Dreamhost , I miss you : Is bluehost too much overrated??? A Comparative Study

Update: Seems like things are pretty stable now. Check out the shared report link from pingdom below.

CLICK HERE TO SIGNUP FOR BLUEHOST.COM NOW.

January month will remind me of bad hosting stuff. I think I am in a need to move again. Here is comparative study between bluehost vs Dreamhost as per my experience :

Before I begin , have a look at the screen shots below (january month Statistics), which will give you a brief idea of what the review is gonna be about.

So, what do you feel ??

Yeah so the screenshots above must have given you an idea , that this is not gonna be about praising bluehost ( title must have also gave you the same idea. Isnt it ?? ). The only good thing was that, the response time skyscrapers came down drastically after moving to bluehost after January 18th.

Problems with bluehost

1. No server status page : When I was with Dreamhost, the moment my site used to go down, first thing I will do is to go to dreamhost status page, which will give me an idea that its a general problem or, only problem related to my webserver.
2. Waste your time with Highly overrated 24X7 Chat : May I ask you what you will look for when you are given an option for live chat support. For those who think they it will be the same like chatting as you chat in you IMs, need to give a second thought. It will take nearly 5 to 10 minutes before the support guy come online. Even when he is chatting with you, it will take nearly 1 to 2 minute for him to reply and I seriously doubt they are too technically sound. A normal chat which should not take more than 10 minutes will get elongated to nearly 30 minutes, and your problem unresolved.

   Dreamhost on the other hand had great email support and it never more than 20 minutes for them to reply to my mail. Here i have to keep waiting for the guy to come online. You may ask, why wait, raise a ticket, then here is the answer, they dont have a “Website Unavailable” category while opening a ticket at help center. Check out yourself (Quite possible they might add it now).

3. Weird CPU exceeded error : Their hosting suffer with weird CPU limit exceeding errors which will left your site down for nearly 5 to 10 minutes. Check out here to know more. I never had such issue with dreamhost.

4. Unlimited domain hosting ( on your server ) : You must have read the highly publicized feature as unlimited domain hosting. How it can affect you?? When I registered with bluehost, there were around 79 sites hosted along with me and after 3 days when my site went down, I checked again and the count increased to 200+ . First time when my site went down for nearly 1 hour, tech support told me that, some other site hosted on my server ,executed some script which made the server go down. He just gave the reply that they are currently working on it. What the heck, still my site is goin down nearly 5 to 10 minutes per day.

So what Bluehost can actually offer ??

…………… A good response time , but my question is will you compromise that on uptime ???

Only people from US need traffic ??

The most lucrative offer, $50 free for yahoo and $50 free for google adwords. This was one factor which drove me towards bluehost. I wish I had known earlier that the offer is only for US guys.

Pingdom report

I decided to make my webserver status public. You can check the pingdom stats for the month of january’2008 here. Arnt the stats pathetic ??

Suggest me a Host

Bluehost has money return policy for 30 days. I think, I will try out for one more week and if things didnt change, I might move again. Please help me by suggesting a good host.

How to decide when you select a host

If you have selected a webhost, and are planning to move. Here is an article by arpit which can help you in decide on a good host. This time I will surely follow these steps before moving.

Tell me if this is possible

I was thinking to dry run a hosting server before actually moving my website. I was thinking of the possibility of the option below, and need your suggestion to know whether its possible ???

Buy a .info domain which cost around 1 to 2 $ per year. You use this domain to host site temporary on the host. Create a replica on this host as your curent website. Use a 301 redirect from your current domain to this .info domain. This way you can test this server without actually affecting your move. This could be a test option which could last for 1 to 4 days.

Disclaimer : The opinion mentioned here are based on my personal experience, which may differ user to user

Update: This have settled ,and please check the my pingdom report.

CLICK HERE TO SIGNUP FOR BLUEHOST.COM NOW.