The VPS server hosted by Bluehost which my employer uses for online marketing purposes has been down for 24 hours now. My monitoring service notified me of the outage at 12:13 yesterday afternoon and the server has not been responsive since. Bluehost claim that the fault lies with an unknown bug in the firmware of their vendor’s routers; but excuse me if I don’t believe this explanation; there’s been numerous outages in the past 12 months at their datacenter in Provo, UT!
I don’t really want to move host because of the amount of work involved in transferring all the sites, Email addresses and databases. But that said if the site is down, then it’s useless and we are giving $60 each month to Bluehost for no reason. Plus there is no SLA (service level agreement) with Bluehost so we don’t get compensated for the lost business because of this downtime.
Even after 24 hours, Bluehost are still not willing to give an ETA for restoration of services; for me this is the final straw; we need to have a reliable service and Bluehost are far from reliable with major outages on August 2, 2013 and December 31, 2013 in addition to this current massive outage. I moved the hosting for my personal web projects six weeks ago because of the consistent unavailability of my websites; personally I’d stay clear of any Endurance International Group hosts!
My personal projects were on a shared hosting platform so I didn’t expect the same level of uptime as VPS/Dedicated Servers, but it seems that regardless of your hosting tier, the same poor uptime applies. The other reason I ditched Bluehost for my personal websites is because of the price hike, to renew for another two years would have cost me double what I paid for the previous two years!
Jason that’s quite unfortunate and I can imagine the anxiety in such cases. For me I never had any such issues with Bluehost (I’m on shared hosting).. I would suggest you to check out Linode for VPS. I have used them in the past and they are value for money.
Thanks for the advice; but I have decided to go with KnownHost; they offer everything I need plus a SLA. If you have experienced no downtime on Bluehost, I guess you either didn’t check your website during the outages or have been incredibly lucky. My shared hosting with Bluehost was majorly affected in both the Aug 2, and NYE outages.