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New Host: Bluehost

I finally lost my patience with LunarPages.  The downtime was just getting out of control.  I put down $95 and got a Bluehost subscription (12 months).  Lunarpages made me wait 10-30 minutes for their technical support and then refused to do anything about it.  The intermittent failures were just unbearable.  I am going to switch everything else to Bluehost asap.

My review of Bluehost so far:

  • Technical support picks up immediately. (Under 5 seconds)
  • The FTP speed isslightly faster than Lunarpages and generally as fast as I could want it.
  • Installing WordPress 2.2 was easy.  Upgrading to 2.3 was easy.
  • They use the latest cPanel, which I appreciate.  Lunar had an older version.
  • Site responsiveness so far seems good.

I will update this review after a month and see if the outages stop.  I put a review in on a site about Lunarpages, and the admin of the site gave me some useful information.  His opinion was that the grass was not greener.  We shall see.  Interesting thing, the site didn’t put up my review.

Comments

4 responses to “New Host: Bluehost”

  1. Gabe Avatar
    Gabe

    Is Bluehost giving you PHP 5? I use Lunar Pages for several clients’ web sites, and haven’t had any problems with them (admittedly, the traffic to them is fairly low), and they are actually significantly better than the company hosting my personal site (IX Web Hosting.) I can’t even get them to upgrade me to PHP 5. Keep us posted on how Bluehost works out for you, my contract on my personal site expires in a few months and I want to move it to a new hosting company. Thaks.

    Reply
  2. Glen Lipka Avatar
    Glen Lipka

    I did get lunarpages to switch me to PHP5, but it was a huge pain. I sat on hold for a long, long time and then had to fill out a change request. They moved my account eventually. You should check out siteuptime.com. They have a free version that pings your site every 15 minutes.

    So far, Bluehost is pretty good. The new cPanel is nice, but overall, it’s fast and they pick up the phone. We will see how it goes in the next month though. I paid for 5 min pings, so I will get a good read within 30 days to compare.

    Reply
  3. Rachel Avatar
    Rachel

    I just got my invoice from PowWeb and need to decide before the 29th whether I will re-up for another year or move one.

    I get the sense that in the $8 – $12 a month zone, the differences between webhosts are pretty minimal.

    Reply
  4. Glen Lipka Avatar
    Glen Lipka

    Although parts of the cheapy hosts are the same, I find significant differences on a couple of items.
    1. Time to pick up the phone. From 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Lunar is the worst on this.
    2. Speed. My PowWeb was about 3X slower to upload/download. Lunar was faster on this.
    3. Uptime. So far with Bluehost, I have way fewer failed pings. Check the link in the post. I switched a few days before the month started. I dont have a comparison of Powweb on that.

    At work we use Media Temple. Uptime is great. Speed is great. Plesk is the worst UI ever made. (Like cPanel, but completely obfuscated)

    Reply

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