Bluehost Cloud - Grrrrr

[lcoughey]

So, although my experience with Bluehost hasn't been perfect, they haven't really been any worse than past hosting providers I've used over the years. As I was up for renewal, I decided to upgrade to the Business Pro Cloud service as I was told it would be faster and more stable:

On the cloud your website is more reliable. Your data is automatically mirrored across three distinct devices. Should hardware issues arise at one, our failover technology automatically designates one copy of your website to keep functioning while the other two copies work to rebuild.

No more long load times. Along with premium hardware and low-density servers, our cloud platform includes a varnish caching layer and global cdn to ensure your server resources are focused where they should be. Static website content is managed more efficiently so dynamic requests can be processed quicker than ever.

On Friday, I set the switch over to happen through the night. Sure enough, with a couple of A-Record updates on my DNS, we were sailing on the new servers.

I cannot tell you how shocked I was to get a jetpack message last night at 9 telling me that my site was down, followed by another message an hour later telling me that I might want to contact my host. Sure enough, 14 hours later, my site is still down and they have no ETA or explanation as to why the "more reliable" servers with "failover technology" has failed.

Fortunately, I was able to setup a page on my in-house server about my site being down and providing our phone number to contact us.

I recognize that things happen, but did I make a mistake by staying the course with Bluehost?

The funny thing is, after I enabled my dummy page, jetpack was pleased to report to me that my server is back online. Unfortunately, it was referring to the dummy page and not my actual website.

On my to do list. Figure out how to setup and import my wordpress site on my qnap so that I have a full backup copy of my site to switch over to in the future.

 

[Y.F.N.C.G.]

That's pretty bad. I jumped ship from Bluehost a while ago because when I would complain about slow speeds they would push me to their pro level, saying how it was much faster. My feeling was that even their base-level package should do a decent job hosting a website, I shouldn't have to upgrade just to get reliable hosting.

I moved all those clients over to GoDaddy after hearing from others that their service has gotten much better recently. I've been happy with GoDaddy. However, every customer of mine who is on one of my monthly recurring website care plans is being hosted on WPEngine, which is definitely the way to go if you can afford it.

 

[16bwhitt]

Did you ever contact BlueHost to see what the issue was? I would contact support and ask for a credit

I have an account with SiteGround- One of the best hosting services. On my first day or two of having a website with them, my site was down. So it does happen! Worrying, but it's been smooth sailing ever since!

 

[lcoughey]

Did you ever contact BlueHost to see what the issue was? I would contact support and ask for a credit

I have an account with SiteGround- One of the best hosting services. On my first day or two of having a website with them, my site was down. So it does happen! Worrying, but it's been smooth sailing ever since!

It took a lot of nagging, but PHP broke in an update. It was back up in about 26 hours.

 

[16bwhitt]

It took a lot of nagging, but PHP broke in an update. It was back up in about 26 hours.

Well, in all fairness that would do it. Updating servers network wide to a broken PHP would cause them all to crash!

 

[lcoughey]

Well, in all fairness that would do it. Updating servers network wide to a broken PHP would cause them all to crash!

Yup...and it would explain why my sites would all just go to a blank screen and not give an error. It wasn't that the server went down that bothered me as much as the fact that none of the tech support team would tell me why my site was down. How hard would it be for them to post a simple message on their support site with a statement saying that an update broke PHP, affecting specific servers and that they are unsure how long it will take to reverse the damage. I was thinking that someone accidentally deleted the databases because one tech support person told me that my account was showing that my database was in the process of being transferred and it could take a week to complete.

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

Every web host i've ever been with has had serious issues. I believe this is because every successful web host oversells. I once started a web hosting business based on reserved space and bandwidth but no one wanted to pay 5.50 for 200mb disk space and 4gb data transfer. (this was like 2003 so chances are they wouldnt have used it back then). Since it wasn't unlimited people just wherent interested and I eventually has to close my doors and transfer my clients to another provider who is also no longer in business.

Now I have a VPS with knownhost, I really like it a lot, the response time initial response time is like 200ms slower than i'm use to but a customer doesn't notice that. I can't recall any long downtime and I am usually at 100% uptime for the month if not 100% then 99.9 or so.