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Here’s an email that the CEO of bluehost.com sent to all bluehost customers letting them know why email was unavailable for a short period of time. I have nothing but good things to say about bluehost. The company is great and the CEO himself lets you know when there is a problem. Nice job bluehost!

Dear Bluehost.com Customer,I am writing today to give you some important information regarding your Bluehost.com account. As many of you know Bluehost.com uses Cpanel, a third party product, as our control panel to allow customers to manage their sites. While this is normally a good thing, it also takes much of the control away from us and sometimes forces us to live with deficiencies that we would normally not tolerate. Lately Cpanel has become so slow and cumbersome that despite buying some of the highest end hardware available some sites are sluggish at best and extremely slow at worst. This was never acceptable to us and we tried to work with Cpanel to resolve our issues, but it is clear to us that our issues will never be at their forefront. So what do we do?

Yesterday was my breaking point. A customer called in to complain of a slow site. I checked it myself and the server load showed it was running fine. Clearly it wasn’t, and I wanted to know what was causing his issues. To make a long story short Cpanel was hitting every server’s hard drive array close to 50,000 times per day more often than it needed to (Based on my rough calculations). Our server monitoring was not doing its job and our customers bore the brunt of these issues. There wasn’t an easy fix and our servers were all grinding to a halt. We had to implement a custom fix and it had to done immediately. The main issue causing these problems was mail related. About 70% of all users had to have their mail moved to a new system and converted to a new storage method. I made the difficult decision to execute these fixes immediately without notifying all our customers first because of a couple of reasons. First, to mail all our users with our current system takes approximately 18 hours (We could do faster, but then many emails would be denied by large ISPs because too many emails come form a single source too quickly), and second because it was causing such a severe problem with all our servers that it simply couldn’t be delayed. It was causing so many sites to run poorly that we acted as fast and effeciently as we could.

This made many users email temporarily unavailable. No emails should have been lost in the transition. It simply wouldn’t allow you to log in while mail was transitioned from one platform to another. Again, we greatly regret having to do this without prior notification, but the benefits were exactly what we hoped for.

While all server issues aren’t immediately resolved, the VAST majority of problems we were seeing on all servers are virtually gone. You should now see a SUBSTANTIAL improvement in almost all areas of your site including mail issues, script execution time, and overall responsiveness of your hosting experience.

Next week we will provide a link to a user monitoring service that will allow you to monitor your server (From our perspective) to see basically what we see, and know if issues you are experiencing originate on our end or if some other factor is involved. We have more speed improvements being worked on aggressively right now and in the near future those details will be made available as well.

I know this email is lengthy, and I congratulate those that made it this far I just wanted you to know that I care about what happens to your sites, and not just because you pay me to care. I don’t get to be as technically involved as I used to be because of trying to run the company, but I realize now that a change is needed. I may not be the best admin out there, but I care the most and will always be your advocate to making your hosting experience better.

All users (All 210,00 of you) can ALWAYS email me directly at - matt@bluehost.com

Thanks for your support, Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com