I am officially taking bavatuesdays off Bluehost starting this weekend, so there may be some extended downtime on the bava. All day today I have been unable to access this blog regularly because of CPU errors and, quite frankly, I’m ready to take the bava off of my experimental hosting account I got through UMW almost two years ago and bring it into the quiver of personal sites on my own hosting account through Hosting Co-operative. I have far less storage space and band-width, but far more reliable service, trouble-shooting, and flexibility. Additionally, the cat who started the Co-op back in 2003 is also the same genius, Zach Davis, who turned me on to Wordpress. So, I’m sticking with the people, applications, and services that have proven themselves in this rapidly morphing environment. Additionally, I can finally pay my outstanding bill and pimp out my new account with some more space and maybe even a WPMu test bed with dynamic subdomains of my very own
Don’t get me wrong, Bluehost is fine for a few experiments, but there is a time when even Mary Washington is going to have to consider another model with which to get at hosting this stuff more efficiently and effectively. Experimental hosting accounts always made a lot of sense to me, but over the last two years these accounts have been doing a lot more than experiments, they been hosting anywhere from 15 to 50 online applications each, and times that by twenty Bluehost accounts and you’ve got yourself a royal mess. Add to that the fact that as of late I have been losing my patience with these mega-hosting services that promise you the world in terms of storage, band-width, etc. and then bitch and moan about running a few WordPress scripts. See ya Bluehost.
Aside from the occasional CPU error, my experience with BH has been pretty smooth.
For the most part, I think a lot of people use providers like Bluehost to run small commercial Web sites or personal Web sites. Those users are probably using one or two applications, at the most, and they’re probably running fairly “vanilla” installations of them.
We’ve always been interested in installing and experimenting with a bunch of applications, all at once, on one account. This kind of activity may simply tax the services that a company like Bluehost provides in unexpected ways. It isn’t that what we’re doing is so intensive necessarily, I just wonder if the Bluehost services aren’t “tuned” to deal with this kind of activity. . .particularly when they scale beyond a certain point.
I still love Bluehost, and I think it can continue to play an important role as a low-cost experimental space for the work we do. At a certain point, however, we probably need to look at individual applications that we’re trying to run, and decide if they’ve scaled beyond a standard Bluehost account. That’s what happened with WPMU, and that made perfect sense at the time.