In 2006, I moved KTracy.com to Bluehost to take advantage of their awesome uptime, unlimited bandwidth, and (most significantly) their PHENOMENAL customer support.

Starting in 2007, when KTracy.com was really blowing up thanks to my coverage of the 2007 Mike Huckabee Presidential Campaign, I started noticing a the site shutting down on high volume days. I eventually realized it was the result of an excessive number of WordPress plugins that gave KTracy.com a flare that other websites hosted on free services severely lacked. I stripped most of those plugins out of WordPress in 2007 and 2008 as web traffic continued to climb. Eventually, in 2009, I totally redesigned the website by creating a custom WordPress theme that gave KTracy.com a state of the art feel for a blog at the time, letting KTracy.com impress readers without plugin gimmicks. I'm still really proud of that design. However, by June of 2010, traffic had grown to the point where even this streamlined theme was still drawing too many resources and crashing the website, causing me to think about dropping Bluehost when my contract with them ended in February 2011. However, before I could get too far with that, I decided to step away from politics for a while; which greatly decreased my web traffic and made Bluehost a better host service for KTracy.com again. A little while after that, Bluehost did increase the power of their shared servers; which made the website running WordPress in the future possible, though still frustratingly slow; which is why we don't use WordPress today.

Despite the horrifically slow load times of KTracy.com on Bluehost using WordPress, I stuck with Bluehost for one reason and one reason alone: customer support. From 2006 until at least 2013, whenever I needed help with literally anything, the support team was right on top of it. If they couldn't solve my problem in seconds, they would grind for hours with me in the chat window to figure out what was going on. You could tell you were talking to an American citizen who really cared about their customers. I think it was in 2015 when I noticed the first change: they began outsourcing their customer support. However, despite clearly talking to someone living on the Indian subcontinent, they still knew their stuff and were exceptionally good at solving whatever problems I came to them with. Unfortunately, while customer service is still outsourced to India (or a surrounding country), the quality of that customer support is now what you would expect to get from China. In other words, customer support is totally useless unless you escalate your issue to a manager after explaining your problem four different ways, waiting 15 minutes for a solution, only to find out they investigated the wrong thing, didn't find a problem, and now want to close the chat.

As you might expect, this keyboard lashing is the result of a recent interaction with customer support.

I think I mentioned before than an unused and out of date WordPress installation I occasionally used for problem solving with my clients was hacked; resulting in tens of thousands of html pages being used to sell tennis shoes and other weird stuff in Japan. It took literally an hour and a half of me trying to explain that situation to customer support before they tried ending the chat to say everything looks fine because my website still loads. Eventually, I talked to a manager who immediately ran a virus scanner; which found and corrected the problem.

Anyway, today I noticed a possibly related error:

So, after that hacking, I deleted ALL of the CMS installations I had on my server, all of my SQL databases, and everything else that was not a part of KTracy.com or soon to be a part of KTracy.com. While I don't know the exact file count off hand, the total number of files should be significantly less than 10,000. In fact, I estimate it to be around 2,500 to 7,000 files due largely to the Kevin Tracy Museum of Art and Photography. It makes NO sense that I should have 183,929 files. I mean, MAYBE I've had a grand total of 183,929 files uploaded to the server over the course of my 18 years with Bluehost thanks only to the many WordPress installations and various trials I ran with other Content Management Systems. However, those have all been deleted.

After explaining the problem to Customer Support multiple times and sending them the screenshot above, they disappeared for a while only to tell me that my 4.83GB of used file space was well within my limit... which as the screenshot above clearly shows, is UNLIMITED!

As patiently as I could, keeping in mind this was a Sunday and I was just at Holy Mass and should be behaving like a good Christian, I explained that the problem was the total file count as that my website is not over 10,000 files. However, I could not find the 170,000 or more files anywhere on my FTP. Our IT friend then suggested I try looking in the public_html directory, assuming this was my first time using an FTP. At this point, I gave up and resolved that I was going to find a new webhost with support based in the United States.

When I began having the traffic problems mentioned above in 2010, I was invited to host my website with the local company Golden Tech. Unfortunately, I was a broke college student with a Chevrolemon Impala that ate every spare dime I had and was determined not to run ads on KTracy.com; which meant I couldn't afford their services. Realizing that I had pushed KTracy.com as far as I could afford to push it was part of my decision to step away from politics and the website for a while. I did regret that decision, but there wasn't much I could do at that moment. However, my financial situation in 2024 is much different than it was in 2010; which means I can splurge a little more on website expenses. Unfortunately, Golden Tech was bought out by The Purple Guys in 2020 and they (so far as I can tell) aren't in the business of website hosting.

With that said, I am still interested in finding a local web host if I possibly can. Even though they may cost a little more and may not be around in 15 years, the appeal of supporting a local Hoosier business and being able to meet my customer support guy face to face whenever there's a problem or I want to develop a new feature would be incredible. Again, I don't know exactly how much this will cost, but I regardless if I end up with a locally owned company with dedicated server or some other bargain bin hosting service with American support, my time with Bluehost is at an end.