How to Check Bluehost Server Status and CPU Throttling

January 30, 2012 By 5 Comments

(Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes)

Here’s a little something which has been in my Drafts queue for almost 2 years. It hardly seems blog-worthy. Then again, I haven’t seen anyone else publish screenshots or discussion on either server status or throttling. Enjoy!

Bluehost server status

Did you know you can check your server status at Bluehost? Here’s what that looks like:

Bluehost reporting that distributed denial of attack is over.

Note the date. Heh.

Bluehost CPU throttling

Are you a good neighbor on your shared hosting account?

Bluehost knows. Here’s why.

I met some Bluehost engineers at WordCamp SF 2011. Cool folks. Mostly Perl hackers, which is appropriate for a Linux-based service. Bluehost also sponsors Linux kernel development, and has contributed code to the time sharing capabilities for Linux. This allows Bluehost to enforce a “good neighbor” policy on all of their shared hosts. If your account reaches a certain level of activity, you will be throttled down.

This is a good thing.

For one, if you have so much traffic that shared hosting is always throttling down, you should be on a different hosting plan. For another, if you have very little traffic and you’re being throttled, you should probably inspect your installation. Something isn’t right, and you should probably fix it.

Here’s what throttling looks like:

You can find the link to the throttling charts in your Bluehost cPanel interface.

Any questions?

Filed Under: Website Maintenance Tagged With: , , ,

Ask Anca: How much site maintenance do your clients do on their own?

November 3, 2011 By 9 Comments

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

“Ask Anca” is a website advice column written by Anca Mosoiu. Anca owns Tech Liminal, a co-working space and technology hotspot.

With a WordPress site, there are several things that constitute maintenance.  Here is how I break it down:

  1. Change text or graphics on pages. This is done through the WordPress interface, usually by our clients.
  2. Add new pages or blog posts. Clients can do this on a WordPress site.
  3. Change the navigation menus (add new links, remove old links). Clients can do this on a WordPress site.
  4. Create particularly complex pages. This includes things with tables or graphics that have to line up just so.  If the client knows HTML, they are fine on their own, but we do help our clients with those types of issues.
  5. Change the template for the site. Add a new column, change the colors, fonts, etc.  This is something that we would do for our clients.
  6. Add something to an existing column on the site (e.g. subscription forms for email newsletters). This is something that we do for clients. We can also show them how to work with widgets and they can do it themselves.
  7. Keep the WordPress software up to date. This is something a client could do through the administrative interface. We could do it for them or we could recommend a web hosting provider that does it.  I would probably recommend the latter option, as dealing with software upgrades isn’t always the most fun thing to do.  Ninety-nine percent of the time the upgrade goes well – but the one time it blows up- it’s worth having support.

 

Here are three example sites:

Heyday Books   We set up the site for them. They add their own books, authors and events, which appear in the proper place on the site.  Occasionally, they want to change how the site looks (e.g. moving a column from the left to the right, or changing how the search results are displayed).  We do this programming for them as needed.

Friends of Oakland Parks and Recreation   We set up this site for them in WordPress. We loaded the content and now they pretty much keep it up to date on their own.  Occasionally they call us to add a PayPal button to their donation page.  As you can see, this is not a “blog” site – it’s more of an informational site.

Get Cooking Simply   These food bloggers come to Tech Liminal for help with a few technical issues and occasional help with laying out the format of their recipes, but for the most part they create their own content and manage the site on their own.  Once in a while I help with updating the WordPress software since their website host is occasionally finicky.

Filed Under: Website Maintenance Tagged With:
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