MacBros' Place

You will see this animated image on my sidebar advertising the great low price and crazy storage space along with the unlimited bandwidth offer.

I just found out their catch 22.

Before I get to the catch 22, I just want to say it is one of the better hosting services out there, and there is a reason for t he catch 22 that will keep your site fast.

OK, now for the catch 22.

If you’re a frequent visitor to this site and you see the “CPU USAGE EXCEEDED – ACCOUNT SUSPENDED!” message every once in awhile there’s a reason behind that.

Each of Host Monsters users are allotted 20% CPU usage in any one session. They limit your account to 40 seconds cpu time within a 60 second period.

What that means is, that if you have a lot of plug-ins on your site that use the SQL Database or you site has a lot of PHP calls to scripting, you are probably going to go over that 20% quickly. So when you have a high amount of traffic like I do, your visitors will eventually see that CPU ERROR.

Why the limit? Lets just say that if there weren’t, users could run as many scripts as they want, (Spammers, bots and so on) and use up server resources, slowing down everybody else’s website, including yours, and not to forget, server wide crashed that result in hours to days of downtime (Dreamhost for example). So having the 20% cap is actually a good thing for everybody.

Now it took me a long while to figure this out, because I was constantly getting the canned replies as to why this error appears, and never had any help in determining what I can do to help this from happening all the time. The canned solution they replied to me was the general, “Optimize your scripts” that would apply to a development Script company, but not the individual regular run of the mill blogger that uses scripts programmed by other people. This is probably because they outsource their support to 3rd party call centers and support desks that get more money for the most calls and trouble tickets in a day. Meaning, they’re in it for the money, and not for the actual service. I know this because I did it before.

Now I wasn’t about to tell WordPress that they need to optimize their program, because that would be a slap in the face to the #1 blogging platform on the Internet. And I know that they know how to write their code as they are constantly optimizing it.

Then I started to remove plug-ins that I really didn’t use anyway or pay much attention to in the first place. I removed things like Site Stats, Users Online, and a couple of others who’s names escape me at the moment. The result was a faster loading page and no CPU errors for the days that I removed them. I can view a log that tells me of CPU errors. and before I removed the plug-ins, it was a daily occurrence.

My theory was completely confirmed when I tried to use the script that Jeremy Steele had gave me from something he wrote. It worked PERFECTLY! But since there’s so much traffic here, that script choking up the CPU, and they claim that the script needs to be optimized so it doesn’t use so much CPU resources on the server. I sent Jeremy Steele an e-mail thanking him for the script and also letting him know about how Host Monster likes it. It’s to bad too because that script was EXACTLY what I needed too, but thanks Jeremy Steele, hope you can optimize that so I can actually use it. I’ll pay you $10 for a better version if you ever make one.

So the bottom line here with Host Monster is, if you have a simple blog with a minimal amount of scripts (plug-ins), then this is the best hosting you can EVER get! But if you have a busy site and have multiple scripts, you may want to inquire about their High CPU Usage account that costs $19.95/ month, which is a big jump from $6/month.

So guess I’ll be trimming down my scripts, and keeping ONLY the necessary ones that make the site SEO compliant, and maybe a little eye-candy.