After 2 years, SO LONG HOSTMONSTER
I feel after I have been a customer for 2 years of both Bluehost and Hostmonster, I am entitled to my opinion and can offer a fair review.

In December 2006 I decided it was time to cut costs and pull my co-located server from a local provider and find a better way. My partner at the time was convinced that Bluehost would fill our needs to run our e-commerce site as he had been with them on a private account for a couple of years.

So after some debate I decided to make the switch. At the beginning of the process I signed for one account at BlueHost and one account at Hostmonster as they had different plans. I wound up getting 3 fund holds put on my credit card when I only authorized 2 accounts. After dealing with an accounting department that basically didn’t care to release the hold on my funds, Matt Heaton (owner) got involved and proceeded to roast me.

I was an idiot, I wasted his time, had no idea what I was talking about. Made no effort to correct things and in no certain terms said I should just go find a new hosting company because I was obviously inexperienced and not intelligent enough to host my own sites. (I had previously run a co-located FreeBSD box for 4 years)

I let it all go, waited the ten days for the hold to be released and went about my business. To be truthful, the first year with them wasn’t so bad. The servers were responsive and things seemed to be fine. About 8 months ago I started to notice performance problems every so often. In November, it got bad enough that I finally called in to Tech Support. I was told I would have to keep calling back and complaining about it enough to get a supervisor who was the only one that could decide to migrate my account to a new box.

I waited for awhile and in January I started getting complaints from several of my clients about their sites being inaccessible off and on thru the day.

I decided then to just sign up for a new account and start migrating sites to a new box. Well, that was ok until I started noticing the same thing happening on the new box.

Essentially what was occurring on both server boxes was the server status would report the box “under a heavy load” during which time you could not access your sites and sometimes not even the control panel.

Over the period of 4 days, I had friends and volunteers hitting my accounts, 24 hours, every 15 minutes on both boxes. It came down to the point that on one box, about every 2-3 hours, sites would go down for around 2-3 minutes while “the problem is being investigated”. On the other box it was happening every 3-4 hours.

Soooo.. all I can say is, asta la vista. I’m just tired of dealing with the poor performance. The sites that are hosted on their boxes are lightweight dynamic sites with small traffic as we deal only with small business. There is/was nothing eccentric begin run.

Over the 2 years support was ok although I didn’t need to utilize their support much. Maybe 4-5 times.

The only reason I have not pushed the issue further with this company is because of my first experience with Matt Heaton. I do not want to risk dealing with that clown again. I do not need to be told this is somehow my fault when I already know it is not.

It’s just easier to leave and move on elsewhere.

Again, I wanted to provide a fair review and there it is.

–grinch

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