2010-06-01
Dealing With Web Hosts
As many of you know, I've been hosting ktracy.com on Bluehost.com since 2006. The first year was fantastic, but as we started generating more traffic in 2007, we kept overloading the server we were on, causing the site to load slowly, not load completely, generate errors, or not load at all. Beginning in 2008, I redesigned and reprogrammed the website to make it run more efficiently behind the scenes. This is actually the longest I've ever kept a website design.
However, since late last year, the server problems we faced in 2007 began plaguing us again. I've since scaled back several more features that I really liked, including the "Most Comments" and "Zannel" features, and have had to further delay new features Semp and I have first conceived back in 2007; but still the problem has gotten progressively worse. Adding to the frustration, Bluehost's customer service and technical support have become increasingly arrogant.
I'm no longer recommending this web host to friends, family, and clients.
This past month, I've had trouble accessing and updating this site more times than I could keep track of with issues happening dozens of times a day. As a result, it's become increasingly difficult for Semp, Travis, Josh, and I to post new content and between the connection problems and the lack of production on our end, traffic has been slowing down... at least on days when I'm not attacking Paulers. This is exactly what happened in the winter of 2007 when Bluehost was giving us the same problems. Although summers are usually low traffic seasons, this one is looking especially bleak.
My current contract with BlueHost.com is set to expire in February. I'm probably not going to wait that long to move our operation to a new hosting company and have already begun shopping around.
Sadly, I've had a really hard time finding honest customer service representatives when it comes to making sure I won't have the same problem when I move.
The problem is that everybody offers "UNLIMITED Traffic or Bandwidth or Transfers." How nobody has been sued for fraud for making this claim is beyond me. As we have experienced many times here, Bandwidth is ALWAYS LIMITED by the capabilities of the servers the site is hosted on. If I have a video file and 1 million people want to watch it live at the same time, the processor on the server won't be able to handle the load and all any of us will see for a week after that incident will be "SERVER UNAVAILABLE."
So, as a potential customer who wants to know about what will make the "SERVER UNAVAILABLE," the sales and technical people are put in a weird situation. They get paid to say, "Unlimited Traffic," but I'm asking them for the truth.
Of the companies I've spoken to this morning, two refused to admit this could happen (they might not have been smart enough to know they weren't telling the truth), one admitted that if someone exceeded a measly 10% of the processor power on a given server, their account would be suspended, one could only tell me what operating system the servers used, and one just terminated the conversation while I was in mid sentence explaining what exactly I wanted to know.
So much for "the customer comes first."
Who do you recommend? And would you be terribly offended if we added a few more ads throughout this site to help pay for our new digital home when that time comes?
