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.
Hmmm. What does Bluehost say about the CPU error problem? I know it’s not new–I’ve run into it a few times myself–but last I heard it was an issue with wiki spam. Are they acknowledging there’s a problem?
Aside from the occasional CPU error, my experience with BH has been pretty smooth.
As large web-hosting services go, Bluehost is very good. But I just think that when working through the externally hosted server space, Bluehost can only handle the first stages of such an experiment. For example, every time I demoed a WordPress site on Bluehost with say 25 students in a computer lab I would inevitably get a CPU error message. Not only does that hurt our credibility, but it is also a real drag because you can’t really work them through the application effectively. I have had none of those problems with our new WPMu install, and it is working much, much harder regularly. Additionally, all those Bluehost accounts are starting to languish a bit because it takes a lot of work to keep them current and make sure they are all updated with the latest versions of the applications, etc. I frankly think UMW has outgrown Bluehost, and in order to keep the external hosting experiment (which is the single most remarkable experiment we have embarked on) we need to get an externally hosted dedicated server wherein we can start to manage all this stuff in a more central space.
My suspicion is that while it is possible to run these larger experiments/sites using the service provided by a company like Bluehost, it takes a lot of work on our part to stay on top of the ways in which they’re dealing with the particular scripts and applications we want to play with, once we reach a particular scale. Bluehost customer support is, in my opinion, pretty great for what we pay. But they’re best able to answer and respond to the kind of requests they get from a typical customer, and I’m guessing that the kind of activity we’re engaging in isn’t what their typical user is doing.
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.
Bluehost? No no no (((
You know you get to a point wen developing that you have to ask yourself why am I hosting 10 sites all over the place? You have to deal with all the different techs and if you need to make changes you cant. Get a dedicated server for a reputable like Server Intellect or Sivan and host all of your sites and development projects on ONE server. Makes like that much easier. Plus if a client gives you grief turn em off and kill to move on.