Tag: iPower

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.

More Downtime

Sorry, but iPower was down again. I’m not happy and I’ll make preparations to switch web site hosting services. I have a big secret project coming up, and although it may not happen for some months I can’t afford to have the site down every week for hours on end. At the moment BlueHost seems like the most likely candidate.

Wait! I’ve got it. Petula’s “Downtown” but called “Downtime”! Ooh, I like it.

Google Goof

At the moment, none of the Google hosted Blogspot blogs I look at are working. It’s error 502, and that’s a bad gateway. Bad gateway! Bad!

This site is WordPress running on Web host iPower. They moved my site from Phoenix to Burlington, MA, not far from from here, and it’s home of iPower’s merger partner Endurance International. The latency times are a fraction of what they were, but throughput sucks. Often it takes 30-60 seconds after clicking log on, or save, for anything to happen. And FTP upload speed is now 150 KB/sec, compared to the consistent 550 KB/sec it had been (yes, that’s bytes, not bits, per second — I have FiOS!).

So either the line into the data center in Burlington doesn’t have enough capacity, or the server I’m on doesn’t have enough CPU for the sites it’s hosting. Maybe it needs TCP offloading. Whatever the cause, I won’t let this continue, and if I have to switch hosting services to see an improvement that’s what I’ll do.

Another Major Meltdown

You may have noticed earlier that the homepage was rolled back in time. The exact point, no surprise to me, was the last post before iPower switched me over to the new platform. This notice was posted on iPower’s support page:

DNS issues potentially affecting your Website and E-mail An unforeseen issue with our DNS system caused us to have to restore a backup from 3/16/2008.If your site has been transitioned to the new platform since 3/16/2008, or you have created your account since that date, your website and e-mail may be affected.

Transitioned customers may notice that your website is displaying an older version. We will be correcting this during the course of the day today (Mon 5/26/2008), as we restore our DNS.

New customers that have created their account since 3/16/2008 may notice that their website is offline completely. This will also be corrected over the next few hours.

We deeply apologize for this service interruption, we know that you count on us, and our team is working as quickly as possible to restore full service for all customers.

Everything seems to be back the way it was when I went to bed last night, but I’ll be on the lookout for further trouble. Needless to say, iPower’s shaky reputation can’t withstand any more incidents such as this one.