Since the beginning of 2008 this site, and all the other sites I or my wife owns, has been hosted at Bluehost. At first there were frequent outages and problems but Bluehost devoted a lot of time and effort to making things more stable and their uptime improved. For much of the past 4 years the service has been good. It’s inexpensive shared IP hosting and it has worked for us.
Recently however we have had some outages and I have become unhappy with the quality of service. Today was the last straw. Shortly after 7 am Central time I noticed that my email wasn’t working, and then that my sites and my wife’s sites weren’t online. Bluehost’s status page indicated that an upgrade was underway and that service should be restored in 30 to 60 minutes.
It’s been more than 5 hours now and we still have no email and no sites. At no time during this outage has there been no attempt at communication from Bluehost. My chat session with support have not been satisfying as all they can do is quote estimates from the engineering teams working on the issues. The most upsetting aspect of this outage is the place holder page that Bluehost has dropped in for all the missing sites. It says that “no site is configured for this address”. This is untrue. There is a site for the address, Bluehost broke the server so you can’t see it.
Update: Wednesday, May 23
The web server outage lasted roughly 16 hours. Our sites were up sometime after 11 pm Central time Tuesday. This morning (Wednesday) they were up and have continued to stay up. However we still don’t have email service. The status page is now 5 hours out of date and gives no estimate for when service might be returned to normal.
As a result of an outage several weeks ago I had already decided to move our domains to WebFaction. This latest outage, the worst I have ever experienced in more than 16 years of having my own domain, has only hardened my resolve to abandon Bluehost. My preparations for the move are now complete and, instead of waiting for the weekend as originally planned, I am going to start the migration as soon as our email service is restored.