Features and Announcements

[areidmtm]

Dear Bluehost.com Customer,

###ANNOUNCEMENT###
Any customer that received an email regarding their domain being unlocked
PLEASE don't be alarmed. There is nothing wrong with your domain and no
downtime or changes of any kind will be made to your domain. We are simply
making backends changes with regards to our registrar and our partner site
sent an automated email because of it. Again, there is nothing to do or act
upon with regards to this email. Please just ignore it. Thanks!
###ANNOUNCEMENT###

There is a lot to say in this email and I will try and be as concise as possible.
Bluehost is growing at a tremendous rate. Our organization is signing up nearly
500 new customers every day. While this is extremely exciting it brings along with
it challenges that can sometimes be overwhelming. I feel that we are meeting our
goals and facing these problems head on. Our bandwidth is up and speeds are
faster than ever. Disk space and features continue to climb, and support is making
a steady and measured improvement. However, sometimes we have issues. On
the night of January 8th we had a simple network swap go very badly. It turned
into about 2 hours of downtime which is years in internet time. The problem was
resolved as effeciently as possible with a team of professionals. Please know that
we take our uptime and monitoring extremely seriously.

The issue we face is communicating with our customers fast enough for them to
act on any problems we are experiencing. For this reason I am happy to announce
the immediate availability of a Bluehost status page for system wide issues as well
as server issues that pertain to your server(s) specifically. The url for this page is:

http://serverstatus.bluehost.com

This site will allow us to post updates about server issues and will also report CPU
and load problems related to specific servers. You must add your domains with a
domain name and password the first time and then the status page will keep your
information for the next time you visit the page. Bluehost Serverstatus is a work
in progress. There is MUCH to be added to this service. In the future it will monitor
all aspects of our servers including specific services such as email and ftp. These
updates will follow in the near future.

As always you can get the personal side of Bluehost at my blog located at:

http://www.mattheaton.com

Or visit the user forum where compliments and complaints are equally welcome at:

http://www.bluehostforum.com

Thanks,
Matt Heaton / President Bluehost

[digitutor]

This is a great idea and will be useful for particular incidents relating to a part, or parts, of Bluehost's hosting (and an idea applicable to every other website hoster on the planet).

However, if the site is hosted solely at Bluehost, the information may be inaccessible to those who need it. This would be especially the case if there was a major outage at Bluehost.

How about if the site were to be mirrored by another hosting service? That way information about all levels of outage would be accessible and hopefully remove uncertainty, reduce frustration, and take a bit of pressure of those operating the help lines.

Lawrence

[alligosh]

How about if the site were to be mirrored by another hosting service?

That is actually one of the next phases. The choice was made to get it online and available to our customers now, since most issues and outages are localized to a particular server. We are going to make it available on a different network than our own, but it is not quite ready for that.

Rest assured, it is planned for.

[digitutor]

Thank you.

[mfratto]

Any word on when/if bluehost will be upgrading php or mysql? Will there be warning given? I ask because I want to test my sites before the upgrade happens.

Thanks.

[fedor]

I need to spread bluehost much much more it's a wonderful host:D
GO BOX 117!!! Lol I likey my box:D

[gmatkin]

I've tried to raise this before without success. The current WP version is 2.0.6 (it's nearly a fortnight old) and it's about to become 2.0.7.

Yet the Fantastico install at BlueHost is still 2.0.5. Is there any chance that this can be updated please?

Thanks,

Gavin

[magpie2419]

I've tried to raise this before without success. The current WP version is 2.0.6 (it's nearly a fortnight old) and it's about to become 2.0.7.

Yet the Fantastico install at BlueHost is still 2.0.5. Is there any chance that this can be updated please?

Thanks,

Gavin

As I understand it Bluehost have no control over the Fantastico upgrades, you can either do it manually from the Wordpress site or wait for Fantastico to release the upgrade, this is one of the reasons why so many senior members dont recommend using Fantastico. They are normally way behind with upgrades and this can be a security issue.

[gmatkin]

Ah... that explains it.

Thanks for pointing this out.

Gav

[Early Out]

Received today:

Dear Bluehost.com Customer,

We finally have some good news to report. After literally months of research into
system performance techniques and I/O tuning we have rolled out a series of changes
to our servers that have immediate and beneficial effects. By the time you read this
the server that hosts your website should have a decreased server load of between
100-300%. This means that for those users that experienced constant performance
problems with our server speeds that your problems should be significantly reduced.

Of course this isn't a magic bullet, and we still have servers that have load spikes and
other various problems and issues that go hand in hand with providing shared hosting
services. We should have more good news to report in the coming weeks and there
is still much to be done to provide better uptime with fewer interruptions to critical services.

Also, as many of you may know a few months back we leased a new datacenter that is
solely for our use and is only 200 yards from our offices. It will allow us to grow to nearly
2,000 servers before requiring additional space. This is a huge long term benefit for us
as almost all hosting companies outsource their servers to a datacenter that is not under
their control. The downside is that it has been painful as we move all our servers to this
location. Downtime and unforeseen problems have been a big part of this migration process.
I wanted to let you know that the end is in sight. Most of the servers have been moved,
and all of the mission critical portions of our network have now been moved. Most of our
intermittent downtime has been because of this enormous move.

Things are improving and long term problems are starting to subside. Thanks for sticking
with us as we look forward to the continuation of improvements that are sure to come!

Thanks,
Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com
-----------------------------------------------------
Good news, even if Matt needs a lesson in arithmetic (a 100% reduction in server load would take it to zero - a 300% reduction is a physical impossibility!).

[jks]

Any chance the System Alerts or status will be available via RSS feeds? Thanks.

[Esmart]

Matt

Really appreciate the email updates we have received recently. Makes a big difference knowing what is going on. Delighted to hear things are improving now.

Esmart

[SavageAg]

Does the server status page actually work?

Box 50 has been down for 2 hours and it has said status is ok the entire time.

[Esmart]

A chat with bluehost support in the last few days revealed that the Status page is not reliable. They are aware of this and are taking action to replace the application. Have you subscribed to the Free Monitoring Service provided to Webhost clients. Accessible somewhere in Cpanel or at freewebmonitoring.com. [no i am not affilated with them] but i do find the service invaluable and reliable

Esmart

[SavageAg]

Thanks, I will look into that.

I did attempt to chat with them last night, but the live chat feature was not "reliable" either.

[SavageAg]

I could not find what you were talking about inside of cpanel.

[scan-pa]

Status alert:

Might I sugest a mailing list, run your own via Mailman software, or outsource it to Yahoogroups, googlegroups.com , or Topica.com ???


I know I would sign up for it.

[betiryan]

Just signed up for an account there. box 102 is in deep **** sllllloooooowwww as can be! :rolleyes:

Happy Friday!

[lunatinker]

9:43 PM 1/26/2007
over the past 1/2 hour, could not access my domains.
any thoughts? tech support says back in a few minutes; "backbone issue" ?
Status doesn't work - ditto. to access the status from C-panel you'd need that c-panel login to work.
EDIT -->> outage lasted 45 minutes.