Author: DOuG pRATt

The Endurance of Bluehost

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.

Red Sox and the deathly innings

When we started watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 tonight, to get ready to see Part 2 this week, the Red Sox at Tampa Bay were in the sixth inning. The movie is two-and-a-half hours long, it’s over, and the game is in the 13th inning, still scoreless! Now they’re going to a 14th inning??

And now, inning 15! I don’t know when NESN stopped carrying the game, but they’re showing infomercials now. WEEI radio is hanging in, so maybe I will too, but it’s 1:15 AM! Fortunately, I’m taking tomorrow — I mean today — off from work.

Finally! Pedroia delivers in inning 16. Red Sox 1. But it’s not over yet, and it’s a quarter to 2!

Whew! It’s over. One nothing, Red Sox.

Kate Klim makes her ex explain

The audience at Kate Klim’s show at Club Passim last night was quite a varied mix of ages and couples. Kate has a very sweet, bright and attractive stage presence, and when we saw her in Bridgewater back in May, she told some funny boyfriend stories. Kate didn’t do that last night, but a year ago she posted this cute video where she pressures an old boyfriend to talk about her.

http://youtu.be/uutgbnoTCLY

From matchsticks to margueritas

I love BBC Radio 2’s Sunday programme lineup, because it’s all over the place musically and the hosts are sincerely enthusiastic about their respective genres of interest. Today, Paul O’Grady, who’s all over the place all by himself, played an 80’s UK hit called Marguerita Time. I didn’t recognize the tune…

… but the name of the band, Status Quo, I knew from a psychedelic 60’s favourite, Pictures of Matchstick Men.

http://youtu.be/_kG-mU7wgW4

With fifteen years between the two songs, I wondered if it could be the same band, and the answer is yes, albeit with some personnel changes along the way.

Debtor nation

What had been a routine matter — raising the federal government’s debt limit to make payments on money already owed — has been turned into a high stakes political showdown, and I think that’s good. But the thing is, the outcome of the polarized negotiations is not in doubt. It’s an absolute certainty that the debt limit will be raised before, or in, the eleventh hour, then Congress will take August off and Obama will go to Martha’s Vineyard. The only question is how much the Republicans will be forced to step back from their position. To get perspective on how we got to where we are, watch this Frontline documentary from early in Obama’s Presidency.

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.