Due to high demand, hosting companies are very prevalent. It can be tough to find a great hosting company. I use “Great ” meaning zero downtime, fantastic customer support, a simple admin UI, bandwidth to spare, proper CPU and RAM allocation to handle high traffic peaks (like front-page DIGG articles) etc… It’s sad to report that a company I thought was doing a good job in many of these aspects, is failing repeatedly.
A little secret of my design firm: We don’t host our clients sites. Why? The hassle isn’t worth the money. We stick to what we do best, and to be honest I don’t want to hire a guy to take calls from clients who’s internet is down (which means it’s the hosts fault…) when they could call their hosts’ customer support line. Anyways, I would have to charge them much more than what is available just to handle costs of having someone manage client’s hosting accounts.
Ok, now that the secret is out… for the last year or so we have sent most of our clients with low traffic and bandwidth demands to BlueHost. We always felt their customer support was very fast, their tools were easy to use, and they had great uptime. Unfortunately, it seems BlueHost has been growing too fast to keep up (aren’t they taking on 500 or so new clients per day!). Downtime is more frequent, traffic spikes shut the site down, small mySQL databases cause CPU overload warnings etc… BlueHost is dead.
Over the last few weeks I have noticed that their downtime has increased. One day in particular a few weeks ago, I noticed one of my sites was down. I went to another one of my BlueHost-hosted sites and it was down too. So I went to the BlueHost server status page… down. Then the BlueHost home page… down!!! Their entire system, even the server which they run their own site was down. This happened for about 5 minutes before one-by-one they started coming back.
A few months before that, I had a site holding a national windsurfing contest. People were accessing the site nation-wide to get real-time results. All of a sudden the site went down. I frantically called customer support. The problem? A server maintenance/upgrade. I asked why it was happening at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Their reply: “Since our customers are international we do them sporadically”. (This is funny because the BlueHost office is about 10 minutes from my house). I asked why I wasn’t notified they were doing a server upgrade, and I can’t remember the answer because it definitely didn’t satisfy me.
More recently (3 days ago) I added a site to BlueHost. It was running PHP and mySQL (BlueHost runs LAMP) . There was a table of listings in the db with about 129,000 entries. Although a large number, it is very minimal when it comes to mySQL. The table was indexed properly, optimized and in the PHP code my query wasn’t doing anything fancy with SQL functions. I was simply using AJAX to create drop downs based on “Select … WHERE” statements. This is one of the most fundamental queries. Anyways, as I was testing this I received a CPU high-load message on BlueHost, meaning I was using too much of the server’s CPU for my processing. Puzzled and thinking it was an error, I continued in testing, only to have the message reappear again and again. More tests, even while connected remotely using SQLyog, gave me a the same CPU high-load message, even if I ran any large select statements or exported the database for backup.
So, needless to say in my opinion BlueHost is dead. With their huge affiliate kick-back and ever-increasing customer sign-ups they aren’t what they used to. So, I am moving on. Currently I have been pleased with Media Temple’s (gs) servers, and I like the option they have of running a separate mySQL box to cut down CPU usage. Last time I called Media Temple’s customer support, I was on hold for 37 minutes. Needless to say, I am still looking for the perfect hosting company… which with today’s demands may not exist.
Farewell BlueHost… we had some good times together and it’s hard to let go. But in the interest of my client’s needs, it’s best if we just stay friends. Maybe for fun, post your favorite hosting company below.
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November 12th, 2007
Same here… I loved Bluehost, but within the last 6-8 months or so, I’ve been disappointed repeatedly. Please share with me, when you do find the perfect hosting company.
Thanks,
Richard.
November 13th, 2007
Great! What’s next? I’ll also be interested to hear what you find. Luckily I haven’t seen the down time much lately - but I’ve definitely had my issues with Bluehost. Hopefully they’ll pull through and upgrade everything before it’s too late.
November 14th, 2007
Seriously, is there such a thing as a host with good customer server and up time. People always say: “oh yeah this host fits that description”, but when I try them the reality is they end up sucking in of those areas. I think it must just be unrealistic to want a host that keeps my site up running smoothly and also fixes problems quickly if they arise.
November 14th, 2007
I have had the same frustrating problem! I have a couple sites that suffered the “Digg Effect” RIGHT AFTER they went popular…the CPU quota was exceeded with only about 1k uniques/minute…that shouldn’t be a problem for them. What it means for me is 1/5 of the traffic I should be receiving. Great post!!
November 15th, 2007
I’ve had great experience with DreamHost, never ever had a problem.
November 16th, 2007
I have been using Dreamhost for sometime now and have had very few times where I have had problems. When I did have problems they were resolved very quickly, both on the phone and via email. They offer large amounts of storage and high bandwidth each month that grows each week. When it comes to affiliate programs they offer many options of a flat fee or a percentage of each sale that is linked back to you. I hope that you check them out.
November 19th, 2007
I love to throw in my two cents whenever I can about hosting.
I’ve been using LiquidWeb dedicated managed for over a year now and I couldn’t be any happier.
take a look at them.
http://www.liquidweb.com
or you can take a look at the specific reason I use them.
Liquidweb. Strongly recommended.
November 26th, 2007
it’s strange, on this report it says they are growing
November 26th, 2007
Hi vic. I didn’t use the term “dead” in that the company shut down. I meant that they were dead in my book of trusted hosting companies.
November 30th, 2007
Media Temple is all marketing fluff with absolute crap customer service
December 19th, 2007
Well, as a re-affirming comment, I still strongly recommend LiquidWeb.
They aren’t marketing fluff, they just have great customer service (24/7 via phone) and great service/products.
February 6th, 2008
I’ve had my fair share of hosting hell with a half dozen companies.
I too have been loving DreamHost.com. When I had a problem, they were totally on top of it.
I’m not looking for hosting perfection, just acting like you care and want to keep my business is a good place to start.
Karin
June 2nd, 2008
Thanks for your review…now i realize bluehost and … will search good hosting provider…
Rajapandian (PHP Programmer)
June 5th, 2008
Same here, my site byteburn.com is hosted at bluehost and now it is down. server status has confirmed that most of the services are down, including the all important mysql database.
I need to look for another host since my account with them will expire soon.
No more account renewal at bluehost.
June 15th, 2008
my site is at bluehost, and I have had no problems.
June 15th, 2008
Ok….. honestly… when you said bluehost and then said this:
I use “Great ” meaning zero downtime, fantastic customer support, a simple admin UI, bandwidth to spare, proper CPU and RAM allocation to handle high traffic peaks (like front-page DIGG articles) etc
I right away knew you were a idiot… your definition of bluehost is 10 miles away from it. I definitely know you know jack about what ” Shared Hosting” means, you want zero downtime, you want allocated resources. all that for 5 bucks a month. You sir, are stupid. Everything you described fits a DEDICATED, or A VIRTUAL PRIVATE SERVER. which is no where near 5 dollars a month you moron. If you want ” zero down time ” then administer your own server for about 300 to 500 dollars a month you re-tard…. Seriously… people like you are so worthless… reselling hosting for 5 bucks a month and DEMANDING dedicated server performance… what a bunch of faggits.
June 16th, 2008
Hey “somebody with a brain”, you obviously haven’t read what BlueHost advertises. Currently they offer “Unlimited” storage AND bandwidth. You should know that it’s not really possible to offer that, especially on a shared solution, but they do it anyway.
We are currently am on a shared server, and they are able to allocate RAM and CPU peaks properly to handle traffic spikes etc… Also, we don’t resell servers. We give our clients a couple options and allow them to choose for themselves. I think you need to do a little more research about what Bluehost guarantees, and what they deliver.
July 4th, 2008
I also experienced many times of CPU load exceeded with my wordpress hosted on Bluehost. I did add in quite a number of appropriate indexes for the wordpress tables. And I also use wordpress super cache, which automatically generates static pages for frequently accessed web pages to stand hikes of traffic.. this has become better, but occasionally it’s come back with the site suspended too, due to too much CPU load… so sad
July 10th, 2008
I can’t agree more. Think about this: Bluehost literally removed or destroyed the database behind my CMS site. When calling support, all they can say is “Ooops!” — since they had NO backups.
And they’ve just changed their sales site from “Daily, Weekly and Monthly Backups” to read “Courtesy backups”. In other words — if they don’t back it up, they don’t have to be sorry.
They are very, very dead. My half-dozen sites are outta there.
July 17th, 2008
My site (swashedbylife.com) on bluehost has been down for more than 5 hours. I don’t know when it will come back.
July 26th, 2008
Media Temple: Poor performance and intellectually bullying customer service.
Bluehost 6.95/month: Promises way more than delivers. Overloaded shared servers cause basic, low traffic sites to overrun CPU allocation. Responsive customer service but no visible concern about degrading performance. For hobbyists only…
Bluehost 19.95/month: There unadvertised hi-cpu servers with many less accounts per server… We’ll see…
Any one else have a good experience with liquid host?
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