My former web hosting service, iPower, was OK until it was bought out by Endurance International, which is in turn owned in part by Accel-KKR. As iPower’s technical problems became more chronic, I prepared an exit strategy by getting an account with Bluehost. But I waited too long to jump, and iPower cut me off for using 30 GB of my unlimited storage. I was forced to spend an extremely stressful weekend doing nothing but making the switch.
Bluehost’s founder, Matt Heaton, had a definite “my way or the highway” attitude, but the service was reliable, if not necessarily fast. The servers are over-committed — according to Domain Tools I’m one of almost 3000 sites sharing a single server, although many seem to be junk sites or placeholders (dograt.net is a placeholder). To speed things up I added caching in WordPress and switched to memory-resident PHP processing on the server.
Since the start of this year there have been rumblings that Bluehost was sold to Endurance International. There was a widely circulated announcement of the iPower buyout, but there’s been no notice of Bluehost being sold; however, Heaton has said goodbye: It’s been a blast!!! Now its time to move on… So something is up at Bluehost.
Because of my bad experience with iPower, I’m on the lookout for trouble with Bluehost, and lately I’ve been finding it. This weekend the site went down at least twice. The SQL database server was offline yesterday, and the server was unavailable when I got up this morning. When I tried to log onto the management console, I saw this message:
Refusing to allow you to login because your server box468.bluehost.com is not responsive enough right now. Please allow a little time for responsiveness to return before trying again.
Bluehost offers something that I had thought was a great idea — a Pro plan for $20/month that supposedly provides more CPU and memory, without resorting to a VPS (virtual private server). I was seriously considering switching to this plan when my account comes up for renewal next month, but if Bluehost is now part of Endurance International I’m worried about the service’s policies changing and its reliability slipping.
Glenn – Bluehost has been slow lately, but I haven’t timed-out yet. If you’re using WordPress, you might be interested in this follow-up post about Bluehost:
http://www.dograt.com/2012/02/08/zip-a-dee-doo-dah/
Doug,
I just set up a hosting account for a client at Bluehost and within an hour of activating their e-mail accounts I was also getting the same message you were while trying to login to webmail. Were you able to get Bluehost to resolve your issue?
Thanks!
Glenn
Bluehost is indeed a premium acquisition. The new data center alone is worth a lot, and improving Linux time-sharing is a clever and apparently effective alternative to the hassle of managing virtual servers. But I wonder if Bluehost’s technical prowess will be compatible with EIG’s financed-focused business practices. Fortunately, EIG’s headquarters is a 15-minute drive from my office. I was there once to complain when things got really bad with iPower.
P.S. One thing I expect won’t change is the “no porn sites” policy. It was one of the things that got me to switch to Bluehost instead of HostGator, et.al.
No way dude, Bluehost is the golden child of EIG. It will just get better with time!