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Massively disappointed with Bluehost’s VPS servers!

I have been a Bluehost customer for coming up to two years using their $6.95 shared hosting package for my personal websites I and really don’t have any complaints apart from the downtime experienced last month due to a faulty switch, other than that there has been minimal downtime.

When I started my new job, I recommended Bluehost to the vice president of the company and he told me to go ahead and set up new website’s to Internet Market their product. Now I am really regretting that decision, in the first few days, I experienced over six hours downtime, no response at all from the server, so I call Bluehost and they tell me that the logs don’t show anything, so I must have been hitting my resource limit and the server stopped accepting connections to recover.

I shouldn’t be hitting my resource limit on the VPS, I am supposed to have a dual core processor, 4GB RAM, 60GB storage and 2TB of bandwidth each month, see Enhanced package from this link.

Ultimately I don’t know how long it’s down each day, I don’t sit there constantly checking the website all day long. But every day I have experienced some total (HTTP/FTP/Mail) downtime while working on the website, I can’t access the server via ping, FTP or HTTP. Usually it comes back up within five minutes, but how much other downtime has there been? Which is why I have started monitoring using Uptime Robot and overnight, the server experienced almost 15 minutes downtime.

The downtime is having a profoundly negative effect on my SEO/Marketing strategy for the company’s products and services, on several occasions now, Google webmaster tools has reported a failure when attempting to retrieve pages in my sitemap. And we don’t know how much business we have lost because the website was down when potential customers clicked a link on the web.

The ridiculous thing is that I also have a personal account with Bluehost that costs me $6.95 a month which is more reliable with over 400 domains sharing that server/IP address. The $60 per month VPS package has a dedicated IP and is very quick when online, but the downtime is damaging the rank of the websites/products I am trying to push. It’s hard to internet market a product or service when the website is down, at this point I think I could host the site at home more reliably.

As I write this; I have Bluehost techs looking into the connectivity issues with the VPS after I expressed my frustration with Bluehost via Twitter, let’s see if they can find the issue, it’s not acceptable to have 15+ minutes downtime each day, especially when paying a premium for a VPS!

Update [Sep, 20 2013, 12:06]: I actually got a reasonable answer to my query about the server uptime issues from Bluehost via Twitter. They checked the system and found that someone was trying to brute-force my server password, which they will find hard, it’s very long and a mixture of symbols, numbers and upper/lower case letters. The techs also noticed multiple anonymous uploads to my server, which are enabled by default, let’s see if these config changes help.

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