HomeThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Bluehost.com and new hosting
I don’t have many bad words about Bluehost where my websites were hosted after m6. They were mostly reliable and their tech support is great.
The only thing that bothered me, aside occasional unavailability of my websites (which were still running 99% of the time), is the problem with processor time. Although I optimized the websites manually and didn’t employ any plug-in to run heavy cron jobs on the server, I still had continuous warnings about my processor usage. After I contacted their very responsive tech support they said that I don’t have to worry and my websites aren’t using their resources too much. However, from time to time I had a “friendly” neighbor or two which shared my hosting machine, and they’ve managed to make it pretty slow and unresponsive from time to time.
Unfortunately, due to larger processor usage, Bluehost doesn’t directly support compression and it is activated with some sort of script which calculates the need to turn it on. Alternatives are compressing through PHP or usage of Zlib compression and FastCGI instead usual PHP serving (which employs processor much more). I gave up serving compressed pages and used manual compression of static files which are served compressed if available (it will be explained in one of my future optimization posts).
In meantime, my main website grew and it got much more traffic, aside its size. After a lot more optimization and bending rules to optimize website loading without any plug-in, the website loading became much better and there were the “neighbors”. In comparison, WordPress website running on W3 Total Cache is just a tad faster, but a lot less responsive on the user/visitor side and it’s killing the random features website offers… unless you are logged in.
One day the website became unavailable for a whole hour… I checked with tech support and they told there was a software update. Afterward, a hardware update occurred and it lasted for hour and a half, and you can guess that it was followed by another software update. Overall, the website was unavailable for 6 hours that day. At first it got a bit faster and within few days it was slower than ever. That made me search for a VPS where I have all the features and guaranteed resources I need. XooNom.com is hosted on that VPS and I’m still tweaking it because it is an un-managed server.
So far, the website is much faster than it used to be. I didn’t move the larger website yet because I’m playing with the parameters and features.
