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BlueHost

2008-05-26 20:09:20.800913+00 by ebradway 4 comments

While they still maintain a great deal of censorship on hosted content, Bluehost has dealt the end-game in hosting: unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains. That means, in theory, you could host the entire internet on a single $6.95 account... Well, except for the good parts!

[ related topics: Games broadband Free Speech Space & Astronomy Net Culture ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2008-05-26 20:14:25.626656+00 by: ebradway

Hmmm... They still stick to 50 MySQL and 50 Postgres databases per account. That's pretty limiting.

#Comment Re: made: 2008-05-27 10:20:03.832099+00 by: meuon

Sigh. I hate the word "unlimited". And while I've had decent service for soem customers on A Small Orange, they've had outages, and systems bogged down as well. At least they run PHP as an apache module, unlike many others that run bizarre server configurations and no shell or SCP, php as a cgi..

What the word "Unlimited" at an ISP means to me is they haven't the technical capacity to track and bill for these things appropriately, which signifies other techno clueless problems,

"Unlimited" also means you are fighting for bandwidth and CPU with every other bottom feeding website hoster.

"Unlimited" means driven by a buzzword compliant marketting department...

#Comment Re: made: 2008-05-27 12:24:17.933281+00 by: petronius

I once saw a commercial where a guy is surfing the internet when the computer informs him that he has seen everything there is on the Web. Could this be the flip side of that idea?

#Comment Re: made: 2008-05-27 16:31:59.996645+00 by: ebradway

I've been with BlueHost for a couple years now. They only recently switched from "limited" to "unlimited". They have the capability of tracking usage. I assume they decided, for marketting purposes, to eliminate stated limits because it's fairly impractical to ever reach the old limits. BlueHost does two things to put practical limits:

  1. They have pretty strict censorship. They even hammered me for having a couple ISO images and MP3s in a private directory on their server. And they are legendary for their stance on adult content.
  2. They limit the bandwidth of any single connection to the server. It's enough bandwidth to stream decent-quality video, but not enough to use their server for backup purposes.

About a year ago, BlueHost bought another hosting company with greater limits on service. I contacted tech support and asked about switching my account. The tech support person said: "Sure, I'd be happy to switch you. But then you'd be sharing a server with other 'unlimited' folks. The server you are on has lower limits but everyone is subjected to those same limits. I'd suggest you stay put until you need more capacity."

So I stayed put. They increased some capacities on my server. I now can have unlimited domains (before it was only six) and my storage went from 15GB to 150GB (I'm still only using about 3GB).

I used to co-lo my own server at Chattanooga On-Line. When management changed there, I decided to switch to hosting. I got burnt very, very badly by customer service from the first hosting company I tried. I switched to BlueHost because of their reputation for customer service and price. Their customer service is top-notch (and probably better if you are LDS).

There are only two things I miss about having my own server:

  1. I used to setup friends with their own accounts and web space. I think I can still do that with BlueHost.
  2. I used to be able to back-up to my server.

But there are so, so many things I don't miss about managing my own server. Going down to reboot it or deal with security upgrades at all hours was among them.