Bluehost sucks for hosting your wordpress travel blog #bluehostsucks

When you run a travel blog, you’ll face a myriad of issues in keeping your blog running

• You don’t have money to keep travelling
• You lose your motivation to get on that plane, train or automobile to the next location
• You find that you lose your mojo in writing
• Life creeps up on you and changes the equation either through health, emotional or life events

What should not be an issue in keeping your travel blog running … ???

Having a terrible web hosting provider!!!

Having a terrible web hosting provider when you’re a blogger will cause the following

• Hours and hours of wasted time with offshored tech support who don’t speak English properly
• Hours and hours of time logging tickets to find that no one reads them
• Doing the same troubleshooting over and over again
• Make your traffic go down because your site is constantly slow or offline
• Reduce your motivation to blog … which already takes a hit when you’re not travelling
• Make you hate life when you can’t explain to your friends or family why you’re spending hours fixing something that doesn’t make you money
• Make you hate life even more, when you realize that no one outside the tech world understands your pain and thinks it’s nothing to migrate servers, databases and code customizations.

So here’s my rant today … just for the keywords so it’s indexed even better.

Bluehost.com is a bad web host, Bluehost.com is poor, Bluehost.com is a terrible web hosting provider, Bad Bluehost Experience, Bad Bluehost Customer Service, Bluehost sucks

After 6 years with Bluehost.com (I won’t even link to them), I finally bit the bullet this week and switched providers. It took me 4 months of back and forth problems, terrible tech support and them constantly telling me that my site wasn’t optimized, my code was wrong or I had a bunch of plug-ins that cause slowness. The email below was the one that broke me … especially when I had spent hours with techs talking about the exact same issues … and this jackass sends me a canned response.

> Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2014 17:28:10 -0600
> Subject: Re: [#DEF-56601-183] Contact me: Slow Site
> From: support@bluehost.com
> To: naparima@hotmail.com
>
> Hello,
>
> Thank you for contacting us! I am curious, what sort of performance problems are you having? I don’t see any performance notes from our administrators, so I think the server has been ok lately.
>
> Typically in this sort of circumstance, there is something on the site that is slowing it down. Have you tried optimizing?
>
> The typical reasons for a website to go slow is for 2 reasons; either the page size is large and causing a slowdown because of the amount of data to transfer (such as images), or their is a plugin/script that takes long to load-or connects to an external site-or causing slow database queries.
>
> For testing the page size, you can run a scan on your website from gtmetrix.com. This will show you the Total page size. If this is larger than a couple megabytes, then you might consider shrinking the images on the site, or reducing the amount of data on the home page.
>
> I recommend to go through the WordPress site and it’s plugins and disable them one by one to see if one of them is causing a slowdown. Or test your theme by temporarily switching it. Make sure that WordPress and the themes and plugins are all up to date.
>
> If that doesn’t help, then there are some things you can do to optimize the site. Take a look at these links:
> – Try to repair/optimize database – https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/496
> – Try Fast CGI version of PHP – https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/447
> – Look into our WordPress Optimizing page – https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/2312
> – Try using CloudFlare – https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/cloudflare
>
> Here are some links to Caching plugins as well:
> – http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/
> – http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
>
> I recommend the Caching plugin and the PHP version change first.
>
> I hope this helps, and let us know if you have additional questions or concerns.
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> Jonathon
> Level III Tech Support Engineer
> BlueHost.com
> 888.401.4678

Running a webhosting business is a thankless business, since there is no praise for being excellent … techs just expect their infrastructure to work. Fortunately, I’ve been employed at a web hosting company both on the sales and technical end and obviously I have a lot of background working with production systems that must be available online 24/7 . In my line of work, it’s tough enough managing teams of techs to keep the shop up and running when have complete control over your environment.

Trying to manage hosted environments, with tons of different customer needs in the same architecture is asking for pain. This is also why I don’t own a hosting company … especially when you’re competing in a highly price sensitive market. Here’s the worse part, I don’t run 500 sites with 1,000’s of hit daily … I run one main blog with some satellite blogs that generates about 400-500 hits a day. This is kids stuff, yet Bluehost consistently failed in the last year.

Before someone rams on about the people and good business at Bluehost, I’ll stop you now …

Bluehost is terrible web hosting provider!!!

The support techs and developers who have no control over business decisions are trying their best, but putting an effort that I’ve been at for the last 11 years at risk will gain you no favours with me. Bluehost’s service, performance, and uptime have tanked over the last year. In ranting this morning, I also wanted to ensure that I wasn’t crazy or some insane outlier … true to form, I’m not … over at WPMU DEV, they have a much more comprehensive review. If you’re a non techie travel blogger but want some deep dish hosting truth, then these are all the reviews you need to read.

• Which WordPress Web Host?
• Page.ly Review: Blazingly Fast Managed WordPress Hosting
• Bluehost Review: Cheap and Unreliable Shared Hosting
• Go Daddy Review: Solid Web Hosting With a Side of Cheese
• DreamHost Review: Speedy and Friendly Web Hosting
• WP Engine Review: Super Duper Fast and Secure Managed WordPress Web Hosting
• Web Hosting Review: So Just Who is the Best?

Fine, I’m tired of ranting … but as usual, you should know I’m not endorsing any host … even the new company I’m with now. Companies don’t care about loyalty or whether you consistently paid your bills for crappy service, we’re all just numbers to these guys, so never be afraid to push back when you get stiffed … whether from a crappy wedding planner in Guatemala or a giant web hosting company in Utah.

All we have now is the ability to voice our outrage and let free market economics take over, if possible.