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!" 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.
Hostmonster Surpasses 125k Domains (July 13, 2007) - Web hosting provider Hostmonster (hostmonster.com) announced on Thursday that it has surpassed 125,000 domains within its first year of business.
Launched in 2006, Hostmonster attributes its rapid growth to its competitive pricing, namely, its $5.95 per month hosting package. Hostmonster's base package comes with free set-up, a free domain, unlimited email accounts and an unlimited number of domains hosted on one account.
"When we brought Hostmonster to the market we wanted to make sure it dominated the competition with its offerings," says Matt Heaton, CEO and founder of Hostmonster. "By offering what we know our competitors could never provide we are confident that our service will quickly become one of the largest hosting platforms in the world."
Hostmonster says that it stresses the importance of quality customer service and support. The company undergoes vigorous training in its 22,000 square-foot, Orem, Utah-based corporate headquarters before it begins assisting customers.
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