I’m on Bluehost after experiencing a lot of downtime with Midphase.
Sadly, despite the excellent telephone customer service (they appear to know what they’re talking about), the server is not that great. All my sites are experiencing frequent slowdown. (Can you call slowdown frequent?)
I’m also having problems with memset, which is supposedly PC Pro’s readers’ choice. They are pretty reliable, but not particularly helpful (they can’t be, they’re not a fully managed service) and recently I’ve experienced really slow page loading.
You tell them about the 30KB/s download speed you’re getting trying to recover 5GB backups and they tell you to buy more bandwidth! You tell them you’re on unmetered 5Mbps and they tell you that it’s contended 40:1! You ask them if they are fully contended all the time and they say “we don’t have those figures, buy some more bandwidth!”
You tell them that their support is not great and they ask you to buy more support. You buy a support package and they can’t cover everything, so you pay extra for that too.
I can forgive all of the above (they’re a British company, they’re bound to be worse than an American company when it comes to the Internet) except the bandwidth throttling. Sometimes, pages with barely 100K on them were taking 7 seconds to load. Unacceptable.
Which brings me back to Bluehost. Can I really expect anything much at all from a provider I’m only paying £4 per month to? For that £4, I get unlimited hosts, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage and more SQL databases than I could use in a lifetime.
Won’t someone just take a bit more of my money and give me some peace of mind?
