers can’t either. Today I tried to send myself an email from another account and it bounced back saying I was over quota. When I tried to get into my cPanel at Hostmonster this is the message I received:
Your username onebodyo is installed correctly, but your account cannot be repaired at this time. Try resetting your password later or contact support if this problem persists.
I submitted a help ticket and got the autoreply. Still trying to login to no avail and still no answer from support.
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Feb 22nd, 2013 at 3:40 am
For all you wordpress folk, try loading the js files from the footer. Put this in your functions file ..
/**
* Automatically move JavaScript code to page footer, speeding up page loading time.
*/
remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_print_scripts’);
remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_print_head_scripts’, 9);
remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_enqueue_scripts’, 1);
add_action(‘wp_footer’, ‘wp_print_scripts’, 5);
add_action(‘wp_footer’, ‘wp_enqueue_scripts’, 5);
add_action(‘wp_footer’, ‘wp_print_head_scripts’, 5);
I have drupal also, and that IS getting too much of a pain ..
good luck
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Mar 20th, 2013 at 6:47 pm
I was just looking at Hostmonster’s policies, and saw:
“Reminder: The Terms of Service does not allow inappropriate use of our network for online storage. Please see “UNLIMITED” USAGE POLICIES AND DEFINITIONS for more information. Files uploaded in connection with your hosted site are always welcome.”
So before you sign up, they offer you huge amounts of storage. After you sign up, storing large numbes of files is redefined to be “inappropriate”.
What a cute bait-and-switch trick.
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Apr 9th, 2013 at 8:10 am
Same here. Hostmonster messed up my personal sites by taking over 20 seconds to resolve my .cc domains with EVERY page load, making it impossible to navigate my sites. Now I’m looking at a “cannot connect to server” for our company website for over an hour also. Still waiting for support to connect using live chat because last time I tried e-mail support it took over 48 hours for a dumb response which needed me to provide the exact same information as in my first mail and then took over 50 hours again for a second response. While I was typing this, I got connected to support who told me the server was undergoing a DDoS attack. When I asked why the server status page was reporting there are “No Known Issues” and the server status is “OK” the rep told me they won’t update that page until they know when the problem will be solved. I figure they only know how long this problem will take when the DDoS attack is over, then there won’t be any problems anymore, meaning the server status page will always report everything if fine and dandy during DDoS attacks, even if they take hours and hours. I already switched my personal sites to EuroVPS, which is slightly more expensive (about 25% extra) but way, WAY faster. I’ll make sure to convince my boss to make the switch too! Furthermore I had to contact EuroVPS support three times for some personal assistance in moving my sites and setting up stuff and the average response time through e-mail was between 25-30 minutes, which is also much better. I gladly pay that extra 25% for no more headaches!
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