I’m back… I hope!

You might have noticed that the site’s been down for quite a few hours over the last couple of days. I apologise for any inconvenience or annoyance it’s caused.

Long story short, I’m having big problems with the company that hosts this site (Bluehost) and have decided it’s time to look for another hosting company. If you use a hosting company that lives up to its hype, please let me know about them!

Until this month I was fairly happy with Bluehost, but so far in May my site has had four major outages, each lasting many hours. Each time, I’ve had no advance warning and no notification from them whatsoever, I just tried to update the site and it wasn’t there. Or worse, a reader emailed me to ask what was going on.

Each time this happens, I’m powerless to do anything but wait. There is literally nothing I can do to make their servers work more reliably, and contacting their customer service people doesn’t exactly help. They try to be helpful, but mostly just give optimistic estimates of when the site will be back up.

The really funny part? The company CEO Matt Heaton uses his blog to rant about other companies’ poor service (like he can throw stones) and spout platitudes like this:

Sound business practices and a REAL commitment to the customer is what will weather the storm when it comes to your small or large business

While Matt preaches about “a REAL commitment to the customer”, Bluehost delivers:

• lots of outages
• no uptime guarantee
• six hours of downtime each time they reboot a machine
• customer service reps who tell customers their site will be back up much sooner than it actually will
• a policy to suspend accounts with no warning, no notification and no information about how you infringed their terms of service

I sincerely apologise to the people who bought Bluehost hosting on my recommendation, and I’ll let you know when I find someone better.