Bluehost $2.95 Sale 8/9/16

[Choices]

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[Daley]

Bluehost is a pretty lousy shared hosting provider, and they're overpriced for what they're offering, to boot.

HawkHost is always that price for their starting package for the same two year contract, their support is far better, and their servers aren't grievously overloaded. Also, people who do this sort of thing for a living highly recommend against registering domains with the company that handles your rackspace, too much can go wrong if you get tangled in some idiotic DMCA spat.

HawkHost is good enough that I'm more than willing to recommend them even without their far more modest than Bluehost's $65 per bounty referral link, and I use them myself. It's who I switched to after A Small Orange got bought out by EIG and their service started sliding downhill.

Self edit 08/15: It looks like HawkHost may be on the slide itself, recently. I've removed the actual link. I'm not having problems with them currently, but if there's mounting problems, I'm not comfortable pointing others to them. However, there's still plenty of solid providers over on DigitalFAQ.

[Choices]

Bluehost is a pretty lousy shared hosting provider, and they're overpriced for what they're offering, to boot.

HawkHost is always that price for their starting package for the same two year contract, their support is far better, and their servers aren't grievously overloaded. Also, people who do this sort of thing for a living highly recommend against registering domains with the company that handles your rackspace, too much can go wrong if you get tangled in some idiotic DMCA spat.

They're good enough that I'm more than willing to recommend them even without their far more modest than Bluehost's $65 per bounty referral link, and I use them myself. It's who I switched to after A Small Orange got bought out by EIG and their service started sliding downhill.

This is good to know. I use Bluehost and haven't had any problems. Not sure about the bounty, just trying to be helpful since I've heard that GoDaddy is pretty awful.

[Daley]

This is good to know. I use Bluehost and haven't had any problems. Not sure about the bounty, just trying to be helpful since I've heard that GoDaddy is pretty awful.

Just a precursory look at your site with Pingdom Speed Test shows some speed issues, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that it's your SQL server. If you knew what you were looking for, you'd probably find a lot of issues with your database being overloaded and running slow under any load (here's my last experience dealing with Bluehost). You probably don't notice outside of slower load times on occasion because you don't know entirely what to look for.

Do yourself and others a favor though, don't recommend Bluehost. They're right up there with GoDaddy.

[Choices]

Thanks! I'll remove the post after your reply to this: how much of a pain is it to switch?

[Daley]

Thanks, guys. I'll remove the post after your reply to this: how much of a pain is it to switch, and do you also recommend HawkHost IP Daley?

No guys plural, just Daley. :) So yes, I both use and recommend HawkHost coupled with Cloudflare on the shared hosting end, it's what the server lights are running on over at Technical Meshugana currently. Don't misunderstand me, shared hosting stinks for the most part anymore under any serious loads with any rackspace provider, but some hosts are better than others.

CPanel migrations are fairly easy to do going from provider to provider, and HawkHost offers free migration assistance anyway.

The biggest headache will be updating/changing DNS records, which is a lot easier done when migrating hosts if your domain and/or DNS management is independent of your rackspace provider.... however, it is really easy to screw up DNS records and break your site if you aren't careful. As a transition point if you're thinking of migrating away from Bluehost and not transferring your domain to HawkHost/whoever, use Namecheap's FreeDNS as a waypoint for your domain's DNS management before migrating rackspace providers to minimise/eliminate downtime during migration. Namecheap's also a good independent registrar, as is Gandi.net.

Regarding hosts specifically, there's a few decent ones. DigitalFAQ has a list they keep fairly current that's done in the same spirit as my Communications Superguide.

Please don't delete the thread, though, maybe just excise the referral link in the original post? The full conversation might be useful for others who want to start a blog frugally without falling into the Bluehost trap.

Daley, I've been using HawkHost's semi-dedicated hosting for about a year now and overall it seems pretty good, but I keep hitting I/O limits. Well, at least they say I am.  Right now it shows:

Your site might hit resource limits soon
You had 996 I/O operations per second out of 1024 max I/O operations per second allowed

[snip]

Have you run into any similar issues with them?

Can't say as I have, personally. It might be a misbehaving plugin you're using on your CMS (Wordpress), you could be getting (potentially accidentally) hammered by someone/thing sporadically. If you haven't already, try enabling Cloudflare to see if it takes any of the pressure off and research the plugins you're using to see if any of them have a reputation of being poorly coded.

[Jack]

If your site doesn't consume many resources (bandwidth/storage/cpu), the cheapest provider by far is nearlyfreespeech.net because their billing is entirely usage-based. I have a static site that doesn't see much traffic (it hosts my wife's art portfolio, which is mainly of interest to people interviewing her for jobs) and it's been costing me roughly $0.07 per month.

I have no experience with this pricing model for a site that's actually popular, so YMMV.

[Daley]

Jack, I use NFSN on some smaller static content sites myself, and recommend it accordingly. However, between their pricing for SQL and PHP access combined with their complete lack of technical support for setup and configuration of those services to do things like WP installs (you really need to know what you're doing, and they will boot you if you seriously break something), in addition to the default size of your average WP install, it gets expensive quick.

tl;dr: NFSN is great for small static page sites, but not much else for the average novice user.

[HipGnosis]

If your site doesn't consume many resources (bandwidth/storage/cpu), the cheapest provider by far is nearlyfreespeech.net because their billing is entirely usage-based. I have a static site that doesn't see much traffic (it hosts my wife's art portfolio, which is mainly of interest to people interviewing her for jobs) and it's been costing me roughly $0.07 per month.

I have no experience with this pricing model for a site that's actually popular, so YMMV.

Good to know. THANKS!

[Jack]

things like WP installs (you really need to know what you're doing, and they will boot you if you seriously break something), in addition to the default size of your average WP install, it gets expensive quick.

Is Wordpress really that much better than some simple HTML anyway? If I cared to blog I'd be far more comfortable writing up a basic template file and just copying it and hand-editing it to create new entries.

[Daley]

things like WP installs (you really need to know what you're doing, and they will boot you if you seriously break something), in addition to the default size of your average WP install, it gets expensive quick.

Is Wordpress really that much better than some simple HTML anyway? If I cared to blog I'd be far more comfortable writing up a basic template file and just copying it and hand-editing it to create new entries.

Not particularly (at least for a more static content site), but most people either don't know how in the first place, or are lazy. Either way, if one falls into one of those two camps, NFSN isn't for them.

[Jack]

Is Wordpress really that much better than some simple HTML anyway? If I cared to blog I'd be far more comfortable writing up a basic template file and just copying it and hand-editing it to create new entries.

Not particularly (at least for a more static content site), but most people either don't know how in the first place, or are lazy.

See, that's what I don't get: I'm totally lazy, but I think figuring out how to use a content-management system would be a huge pain in the ass compared to learning HTML+CSS.

[Daley]

Not particularly (at least for a more static content site), but most people either don't know how in the first place, or are lazy.

See, that's what I don't get: I'm totally lazy, but I think figuring out how to use a content-management system would be a huge pain in the ass compared to learning HTML+CSS.

See, that's the thing. Between modern cPanel/Softaculous back-ends for hosting companies and the ease of Wordpress these days making blog posting no more complex than using webmail... basically, the end user doesn't need to know crap about what they're actually doing. It's so easy now that creating your own domain and website can become an impulse buy like a gossip rag and candy bar at the grocery checkout.

On one hand, it simplifies things and helps give voice to people who don't have the technical chops to otherwise do something like this. On the other hand, it simplifies things and helps give voice to people who don't have the technical chops to otherwise do something like this.

Each approach has its usage and place in actual development... but most people aren't wired like us.

[Dancin'Dog]

I've been happy with weebly.com   It's free & is very simple to use.  I made my site about 10 years ago & it's been good.

[tj]

Bluehost is a pretty lousy shared hosting provider, and they're overpriced for what they're offering, to boot.

HawkHost is always that price for their starting package for the same two year contract, their support is far better, and their servers aren't grievously overloaded. Also, people who do this sort of thing for a living highly recommend against registering domains with the company that handles your rackspace, too much can go wrong if you get tangled in some idiotic DMCA spat.

HawkHost is good enough that I'm more than willing to recommend them even without their far more modest than Bluehost's $65 per bounty referral link, and I use them myself. It's who I switched to after A Small Orange got bought out by EIG and their service started sliding downhill.

HawkHost not sounding so great according to this:

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/web-hosting/7465-frog-host-redirects.html#post45062

[Daley]

HawkHost not sounding so great according to this:

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/web-hosting/7465-frog-host-redirects.html#post45062

That's unfortunate. *sigh*

Getting harder and harder to find a good host anymore, short of paying extra for a VPS host.

For now though, HawkHost is still treating me reasonably well, but given the recently raised concerns, probably not a host I want to point others towards currently. It does illustrate how valuable DigitalFAQ's forums are on searching for a good host, however.

[tj]

My research at DigitalFAQ suggested SiteGround seemed reputable enough. Until September 11, SiteGround is giving away up to six months of free hosting for their shared hosting plans (which their marketing materials suggest for up to 100k visits per month), matching the remaining term that you have prepaid with your current hosting provider (if you opened it before 9/1). Pretty sure they will migrate it for free as well.

My affiliate link is below if anyone cares to use it.

https://www.siteground.com/index.htm?afcode=b9e64ef3910567d9423fc4f8ff531e16


I've read so many bluehost horror stories if you generate big traffic. I'd get out if you can.