I’ve had my own sites for quite a while and been through many experiences hosting my sites with various hosing companies. By and large you get what you pay for. Many are very cheap, and if you can do it yourself, they provide a very inexpensive way to maintain your little piece of the Internet.

About a year or two ago I started hosting my site on Bluehost. They had a great reputation as being cheap but very reliable. They were considered by many to be the best under ten bucks a month hosting on the Internet. My experience was pretty good for a long time. I never needed to contact support. Everything pretty much just worked out of the box. That is until the past few weeks.

I was used to getting emails from Bluehost from time to time. The owner himself would even send emails after some event occurred that had affected service or after an upgrade. I always thought that was a nice touch. I’m not running a business. Although my email is important to me I can almost always tolerate a few hours of downtime in an emergency. Bluehost’s guarantee is triple nines, or 99.9% up time. That means about ten minutes per week downtime at most.

I received an email that maintenance was to be performed on the server hosting my account. The email stated that the maintenance would be performed on a Sunday night and the outage would be about two hours. No problem - and thanks for the head’s up, right? What followed was that my account was on and offline at random for nearly two weeks. I was pretty patient in the beginning. Things happen. I work in IT. I can give a brother a break. But the outage went on, and on, and on…

The original notification said that they were doing an “upgrade” to consolidate servers and provide better service to their customers. I manage a server farm, including a virtual server infrastructure. The main motivation in ‘consolidating’ servers is ease of management for IT. It reduces operating costs. It isn’t an upgrade - other than perhaps enabling IT to provide better management or resources to the end user.

What I discovered was that the ‘new’ server hosting my account had a CPU that was maxed and it was out of disk space. This was my upgrade. I was only intermittently able to access my email or websites throughout the day. This continued for two weeks.

At no time did I receive notification that there was a problem. Bluehost’s network status paged showed green lights. I was never notified.

After many fruitless emails to support I was finally responded to by a level three engineer who explained the “upgrade” had gone badly and they realized there was a problem with the RAID controller on the new server. He explained that they were over-nighting a new one and it would be fixed the next day.

Ok, great. Here is a professional server farm, hosting hundreds of accounts, and it takes twenty four hours to put a customer back online because of a dead RAID card? What happened to the magic of virtualization? What happened to having homogeneous hardware and a stock of parts? What about reversing the migration and putting my whopping one GB of content back on the original server?

When I asked Bluehost if they planned to make any compensation to their customers they said no. I asked about the 99.9% guarantee. Do you know what they told me? They told me the 99.9% guarantee only applied to their entire infrastructure as a whole. The only 99.9% percent guarantee was that their entire operation would never go offline. It had nothing to do with the service provided to an individual customer.

The response from level 3, although appreciated, was a day late and a dollar short. I had recently paid up with Bluehost for an entire year. I didn’t care. I had to move my account on a matter of principle. I’m trying to get a credit for my remaining months now.

The next day I signed up with LiquidWeb and spent most of the day this past Sunday migrating over.

So long Bluehost. What a drag.