Alternative to Bluehost?

  • Hi,

    I finally had my links.com site installed on Bluehost, after lots of initial effort, but unfortunately, the server seems to be going down quite often with lots of downtime. I really do not know how often it is going down, since Bluehost does not provide me with this information, information that I really need to make an informed decision.

    Given that today I have had over an hour of downtime already, I think I have to move. I get 24*7 telephone support at Bluehost, and I would like to retain this level of support. I would also like a site that provides information concerning downtown, since this seems to be very important information to have.

    Obviously, links.com is an important site for me, and I do want to place it on a highly stable server, so I will pay extra money to get the proper level of stability. Any recommendations are very much appreciated.

    Thanks,
    Rich

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

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    Thread Starter richrf

    (@richrf)

    Hi whooami,

    Thanks for the links. I did have a chance to browse through these links and others on other forums before I posted my message. Most of the recommendations are good, but not what I am looking for.

    First and foremost I need 24*7 telephone support. Also, based upon my experiences with Bluehost, I definitely need daily reports concerning any downtime that my website is experiencing. Hopefully, someone on this forum can help me out with my specific requirements based upon positive personal experiences. I do not want to move to Bluehost, unless I know that it will be a positive move, since I do not want to risk a really poor situation with an unknown hosting site.

    Thanks for your help.
    Rich

    I’m also looking for a reliable host, but not very costly at the same time. I’ve read the “Hands on BestHost” post here on the forum, but it’s leading to nowhere, except more confusion.

    The post gives the impression of, try & leave sort of thing, but the average user don’t have the money to try a new host every day.

    This is what I’ve gathered from the post:

    LinkSys,
    GoDaddy,
    DreamHost,
    AN Hosting

    Now if someone could give a suggestion to the Best option for hosting, it would be grate.

    As far as hosting goes and people good and bad experiences its all in how the host works and takes care of its customers. I use FreshlyPressed, there pricing is high, but the support is awesome. I have learned allot from James and Mark, and they answer all my dumb questions, and maybe aggravated them a little but if it was that bad I am sure they would have dumped me by now.

    As for others I know allot of people that use Bluehost and have NOT had the problems that others list here, maybe the company fixed things that were broken or maybe the posts about them were exaggerated. I am NOT taking sides, because the same has happened to me with https://www.crystaltech.com. Back when the original guy was running the place that started the whole business there was a strong sense of customer commitment, now IMHO, its just not the same.

    Theres always 3 sides to everyones story there side the hosting companies side and the truth.

    ANhosting is rated highly but as of this week I know of 2 people that were going to move there domains there but the XML import would not work, there support did everything possible to fix and work with the customer, but in the end could not get it to work.

    Dreamhost is also highly recommended by allot of people but there are bad posts about them also. I know of one person personally Glenda B, that recommended them too me and she has been with them for 9 years, than again if you mention her name or email address she gets credit and free hosting for you mentioning them.

    You can also goto https://www.webhostanalysis.com/ amongst other sites and find coupons or codes for discounts.

    https://www.asmallorange.com

    I host my site on GoDaddy. So far they’ve been great! 24/7 Tech Support (Here locally in the US, There Tech support offices are only a few blocks from my house here in Scottsdale) and the only downtime i’ve had was my fault with me messing with DNS Settings (So it doesn’t count that GoDaddy was down, As the server was still up) For a paid upgrade (1.99/month) You can get there pro-stats which has Bandwidth use – Sever uptime and Avrage server response time. (Mine has a avrage load time of 0.829 Seconds) What you could use for uptime is a site called “SiteUptime” they go to your URL and wait for a “OK” response from your server. Overall GoDaddy has had 11 downtime’s. But they were All caused by me There prices are very resonable (Starting from 3.99/month which comes with 5GB of Diskspace and 250GB of Bandwidth, Which for me is fine as i only run a small personal blog but prices go up to 10.49/month for 250GB of Diskspace and 2,000GB of Bandwidth or you can have deticated etc etc etc)

    Bluehost/Hostmonster’s support is not very good. Yes, we had them till March. We have changed our hosting companies several times. We always conclude that there is no such perfect web hosting company. If you have a problem with one hosting company, you are likely to have the same problem wherever you go. As for Bluehost/Hostmonster, their support got a lot worse when they started using Livechat. Now, their average response time is 3 to 4 days. Lunarpages is relatively good. But it’s no perfect, either.

    >the server seems to be going down quite often with lots of downtime

    In the meantime, this problem can be triggered with DNS entry errors. It’s stated here in more detail. We had this problem even when our website was hosted at Bluehost/Hostmonster. They changed our servers without a notice and without our permission. Everything was working fine. But they then changed servers some time around February, 2007. And we started having a downtime frequently. Note that if the downtimes are caused because DNS is pointing to different servers for your account, you must be losing mail. Damage must be permanent, and lost mail cannot recovered. And Bluehost/Hostmonster can change your servers when one runs out of space.

    First of all a little insight about how shared hosting works. You are put together with hundreds of other people on one server. You usually have a limit of 20% CPU usage and 20 simultaneous MySQL connections – something that you will most likely get all the time since your site is very popular/big. A shared hosting account is just not for your kind of traffic if you use dynamically generated content.

    I am hosting a cheap web hosting directory on bluehost and have never had any problems.

    For your requirements at Links.com I would suggest a VPS from either Lunarpages or HostIcan both of which offer 24/7 support and are reliable in terms of uptime.

    Go Daddy has been problematic for us. There servers do not seem to support CURL or fopen which are fairly common php functions. This is bad if you want to use certain plugins.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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