How do you find BlueHost's service?

[pietpetoors]

HI, I am considering moving some of my domains to Blue Host. My web sites are my main income source, thus I cannot afford downtime or slow web sites. How do you guys find Blue Host's service and uptime?

[redsox9]

Hi, I am considering moving some of my domains to Blue Host. My web sites are my main income source, thus I cannot afford downtime or slow web sites. How do you guys find Blue Host's service and uptime?

For $7 per month, I have no complaints. I've been here two-plus years and, except for the occasional hiccup, I find the service to be everything I need.

[ljcblue]

I've been a BH customer about 6 months and have been extremely pleased. No service outages and responsive customer service.

[Early Out]

My web sites are my main income source, thus I cannot afford downtime or slow web sites.While I've certainly been happy with BH (despite some early problems, over a year ago), I have to say that if you're relying on your websites to keep the wolf from the door, you might want to invest more than $7 a month in hosting them, in exchange for enhanced reliability (like redundant systems), fewer limits on CPU usage, and so on.

[Stash]

While I've certainly been happy with BH (despite some early problems, over a year ago), I have to say that if you're relying on your websites to keep the wolf from the door, you might want to invest more than $7 a month in hosting them, in exchange for enhanced reliability (like redundant systems), fewer limits on CPU usage, and so on.

I strongly agree. I have been with bluehost for about 3 years now. I seen it all and been through everything. Am I satisfied? Absolutely. Perfect uptime, everything is allowed and so on. However as my friend above said, if you rely on your website for income don't go with shared hosting not on bluehost or any other hosting company. Get a VPS or a Managed server. Depending on what your website is. More info would be helpful.

Regards.

[Shonky]

HI, I am considering moving some of my domains to Blue Host. My web sites are my main income source, thus I cannot afford downtime or slow web sites. How do you guys find Blue Host's service and uptime?

I've been pretty happy with Bluehost so far, there appeared to be some teething problems when FastCGI was implemented that have since been resolved.

Please don't be offended by this, but if you are serious about not being able to afford downtime or slow sites, shared hosting with any provider is not the place to be looking for hosting, as you are always at the mercy of other users on your server.

You have to ask yourself, how much downtime can you cope with, versus what you think you will lose in income, you may find that spending say $20-30 a month on a VPS might be the better option.

If you decide to go with Bluehost, just don't come in here down the track crying about lost revenue cause your site is down or slow, you made the decision to only spend $7 a month on hosting. ;)

[pietpetoors]

Thanks for all the replies.
Stash and Early Out, your replies are very relevant to my problem. I do have a VPS with another company. The problem now is that it is running out of memory and I have to upgrade in order to get more memory. I currently have 256MB Guaranteed Memory and 1GB Burstable Memory available. The charge me $20 per month extra to upgrade to 512MB Guaranteed Memory 2GB Burstable Memory

Of the 10 Gig available I only use 1.7 Gig and of the 150 Gig bandwidth I only use 50 Gig.

So it is hard for me to justify upgrading if I am still far within my limits as far as bandwidth and HD space is concerned.

I run different web sites. www.digiprop.co.za is where people can advertise their properties and can upload photos. www.freeforex.net and www.photosa.co.za are only information web sites and www.hilux4x4.co.za has a forum which are very busy. So my web sites are all different, in total there are 71 of them and I will rather not list all of them. The 4 I mentioned above gets the most traffic.

[John]

Bluehost 3 years ago was the best, bar none.

But now it's nothing but slow servers chugging along with thousands of users crammed on them.

$7.00 per month should get you exactly what Bluehost says it will get you, it's not how much something costs, it's what your told you get for the money, and you don't get what you used to with BH.

Sadly.

[terrakeramik]

Would not recommend BH for an ecommerce site where reliability, uptime and performance is critical. Look into VPS (starting at about $50 per month and up). Read my recent experience (last 4 weeks 3 long downtimes each exceeding 1 hour) on this thread http://www.bluehostforum.com/showthread.php?t=9900. If those factors are not critical, then BH is a reasonable solution (good price, great features, decent phone support).

[felgall]

Forget hard disk space and bandwidth. Just about any hosting will provide 10,000%+ of what most people could ever use.

The limitations on any hosting these days are CPU usage. If you are running out on a dedicated system where you get 100% of the CPU for your own use then moving to a system where you are sharing the CPU with hundreds of other sites will mean that you will run out even sooner since you will be getting less than 1% of the CPU that you have on a dedicated system.

If your dedicated system isn't powerful enough either split it onto two dedicated systems or get the server upgraded to meet your requirements.

Shared hosting is for sites that have low CPU requirements (eg. mostly static pages) where occasional short periods of downtime can be tolerated. Most such downtime is caused by someone trying to install the wrong type of site onto shared hosting and thus causing all of the sites on the server to collapse due to their trying to use all of the system resources rather than just their share. The sites on that server then go down for a short period until the offending site can be removed by staff.

[pietpetoors]

Thanks felgall, after reading all the comments I understand the term shared hosting better and it seems like I would be better off upgrading my existing system.

[hofmax]

For your requirements I would recommend an entry level dedicated server from either the planet or serverbeach. I didn't link but I think mentioning these companies shouldn't be a problem since they are not direct competitors to bluehost.