Bluehost and my usage
so, i teach 2 online classes that have 24 students; though, both classes were missing a student last week (one on wednesday and one on thursday). that’s 23 students/class if you’re keeping track at home.
in both classes, i had students log into my drupal site and sign up and post a message. both times, a screen came up and said that i was locked out for a few minutes because my site was using too much of the CPU.
23 users? compared to most websites on the internet i am extremely small time, yet i overloaded the CPU?
i guess i am just a bit shocked!
i have been extremely happy with bluehost up to this point, but this just seems a bit pathetic to me. 23 users on my site and i am shut down. having 30 GB of space and fantastico and cPanel and all of that jazz is great, but there comes a point when just being able to access the stuff you have online is even more important and that’s while i am teaching.
bluehost made changes in the last month or so that have caused the errors i am getting. and, i also realize they quickly added a new account for heavy users, but i have two small classes . . . $20/month for an educator with 2 small classes is a bit steep considering i pay $6.95/month now. thank gosh my students are online and that they login at different times; however, i am looking ahead to the date of my midterm and i am worried that they’ll all want to access my drupal site where the class content is located and i’ll get overloaded again. this is the kind of thing that never entered my thinking when choosing an online host. i still have an account with iPowerWeb, but i kept getting database errors with my drupal installation on their site. i do use them for my phpBB installation and it’s gone well. perhaps i’ll figure out how to get drupal installed there and leave bluehost for just my blog. my blog doesn’t get too much traffic. ;~)
Tags: bluehost, drupal, overloaded, teaching, online, hosting
September 20th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
hey, whoa. i was about to sign up for bluehost, cuz it sounds great. I love that I can install Moodle and such easily with 1-click, that works for me as I’m not too deep into installing programs etc… Anyway, it looks like they don’t have drupal anymore for that?
This traffic thing is a big issue, too…
Also, I teach online German, so I want to set up this Gong server, and I wonder if I could accomplish that with Moodle and with an account on Bluehost. It looks to me like I can… I set it up on my wife’s PC at home but needs something more solid than that!
Here’s a link: it’s an awesome, free Java audio message board. Perfect for online asynchronous language teaching/learning:
http://gong.ust.hk/
cheers,
clark
September 20th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
I haven’t had issues since that one week. My students are now online and they show up at different times, so I doubt I’ll see the issue again. Other than that, I have been quite happy with BH. Everything is easy to install in seconds to fiddle with. But, they did drop Drupal. I’ve read that Drupal was taking too much CPU and this isn’t unique to BlueHost. Hmmm. But, Drupal is working out really well for me, so I hope things get patched up and it returns to Bluehost. Then again, once you learn how to install it manually, it really does become a quick process.
Thanks for the tip on Gong. I am downloading things now. Unfortunately, they don’t have a Macintosh client from what I can tell and I have students who do use Macs. Thus, I can probably fiddle with it, but it will have to be mostly for fun.
September 24th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
Bluehost has given me my share of problems lately, as well…mostly with random outages, that takes my site down for 20 minutes to an hour. It’s frustrating when I think about the rock solid performance I was getting about a year ago.
Overall, I’m still happy with the features. Add-on domains for $10 a year is a cool selling points as well as the great customer service. I’m hoping that the recent upgrades iron out the other problems.
As for your site getting bounced because of CPU usage, it doesn’t make much sense. I’ve read that poor PHP code can sometimes be the blame for that. Over the past week, I’ve had about 150 students access my forum each day, and things have been running solidly, if a TAD slow sometimes.
Keep us posted on your trials and tribulations with the Blue.