Readers of this blog will note that I’ve been having huge problems with CPU quota errors blocking my own access to my site and barring visitors from accessing the site as well for large portions of the past two weeks. After getting conflicting stories from Bluehost about what was wrong, getting various promises the problem would be fixed by a certain date (after which it never was), and asking multiple times for an explanation of what was wrong and never receiving one–I decided BlueHost was unredeemable.
Carthik Sharma, one of the technical wizes involved with WordPress wrote me an e-mail that CPU errors can sometimes be caused by one’s site installation (php scripts, etc.). But it can just as easily be caused by another site on your host’s shared server. Though I’m no technical expert about this, I’ve got to believe that BlueHost should be able to identify which server is causing the problem and which site on the server is the origin of the problem. The fact that they didn’t seem able to speaks volumes about their level of expertise and technical competence, I’m afraid.
The good news is that Carthik’s offered to allow me to share some real estate on his virutal server. And I haven’t had a single CPU error since I moved, which essentially points the finger back at BlueHost as the source of my problem. Carthik’s also fixed a few gnawing problems with my WP installation: my file upload feature stopped working several months ago and the only way I could upload was via ftp or using the Ecto, blog publishing software. It turns out that I didn’t realize that CHMOD settings for the upload folder must be set to 777. Who’d a thunk it?