Why I Should Have Switched to Bluehost Years Ago

by jamesgeorge | May 17, 2013 | Articles, Blogging, Web Design | 5 comments

Precursor to Bluehost (Godaddy)

I usually don’t like to talk about my own personal difficulties, but I am writing this with the hope that if someone else is struggling with their hosting company then you might feel better about Switching to Bluehost after reading this. If your site goes down inexplicably, and your hosting company’s support isn’t any help, then you know where I am coming from. I started Creative Beacon in 2010, not knowing what I was doing with blogging, but the main goal was to build a tutorial & design blog that would help other designers and possibly provide additional income at the same time. I did my best for a year or so, learned a lot as I went, but eventually had to let the site go dormant for a while, because my local business was flourishing. I decided to relaunch the Creative Beacon in July of 2012, and its growth have been steady.

Where the Problem Arose

My site started to grow in popularity, so I added a monitoring service for free, called Free Web Monitoring Report, to notify me via email if my site went down. I received messages from visitors ever so often, telling me that my site link didn’t work, but when I started monitoring my site, i received an error report on a bi-daily basis. When you have a design blog that talks about great web design, and gives you tips for building great sites, it might be a good idea for your site to work. Who knows how many visitors have come to my site and never came back, because the screen was blank, or there was a server error.

Problems Began to Increase in Frequency

Every other day I was having to call Godaddy, because of different errors (none on my part) and every time I got a different answer. There were also times where I got a made up answer and had caught them in either a lie, or something that boldly conflicted with what a customer service rep had told me a day or two before. All I got were excuses and the “I understand, but can’t do anything about it” conversation.

The Last Straw

So yesterday, most of you may know that my site was down from about 1PM EST to roughly 2AM this morning. What happened was that my site kept getting the same old “The Server Reset the Connection” error message, but it didn’t go away. After an hour and a half of being on the phone with support, I was told that my site may be down up to 24 hours while they were resolving the issue. The issue was that their server was having trouble connecting with the database, and that they were going to fix it. My argument was that they hadn’t fixed it the last dozen times that it was down, why would this time be any different? So after an hour and a half wasted and my site still wasn’t back up, I’d had enough.

The Solution

The webhosting company by the name of Bluehost was my final choice. I have built and worked on dozens of sites for my clients that were hosted by Bluehost. Most of them were WordPress sites, and I have never seen any of them go down…ever. I went online, signed up with Bluehost, and started pointing my names servers there. My initial worry about switching my hosting was securely and easily moving Creative Beacon, all of my posts, my site files, and the database itself over without any problems or without losing everything. I have put a lot of work into this site, and I didn’t want it all to go to waste.

I called Bluehost’s customer service, and they were friendly and very knowledgeable about WordPress, and how to move my site over the right way. In seven years of being a professional website designer, I have never had to migrate a site before. I have always built it from scratch or edited an existing one, not having to deal with hosting issues. I was a little nervous moving my site from Godaddy to Bluehost. I was sent a step by step article on what needed to be done, and I was walked through verbally by Bluehost’s technical support so that I was confident that everything would go smoothly. Every hosting company’s back end admin is a little different, so I needed a little guidance as to where everything was. After all, time was a factor in my situation.

One issue arose, which was that my SQL database was too big to upload via their built in panel, so I was told to transfer it via ftp to my hosting and to submit a support ticket to get it installed by a Bluehost rep. I uploaded the database file and submitted my ticket, but I wanted to expedite the process, because I was down long enough already yesterday. I called Bluehost’s technical support again, and they gladly uploaded the file while I was on the phone, and they stayed with me to make sure that everything worked properly and that my site was up.