bluehost.com: increase website speed and cut bandwidth costs for free (February 6, 2010) - Matt Heaton, CEO of BlueHost.com / HostMonster.com mentioned: "How I could best increase the internet speed for our clients that have slow internet connections at no cost to them? I decided on using mod_deflate. I had used mod_gzip in the past (Almost 10 years ago) so I was familiar with how it all worked and it was simple to set up. Mod_deflate basically takes certain types of files and compresses them at the server level and then sends those smaller files to you. Images, zip files, etc don't compress well (And so we don't compress these, but HTML files, javascript files, css files, etc compress very well. Often we see 80% compression levels on those type of files. These files are then decompressed on the client side automatically and used. This is all transparent to the user, except that download/page load times are much faster for the user (10-25% faster). However, there is a severe problem with using mod_deflate that no one seems to have solved. Using mod_deflate requires *significant* CPU usage on the server to use. The problem is that often CPU resources are maxed out. If you use mod_deflate while the CPU(s) are maxed out then the servers become even slower and all websites on the server will appear very very sluggish. For this reason most web hosting companies don't use mod_deflate, and for good reason. However, at Bluehost/Hostmonster we have a great solution for this problem! Some of you may have read where I mention that Bluehost/Hostmonster have a proprietary CPU protection system. Using, this system we track CPU usage in realtime. We then wrote a patch to the Apache web server (This is what serves your websites to your browser) that interfaces with our CPU protection system. This patch checks our CPU usage twice a second and if CPU usage exceeds a certain threshold then we temporarily suspend mod_deflate. When there are unused CPU cycles then it reenables mod_deflate. By implementing it this way we get all the benefits of mod_deflate with none of the detriments of excessive cpu usage causing slowdowns. The first full day we ran this it lowered our bandwidth consumption about 600 Mbits a second (With very conservative settings). When we run it with aggressive compression we save over 1 Gig/s of sustained bandwidth. That is considerable savings/speedup for something that took about 4 days to develop, test and deploy! Now, next time our family goes on a cruise Bluehost/Hostmoner sites will appear much faster!" US Web Hosts Self-Censor: Newsweek (March 9, 2009) - A Newsweek article, which will appear on newsstands next week, has condemned web host BlueHost (www.bluehost.com) for censoring users affiliated with foreign countries, however, this common practice, which has its faults, it can be argued that it is often the only way large web hosts can effectively weed out customers using web hosting for illegal purposes.
The Newsweek article described the situation when Belarus-born Washington DC lawyer Yaraslau Kryvoi got a notice in February from his web hosting firm that the blog he administers for his local Belarussian American Association chapter would be suspended and that he had 10 days to remove his content. This was, in effect, because BlueHost mistakenly throught that Kryvoi was a citizen of a country on the US government's list of rogue states.
Many large web hosts including HostMonster, Blaser Hosting and Biz Builder Hosting explicitly prohibit countries based on the perceived risk of dealing with them. Newsweek rightly implies that this is a form of profiling, however, from a web hosting perspective, eliminating large, troublesome areas helps companies more efficiently police customer websites.
According to its Terms of Service, BlueHost sanctions countries based on the government's economic and trade sanctions. BlueHost states that the US government, through "various of its offices and agencies, ...has determined that, with respect to all or certain commercial activities that would otherwise occur between i) the US, its citizens or residents on the one hand and ii) the governments, citizens, or residents of certain other countries ("Sanctioned Countries") on the other hand, said commercial activities are to be prohibited, embargoed, sanctioned, banned, and/or otherwise excluded."
The countries BlueHosts presently sanctions include Belarus, Burma, Cote d'Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Iraq, former Liberian Regime of Charles Taylor, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Zimbabwe, and countries belonging to "the Balkans."
While ideally, web hosts should be able to account for everything they host, much like newspaper publisher has a responsibility for what is published in their paper, however, as online crime continues to be profitable, criminals will continue to find hosts for their frauds and scams.
For some hosts, imposing rigid rules on international users may be a necessity so that these hosts can keep tabs on their US-approved clients, which can be equally threatening.
The dangers of laissez-faire web hosting were revealed when web hosting provider McColo (www.mccolo.com), which allegedly hosted some of the Internet's most malicious online scams, went offline in November 2008, reducing the global amount of spam by three quarters according to some estimates.
Again, while Newsweek brings up the point that US hosting companies blacklisting certain rogue states is just as anti-democratic as these purportedly authoritarian states, there are plenty of reputable hosts that will host sites from around the world - though perhaps not for just $6.95 per month.
BlueHost, HostMonster Reach Milestone (January 14, 2008) - Domain registrar and Web hosting providers, BlueHost (bluehost.com) and HostMonster (hostmonster.com) announced on Monday that their combined hosting platforms have surpassed 700,000 domains hosted -- a 33 percent increase since September 2007.
The past few months have seen a significant growth in the two companies, resulting in 175,000 new domains hosted during the last quarter. Both Web hosts have grown their product offerings through partnerships with leading companies to include spam protection, coupons for free PPC advertising credits, shopping carts and merchant account services.
"Its easy for a small company to say they have grown by 25 percent, 50 percent or even 100 percent in a quarter when they are talking about a few thousand customers," says Matt Heaton, CEO and founder of BlueHost and HostMonster. "What really starts turning heads is when you can say, we just grew by 175,000 domains last quarter and the first 525,000 took us 4 years."
Heaton also announced he has launched domain registrar and hosting provider FastDomain (fastdomain.com). The ICANN accredited domain registrar plans to offer domain registration and management services along with hosting solutions.
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