Bluehost Adds New CPU & Memory Protection Features

A few of you might know that I’m an avid user of Bluehost. Their hosting has literally saved me a packet. It’s cheap – their main plan only $6.95 a month – which bring it in reach as a hosting service for the masses and especially attractive to those just starting websites.

One of the main complaints about the Bluehost’s shared hosting service has been the fact that other people reside on the same server and if their website is attacked, your website can suffer the consequences.

Much like my friend and reader Dave Doolin (interview with Dave here) of Website In A Weekend who suffered a distributed denial of service attack across the server his website (and many others) were hosted on. It affected the availability of his site (the server went down) and his statistics plummeted including his Alexa rating which he’s worked very had on building up (or down as it were). All in all it was a major inconvenience and something I’m sure he’s happy to see the backside of.

Good news then for Dave and others like him who’ve suffered at the hands of invisible attackers – this is what was waiting for me in my inbox this morning, a message from Bluehost president Matt Heaton (Matt, let’s talk about your blog design buddy ):

FREE FEATURES ADDED IN THE LAST 12 MONTHS:

1) CPU Protection – No longer will a single site on a server impact the performance of other
websites on the same server. This means much improve consistency and higher performance
for 99% of our customers.
2) Memory Protection – No longer can a single user or program consume disproportionate memory
that would cause slowdowns for our customers.
3) Bandwidth Compression – This allows our customers to see a 10-25% decrease in site load
times. This is especially noticeable for customers with slower internet connections. This does
not speed up times of PHP/CGI scripts. For PHP/CGI scripts they will run at the same speed.
4) Process Protection – No longer will a single user be able to spawn runaway processes that
cause the processors/cores to slow down trying to handle all the requests. This is especially
useful when it comes to MySQL usage where sometimes hundreds of thousands of queries
happen in short period of time (5 minutes).
5) Many other changes Too many to list in this email.

The main ones here that I think are a big improvement in Bluehost’s service at the added CPU time limiting (point 1) and process overrun protection (point 4) which will stop rogue scripts and programs taking up valuable CPU time trying to handle requests.

If this is the case, I’m hoping this means a cut down on the effects of CPU usage from DoS attacks which is a major contributor to killing everyone’s site on that particular server machine.

The way he’s noted this seems to indicate some sort of isolation amongst the processes serving up web pages for each site, and I’m hoping it’s a sort of cap to how much CPU time a single process or even how much CPU time a single user is allowed to take up on the machine.

The second point about Memory Protection clearly indicates a cap on the amount of memory a single process, or even a single user account can take up on the server box. That’s great news but it’s something they should have put in place a long time ago.

The changes announced today have a great impact on the quality of service, something Matt Heaton seems pretty over the moon about. They’re not changes you’ll notice in your daily use, but this is the kind of thing that should be taken into account when choosing a reliable service to host your website/s.

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