Hey Bluehost user,

Like all the time I’m again sharing my experience with Bluehost and adding another chapter to our Bluehost community. As I mentioned earlier that I have 2 hosting account with Bluehost and more than 8 blogs are hosted on Bluehost server. Recently I got an email from Bluehost with title “Server performance warning for” one of my domain. Here is the content of the eMail:

Dear Harsh:

It has come to our attention that your site is using an excessive amount of MySQL resources on your Bluehost account. This is causing performance problems not only on your own website, but for other customers that are on this same server.  When left unchecked, it can potentially cause crashes or service interruptions and lead to additional downtime.

Our research shows that server performance degrades when the MySQL usage is over 1000 tables and/or 3 GB on a single account or 1000 tables and/or 2 GB on a single database.  In order to ensure optimal performance for your account and the others in your shared hosting environment, we request that you reduce the MySQL usage on your account to under these limits by 08/07/2014.

Your account information:
    Total MySQL Database Size: 2560.97 MB
    Total MySQL Tables: 505

    Largest MySQL Database Size: 2533.55 MB
    Largest MySQL Table Count: 246

We do understand that these databases may be old or unused, and that there are programs/scripts that may create new tables automatically. If you need assistance with removing content or help troubleshooting the reason for this problem we will be happy to assist you in doing so. After you have removed the unused or excessively large MySQL content you may request a rescan of the account, to establish whether or not you’re within acceptable limits.

Who was the culprit?

Initially I thought it is one of those scam emails sent by hosting company to force their users upgrade the hosting account to higher package, but as I read the complete email I was wrong. Email clearly mention the problem and they were happy to help. Though, I prefer to clean up my mess my way and I started looking into the problem.

The culprit this time was me and my ignorance. I had WordPress installed on the trouble creating site and it was running an outdated version of WordPress software. Not only that, my site was injected with malicious code by some hacker and searching my site in Google revealed the same.

The only good thing here is this was an idle WordPress site with no content. It was a domain with WordPress installed and all I needed to do is uninstall WordPress. If it would have been a working site, I could have simply asked Bluehost team to run a scan and clean my site. Since my admin dashboard was also not accessible, I went ahead and uninstalled WordPress using Bluehost cPanel. Let me quickly add steps which I used to uninstall WordPress from bluehost cPanel.

How to Uninstall WordPress from Bluehost cPanel:

Login to Bluehost cPanel and click on My Sites > Manage Sites.

Manage site will take you to the site option panel where you can configure a lot of stuff. For example, you can configure SSL certificate, backup and few other things. In this case, we are interested in deleting the WordPress installation so click on settings.

Click on “Delete” in front of Delete site and Bluehost will ask you the confirmation for deletion of all files.

That’s it and it will take a minute for automatic WordPress installer of Mojo marketplace to remove WordPress from selected domain. Just to be sure that all other websites on my accounts are not hacked, I also asked Bluehost team to run a scan on my server. This is something you should also do.

There might be chance that you don’t want to remove WordPress and only want to fix the server performance warning issue; in this case ask Bluehost to run a scan on your server and find the faulty script which is causing this issue. If your case is also similar as mine, they will identify and fix the problem for you. If you have access to your WordPress dashboard, you can use this plugin to find the hacked file and get rid of it. The only thing which I could add here is: Always keep your WordPress software, plugin and theme updated. Also make sure to hack-proof your WordPress blog.

If you have a similar story to share, let me know via comment.