Moved to Bluehost
Posted on February 24th, 2007 in Personal, Technology & Gadgets |
I moved all webpages for:
boulderheights.org, .us, .org
kabal.org, .ca, .net
bouldermountainfire.org
Over to bluehost.com. Seems good so far. 1and1 was starting to have real performance problems, so I ditched them.
2 Responses
Hi, Dave.
Just an FYI - I had this page bookmarked as “daveslist.kabal.org”, but that link is dead at the moment.
Also, I wonder…..How do you know that bluehost won’t also be a victim of it’s own success and fail to keep up? They seem cheaper than 1and1 which probably means they net less money to buy servers and bandwidth, doesn’t it?
Yeah, I’ll put up the daveslist.kabal.org again soon.
You’re right, can’t trust bluehost either. There are a number of salient differences which *may* make bluehost better:
1) MySQL databases are on localhost, not separate servers. Many of the performance problems were caused by disconnects between them. For instance, that gallery2 picture in the corner of the page didn’t work reliably with a separate server for the databases. The performance on 1and1.com was intolerable (gallery2 loads, on 1and1, would require up to 40 seconds).
2) bluehost has an inaccessible area in the user space. I need this to compile stuff outside of the webspace and have it accessible to PHP, etc.
3) bluehost technical support is in North America, not the Philipines. I frequently had trouble communicating my problems with non-English speakers. That being said, the average technical support person on 1and1.com is more capable, and has more latitude to help you out. Moreover, 1and1.com gets you to a human faster because of their outsourcing.
4) They don’t seem to advertise (2 page spreads in PC magazine for 1and.com) to get new clients on shared web hosting.
Here’s the downsides of bluehost I’ve encountered:
1) Long wait for technical support. Needs better staffing, with more programming experience (i.e., fluent in PHP and Perl)
2) All technical support cannot do everything (i.e., 1and1 had every tech support person empowered).
3) Strange limits on add-on, parked and subdomains…. Should cost them nothing, why impose such a small limit on these?
4) Strange terminology unique to bluehost on “Add-on”, “Subdomain” and “Parked domains”. They seem to think everyone else uses the same terminology. For instance, kabal.org, kabal.net and kabal.ca all point to the same place, and serve the same pages, but boulderheights.org, .net and .us need to all do a painful redirect back to one of them, visible to the user.
Dave