I was reading Matt Heaton’s Blog (the owner of Bluehost and Hostmonster) and I was blown away by their latest announcement. The new change puts Hostmonster and Bluehost well in front of their competition and proves once and for all that they are by far the best web hosts on the web. Read the post below:
I have been promising CPU protection for a long time and its finally ready. It has been running on several servers during our live beta testing and it has proven itself to be extremely successful. For those that need the brief rundown again this is what this feature will provide.
1) Guaranteed CPU resources for every user on every server.
2) Protection from heavy users. No longer can a single user, or a small group of users consume inordinate amount of resources causing your own site to fail to load or load slowly (NO OTHER SHARED HOST ON THE PLANET CAN SAY THIS WITH ANY VALIDITY – WE ARE THE ONLY HOST THAT HAS THIS TECHNOLOGY AT THIS TIME!)
3) Extremely sensitive CPU resource allocation – CPU time is calculated in 200 millisecond increments. This means our servers will always respond quickly and users won’t be exposed to slowness due to sudden bursts of CPU usage.
4) CPU Statistics – We can now tell you exactly how much CPU you have been using each 24 hour period. More importantly, we can tell you how often your domain was throttled or capped if your site experiences “bursty” CPU usage. No more guessing on what you are using, now we will tell you exactly.
5) Users can see IN REAL TIME if their account is being throttled for any reason.
6) Users can see IN REAL TIME exactly what processes they are running that put them over the CPU limit.
7) NO MORE CPU QUOTA EXCEEDED ERRORS EVER!!!! (Starting on Tues July 29th 2009) We will be completely removing the code that bans users for CPU overages!!
Processes will no longer ever be killed or stopped because of too many cpu resources. Instead, your site will simply bump up against any cpu limits that we put in place. This will work just like a VPS or dedicated server, but without the high cost!
9) Now able to sell “dedicated” cpu resources (Actually its not in our shopping cart yet, but the technology is there so give us a couple of weeks to build out the site for it). Now you can purchase an entire core of CPU and get speeds FAR FASTER than a dedicated server for 30-40% less.
10) Ability to purchase instant CPU upgrades. If you decide you need double the CPU that you currently use we will be able to do that for you without you having to deal with the maintenance and headache of a VPS or dedicated server. FINALLY!
11) ALWAYS have some idle CPU resources available to service incoming requests. We will never allow the general pool of CPU usage to become saturated so that no resources are available to service requests. Again, no other shared hosting service in the world that I know of has this technology.
12) FREE – FREE – FREE – There is no cost at all for this feature. The only cost would be for those users that want higher dedicated cpu resources. We will most likely offer 3 different choices in that regard. Mostly likely we will sell CPU in increments from 50% of a single core (CPU), up to as many as 4 cores of dedicated resources in a shared hosting environment. This has all the benefits and cost savings of a shared server system with the performance of high end dedicated servers.
We are willing to license this solution to a minimal group (At least for the first 60 days) of other Cpanel hosts if you are interested. The general cost would be $125 per 8 core server for 12 months. The cost is $75 for 12 months if using a 4 core server. This solution does work on dual core systems but is designed to be most efficient with more cores. This cost would include our disk I/O throttling solution as well (Well discussed in previous blog entries of mine). You can FULLY EXPECT to double your user density with MUCH better speeds for your customers with these two solutions in place. This is not marketing hype or extreme case situations. It really works that well.
Requirements for hosts that want to use this product -
1) Must use linux with a 2.6.28 kernel or newer (Sorry, backporting beyond 2.6.28 is a nightmare!)
2) Must be willing to apply a small kernel patch (Wish there was a way around this, but we do have to modify the kernel to make the magic happen!) We will assist with applying the patch if there are any problems.
3) Must be willing to run two binary files that we will provide – cpud (Our cpu controller) and iothrottled (Our disk i/o bandwidth, iops) manager. We will make the source available for eview once we have the legal issues on our end taken care of, but for now it is two binaries.
4) The CPU controller (Once the kernel portion is done) takes about 5 minutes to set up, literally!! And iothrottled takes about 10 minutes to setup and configure.
5) Must trust that Bluehost/Hostmosnter would actually sell a product to everyone else to compete with ourselves 
If you are interested in licensing it or testing it out (Must be at least 10 servers or more if you want to test it out before buying at this time) then please email me directly with your contact information at matt@bluehost.com.
Thanks,
Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com
Go to: Hostmonster.com
Go to: Bluehost.com
