This was the last straw for me. I previously wrote about how bluehost would not admit to overselling even in the face of clear problems and claiming that restarting mysql regularly was an accepted practice to solve problems, and storing my password in plain text. I was reminded last night why shared hosting is a failure (besides the problems of shared resources in a non-isolated way) – you simply don’t have control over what the host decided to do with the server.

Isolated, virtualized hosting is the way of the future. You get completely predictable behavior – no one will be messing with this server but me. I would run this blog on EC2, but at this point the processing needed is just way too small so I went with slicehost and their $20 256M slice because EC2 does not offer a comparable cheap product. Slicehost is not ideal because they don’t allow you to provision your images from the outside (in other words, to use a product like CohesiveFT’s elasticserver.com to create a bill of materials for a server and provision it predictably (disclaimer: I work for this company, but I also use the product for personal use with Planypus)), but it cheaper than EC2 and for my personal blog, that wins over the convenience of dynamic provisioning for now.

Goodbye bluehost, and good riddance.

I’ve included a one liner history of my interaction with them. My responses are paraphrased, while theirs are direct quotes from their emails. Note that they usually respond hours later when the site has restored itself due to their reaper scripts constantly restarting the database.

• February 13 Yan: Database problem.
• February 13 Bluehost: The processes on your server have been shut down. The site is showing up and running.
• At this point I call them, have a chat, they say they have had ongoing problems and they will be fixed. I ask them to notify customers. They do not.
• Mar 9 Bluehost: Currently MySQL on your server (box12) is overloaded.
• Mar 10 Bluehost: It looks like you are exceeding your own mysql active connection limit which is 30
• Mar 10 Yan: How can I exceed 30 connections with a blog that gets low traffic and runs 5 php processes? Database is down again.
• Mar 10 Bluehost: At this time there are no connections to terminate.
• Mar 17 Yan: Down again.
• Mar 17 Bluehost: Checking the sites both show up an running. At this time there is no issue at this time.
• Database goes down 10+ times between March and April. I just wait, hoping they will fix it.
• Apr 17 Yan: Down again.
• Apr 17 Bluehost: I have checked your databases, and do not see the connections maxed out.
• After several angry emails, my ticket is escalated to the next level of support. The person seems more intelligent than the previous support staff who clearly have no ability to investigate past events.
• Apr 18 Yan: Why do I see scripts that constantly restart mysql?
• Apr 18 Bluehost: When there are problems with mysql the server will try to restart it.
• Apr 18 Yan: Brilliant answer.
• Apr 25 Bluehost: I can see that Mysql has been having some problems on your server. (Ya think!?)
• Apr 25 Yan: Who is eating my connections? I asked before and no one answered how 5 php processes are eating 30 connections.
• Apr 25 Bluehost: [...]Not necessarily from your account[...] To be honest some boxes seem to have more problems then others and box 12 happens to be one of those boxes.
• Apr 25 Yan: How about telling your customers that box 12 has some capacity issues and moving them off?
• Apr 28 Bluehost: I have been keeping a close eye on box12 it hasn’t been having any issues the last few days. There is no capacity problems.
• Apr 28 Yan: Down again.
• Apr 30 Bluehost: no response….
• I call them up. The support person verifies that there have been ongoing issues on box 12. I ask why the customers have not been notified. She says because they prefer to spend their energy on fixing the problem and probably most customers don’t use the database. I say, fine, but it’s been 2 months. She says she doesn’t have a good answer. I inform her that their failure to be proactive is resulting in this blogpost.

Well, that’s the story. Draw your own conclusions. Either there are some serious miscommunication issues inside this company, or the support staff have been lying to me outright. In either case, it’s not a company I wish to continue to do business with. I’m looking for a new hosting provider to move away from Bluehost.

They’ve moved me to a different server now in hopes that this new home will have less downtime…however as of today they have still to my knowledge not contacted anyone else on box 12 to tell them about ongoing problems.

After about a round of ten emails, I got escalated to level 3 support and got the best “you’re in a helicopter” response ever: I asked why they have scripts that run that kill and restart mysql after I caught this happening during a time when my blog was down. The answer: “When there are problems with mysql the server will try to restart it…”. Uh, really?

Now maybe I’m crazy here, but can I get a show of hands of people who have such problems with their Mysql that they have to regularly restart it? In my experience, it’s possible to run a properly configured database instance with nearly infinite uptime. So, are they royally screwing something up? Or is this really just a downside of running a database for tons of clients who may be doing bad things to it?

Update: bluehost has admitted the problem is not from my account. They have a connection limit of 20 connections for Mysql for all accounts on the server. That it took me ten emails to have them admit they’re overselling capacity is downright unacceptable. And I’ve been fighting this battle with them for more than two months now. I asked them time and time again to admit they’re overselling and to fix the problem by reducing load on the server, but no one would so much as even answer my question, every time implying that it was my php scripts (a standard wordpress installation, using caching, and on low traffic with less than 5 php fastcgi instances) causing the problem. Now they’re offering to migrate me to another server, clearly again band-aiding the problem instead of addressing the core of the problem.

From bluehost support:

“When you get the error that mysql is out of connections that means mysql connections on your server have backed up to the point to where the connections are maxed. Not necessarily from your account, but the server as a whole. We don’t think a restart is the answer to the problem, however often times stopping mysql, running a repair to fix any corrupt tables then restarting will often times clear out the cause of the problem.”