Bluehost

Tell us how you really feel about Bluehost, Joe! 

I have been on and off the admin side of my Bluehost account several times today. It seems to be up steady. EIG's problems must be isolated to just some servers. Doesn't make you feel any better though, huh?

Inmotion Hosting

Joe,

For my business I switched to Inmotion Hosting about 5 years ago. They are great!  My site is rarely down, and their tech support is the best I've ever encountered.

Now, having said that, I don't have an internet business like you do. I don't have videos or forums, only a web site with some forms my clients can fill out.

When I went searching for a new provider they came up consistently at the top at nearly all of the review sites. They have never disappointed me.

http://www.inmotionhosting.com/

Their twitter feed

Their twitter support feed is saying the outage is network related and it's affecting all their dedicated and VPS servers.

Great, that will be their corporate and business customers ... no ETA on a fix yet. One twitter post said their admins are having difficulty even connecting to anything.

Sounds like a total meltdown. This could be the blow that really puts EIG on the front page news as the worst managed internet conglomerate out there.

If this continues to unfold as ugly as it's starting to be, firms will like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

It's the Chinese.............

............this is how they start CyberWar 1,...............testing their stuff with hobbyists!!!

Peter

Just wondering ...

Does 1 and 1 do hosting and have you had any experience with them. I have had great performance from them for web site hosting and email.

Real mess

Sounds like a move is

Sounds like a move is imminent Joe.

We're moving to Amazon hosting

As soon as Bluehost comes back up (we fear it could be 24 hours or more before they do at this rate), we will begin immediate steps to move to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We have some other web resources that's been on AWS for up to three years now, with not a single outage.

AWS is quickly getting the reputation of being some of the most dependable web infrastructure on the planet.

But Bluehost has to come back up before we can start the move. I fear that could be a day or more yet at the rate they're going.

I think you will be happy ...

... with your decision to move.  Amazon seems like a good service provider; they are quite large and likely have the infrastructure to ensure reliable/continuous service.

Saw a very interesting video about FaceBook the other day.  Seems that they receive and install 1000's of servers every day ... just routine for them, and necessary to keep ahead of the increasing volume and memory requirements from nearly 600 million users every day ... it was quite revealing to see a bit of what it takes to keep the Internet running.

Bad news

Joe, I haven't done a lot of research on ISPs, but I manage a vendor relationship that requires high-availability web hosting and support for a major player in the credit card / payments industry. In the five years I have managed this account, they have had two outages more than a few minutes in duration. Two. And in each case, service was restored within an hour to 90 minutes. Their third-party provider's failover systems are extremely reliable...with redundancy across multiple centers in the US and Canada. They have been rock solid.

You have every right to be ticked off, a day's outage is an eternity for businesses relying on their service. If your ISP is experiencing monthly issues, that isn't random or accidental failures - it's more likely a systemic problem that won't be easy to fix. High personnel turnover with inadequate training, reduced storage capacity standards or maxed-out network scalability are just a few issues that come to mind.

May the bits and bytes flow freely...

Whatever the problem is

it never seems to affect the forums? I've never been unable to connect ..DaveB

MRH is hosted elsewhere

MRH runs on Drupal, and we host this site on a very special provider that understands how to make Drupal sites that just run and run.

That said, other parts of what we do is hosted on places like Bluehost. Up until about 9 months ago, Bluehost was solid as a rock and I recommended them to everyone. Since that time, they have gotten steadily worse. Today, because of this outage, there's a ton of negative posts on the web if you google "Bluehost outage". 

In one of the threads there was a reference to a Bluehost admin speaking "off the record" that Bluehost's practices have changed dramatically since they were acquired a few years ago. As a result, the new owners are trying to run things lean-and-mean in order to increase profitablity.

Well, this strategy just backfired. I have read dozens of posts on other threads today of companies that have had it with Bluehost. This new policy of theirs that has lead to this ridiculously lousy level of service is going to cost them dearly.

Verne: I agree with you. My background is in IT and I know what it takes to get infrastructure that's reliable. I would never get by unscathed with an outage that went for more than a couple hours. We're at 13 hours now and still the response is "no ETA available yet". That's just totally irresponsible - I would be shown the door as an IT person if that was my response to hundreds of users after 13 hours. It's a systemic problem in how the company is run that has lead to infrastructure that has no backup when it fails and is so brittle you can't easily repair it when it does fail.

, there's a ton of negative posts on the web

 Hi Joe, Don't worry about it too much, I think the modelers that use the site are not too concerned about losing access for a while. We all know you are not responsible for the problems and we know you will solve it as soon as possible. Tomorrow will come,the problems will go and you can get back to work on the next issue. .....DaveB

Compensation

Beat'em up for cash Joe!

"The support team of Bluehost is actively using Twitter to communicate with affected customers. It is worth mentioning that customers of Bluehost are requested to contact the company to ask for compensations."

...

My background is in IT and I know what it takes to get infrastructure that's reliable.

Yeah, it's not too complicated, though.  Realistic Hardware lifecycle protocols, Competent managers, Discipline...

It's that last one that comes hardest...

Bluehost

Fwiw a website i created for

Just the customers paying the big bucks

Bluehost has communicated the problem is only with their VPS and dedicated server customers. My personal Bluehost account and the accounts of my friends, all shared host accounts, have been up the whole time.

It is not just the servers

That some companies have problems with.  I just had a frustrating experience.  I needed a specific cable to go from a meter to a USB port.  So, it has to come from the vendor of the meter to get it right.  Went to their website.  Broken / misdirected links, then I get parts of screens that over lay each other.   Finally, I was able to find their help phone number.  The nice lady took the order info (14.99 + tax and shipping, not a big part.) and asked questions about what was wrong with the website.  I got specific, so maybe they can fix it in the future....

I think they just went out there with all the wizbang stuff and forgot that they have to support things like IE8 still (Don't try and tell me to "upgrade".  Work machine, company decides what to put on all of the thousands of employee machines and if I don't like it I can go work somewhere else.....)

Heck, even with my home machine, this board doesn't like carriage returns all the time, especially in the opening post of the thread.  (I can get around that by composing my message in word and pasting it into the entry box.) 

This is becoming "Standard"

My BlueHost accounts all seem to be fine, but I'm not paying for my own servers either. It does however seem remarkably similar to an issue I've been dealing with at work, where a vendor continually and regularly can't get us the files we need in order to process. Yes, I'm also IT at my Day Job.

Originally this vendor said that if we got our files to them by 02:00 ET, they would have our files for us by 08:00. Unfortunately, it turns out that instead of 6 hour turn around, it's actually a 30 hour turn around, assuming nothing goes wrong, which it often does. Currently we are still waiting for test files from two days ago, that haven't shown up yet, and all we get back from these jokers is, "We are talking to our developers in order to find the problem. Unfortunately we do not have an ETA on when the files will be ready".

The really sad part is, these are files that we need for calculating Cost Basis. Yes, we're talking people's money here. It's been this way since we started with them nearly two years ago. Whoever negotiated the contract wasn't smart enough to put in any type of SLA, so we have no power to do anything. We can't demand they discount the cost because of processing issues or anything else. My understanding is that this person is no longer with the company. He's the son in-law of the our founder, and now works as a VP at this same vendor.

No one seems to care about service anymore, or doing the job right the first time, or taking responsibility for, and pride in your work. This has become the new normal.

Let the move commence!

The website seems to be back up again.

Bluehost is back, finally

I had great luck with

I had great luck with http://www.he.net.  Never had any downtime with them...

A few comments

from near the bottom of the totom pole. I worked for a company that processed medical records from all over the US. It was rapidly becoming an internet company. Hosp sends medical records, we would look them over for QA and other stuff and send them back. The servers went down one year and stayed down for close to a week. The reason, they were so cheap on pay that the IT guys would gain some experience and jump ship including in this case the guy who set the whole thing up. Fed up enough with his pay he didn't leave much in the way of records.

Their old production crew who used to process all the paper medical records hadn't had a raise in 8-10 years. Morale was so far in the negatiive that when layoffs started coming with the change over to internet based record processing it was "Oh thank God I'm done with these idots."

Service??? it was every person for themselves. In my case it got me through the depression. All to often with a place that is under new ownership, it is the idea behind the purchase to be able to make a lot of money. The way they do that is start cutting corners and the best people start to bail.

Jack