Bluehost is a web hosting service based in Utah. A subscriber to a hosting service expects to be able to view the access log. Bluehost, however, does not make complete access logs available to the customer unless the customer calls them on the telephone to request it. Bluehost's CPanel archive download manager is broken. Available to the customer is only a truncated, incomplete daily access log. Activity from two days ago is not available to the customer. Bluehost does not make the monthly log available for some unknown reason. I wonder what they are doing over at Bluehost that they are so concerned they need to cover it up?
Downloading the daily log, which is insufficient and only provides a brief glimpse of activity, results in a .gz file. Inside the .gz file is another .gz file. Bluehost zips each daily access log twice for no apparent reason. There is no technical advantage to doing so. It is simply a quirk on the part of Bluehost and yet another inconvenience to the customer.
In addition to all these shenanigans related to the access log, Bluehost also throttles shared hosting accounts. I have a site that is throttled every day without fail. "Throttling" is a process by which Bluehost deprives the site of cpu share, which slows the site down substantially, often to a crawl. The site being throttled is a low-traffic site that receives no more than 20 visitors per day. I have seen Bluehost throttle this site when it has received 3 visitors spread over a twenty-four period. I should add that the site is highly optimized, and its cpu demands are more modest than this blog's. Clearly Bluehost throttles sites not based upon activity, but for any reason whatsoever, just to handle a very large volume of customers, more than they should be handling.
I can't recommend Bluehost in good conscience any longer to anyone. They seem to be handling too many sites per server and cutting corners in order to deal with the load.
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