A new term has wafted its way into the web hosting lexicon, and it’s a troubling one. It’s called “CPU throttling”, and it means a deliberate reduction of the CPU usage on your shared web hosting account. The host will freeze or seriously reduce your allotted usage, thus resulting in much less resources available for your site to pull.

This can have the effect of your site failing to load properly, if at all. Many times the allotted time to load a web page will expire before your page is visible, and the person who was trying to take a look at your site is unable to do so. This is not good.

Many site owners signed up with the web hosting company under the impression that they had unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth. All well and good, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about CPU usage, and there IS a limit on that. It’s not usually discussed or even revealed at signup, but we are starting to see hosts using this as a barometer of just how they can make their resources go further. This type of plan was developed by the owner of BlueHost, and one can only assume that this is a scheme aimed at not only conserving processing power, but perhaps also at bumping hosting  power users into a more “appropriate” plan (read: more expensive plan).

So far the only major hosting companies we’ve seen implementing this on a wide scale are BlueHost and HostMonster, unfortunately two of the biggest. There is even an icon on the cpanel that allows the owner to check on the amount of resources being “throttled” (Though it appears these numbers are a bit unreliable).

These hosting companies will tell you that the fault lies with the webmaster whose site is power intensive, and draws more than their fair share of the CPU availability. This may be due to too many WordPress plugins being deployed, non-caching of web pages, buggy scripts or numerous MySQL errors. WordPress themes that are poorly optimized can also have a negative effect on your CPU usage.

It seems very odd that this type of problem has not surfaced heretofore. Webmasters and web developers with a great many client sites have had bandwidth and storage issues back in the day, and now it appears there may well be a new gremlin to deal with.

While many webmasters can understand the need to monitor and allocate shared resources responsibly, the manner in which it has been handled speaks volumes about the possible motivations behind this recent development, and portends poorly for the future. Let’s hope that web hosts will come up with a better way to implement this sort of web hosting socialism, and not overly penalize the very people who are helping to make their hosting platform a success in the first place: webmasters with busy sites who are recommending their host to others!