I was busy over the weekend and didn’t have a chance to follow-up with Bluehost. I was planning to do so tonight…
…but Bluehost emailed me! The direct message I sent this morning to Sachin Puri (“CEO @ Bluehost Group”) asking whose leg I had to hump to get some action on this ticket may have been a factor in that.
Summarizing, Bluehost’s latest theory is that: “a script is being terminated due to execution time limits, specifically during image processing handled by WordPress”. Which is actually a reasonable theory, and explains some things: if the script is being terminated because it takes too long to run, there’s probably a connection to server load, and that would explain why some people see the problem intermittently.
Options to Resolve
Resize images before uploading to reduce processing time. (recommended)
Disable image resizing via a plugin
Consider upgrading to a VPS or Dedicated plan, where you have full control over PHP limits and resource usage.
I’m not really interested in adding an “image resizing” step to my workflow, especially when this worked in the past without that step. I’m also not really interested in paying more money to get back to where I was.
Next Steps & Suggestions
To further isolate the issue, we recommend:
Retry the upload using WordPress to confirm if the problem persists on your end.
Which I would love to be able to do. But as I’ve mentioned to my readers, and as I told the Bluehost support rep, they’ve set the maximum file upload size for this instance to ZERO BYTES.