Server running slow?

[photogmomma]

I am brand new to hosting and vBulletin and have had my site up for less than a week. I noticed today that a bunch of things are running slow. I blamed it on vBulleting and my inexperience, but noticed when I go to my control panel in BlueHost, it's slow there, too.

Is this something system wide and I just need to be patient? Or are there things I can do to check to see exactly where the slowdown is?

Thanks so much

Andi
www.butteboard.com

[photogmomma]

Called BH.com and they said they saw a problem.

As a note, this is what I'm getting for my server status:
Server Load 32.20 (4 cpus)

With a flashing red dot. Hmmm, i'm guessing not good.

Anyone else with this problem? how do I find out what's going on to fix it? How quick is BH.com to fix these issues? While it's not cratering my site, it's certainly a LOT slower than normal - and I have a LOT of unhappy users.

Thanks
Andi

[PaulC.]

This is a common issue with bluehost, and in my opinion, the only thing that really holds them back for being the best provider. Their hosting accounts seem counter intuitive for the hardware they are providing. Meaning, they offer all these great features and options (200GB space!?! crazy...) but they don't seem to have the CPUs to handle the load after encouraging ppl to use what is provided. I love what I've got from them, and have reccomended and signed up a number of friends and family to host here, but if something doesn't get better with the CPU issues, I may have to go elsewhere.
MattHeaton.com never seems to directly address this issue (although he does blame cPanel as being a hog), but he does seem passionate about the quality of service...and then then number one problem I hear from ppl are slow sites, scripts timing out due to CPU throttling, etc.
I also wouldn't go entirely on that cpanel applet about the system status. I work for a company that hosts a few thousand websites and we've had servers pretty pegged CPU-wise, but they still operate OK.

[photogmomma]

Thanks so much for the information. I'm pretty bummed to hear this as I thought I had done enough research.

I'll just keep my eyes open and if this keeps happening, I'll reevaluate.

Thanks for the info on the cpanel information. As well as the system status. I'll take those into account!