slickhog.com

If you’re a beginning blogger looking for a hosting company, chances are the main factor deciding on which hosting company you are going to use, will be the price.   Almost every hosting company guarantees 99.9% up-time and those that don’t, well… you still assume that their servers will be up.  At least I did.

Last year I decided to create additional four or five new sites.  Whenever I setup a new site, I try to find a new hosting company.  I do that for three reasons:

1. Hosting prices have probably went down since the last time I shopped
2. It makes sense to see if there are other, better hosts out there, which I have missed in the past
3. It’s a great opportunity to see what kind of service other companies offer their customers

After spending a few hours over a couple of days, I decided to sign up with BlueHost.com, they offered great price, huge bandwidth and hard drive space along with excellent add-ons, which made installing WordPress blog a breeze, even for a beginner, such as myself.

I opened a few accounts, including one for my news site.  For a few months things were great, I got used to their control panel, which is extremely easy to use and full of features you won’t necessarily find everywhere, I especially likely the IP Deny Manager.  All of the sites ran just fine.

In February 2008, after hosting with them for a couple of months, my news site went down for 15 minutes. A week later, down again. Week after that, it went down twice, both times for roughly 15 minutes.  This has repeated for a total of 7 times within a period of a month and a half.  The site may have been down even more, I just noticed it being down 7 times.  Each time the site went down, my account had a message telling me that the administrator is looking into the issue.  I also tried calling them every time, unfortunately when my site was down, so was a number of other sites, so everybody called and I was usually called #18 or 20.  By the time I got to talk to their customer service rep, the site was back up and I was told that they do not know what the issue was and kindly asked me to call back when the site is down again so that they can run some tests then.  Hello?  When the server is down, everybody is calling and I can never get through!  So I played this cat and mouse game, until one time my news article ranked high on Google News, I was getting some 5,000 visitors per hour and… the site went down again.

Well, I never called BlueHost again, I decided to move my news site to a dedicated server.  I only regret that I prepaid my hosting with BlueHost for an entire year (they offer a better price what you do that).

I still have a few accounts left at BlueHost, but these sites receive a very low volume, so even if they’re down, chances are I am not losing anything.  I will be pulling them out and moving over tothe dedicated server shortly, but it will be done one at a time, because it’s a time-consuming process.

To summarize, my opinion of BlueHost is that they offer great features for a great price, but having a server down and not being able to explain why it has happened it ridiculous, in my opinion.  If you are looking for a long-term hosting company for your blog, based on my experience I would recommend looking someplace else.