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Ask HN: Bluehost went down for me for half a day -- is that normal?

5 points by uberc ↗ HN
I have a simple WordPress site hosted on Bluehost. It was unresponsive on Monday morning, and it took Bluehost half a day to fix it.

While the site was down, Bluehost was unable to give an ETA on when the problem would be fixed. Bluehost support did tell me that the problem was another customer hitting the SQL server too hard, causing the entire server to be slow. They also implied that this kind of problem was to be expected given I'm on shared hosting and paying so little (less than $10/month).

This is the first time in around 6 months that I've had any problem with Bluehost.

My question is: is this kind of half-day outage, with no ETA for resolution given, indeed normal for low cost shared hosting providers like Bluehost? If not, any suggestions for alternative providers?

11 comments

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bmelton
I can't speak for BlueHost, but bad neighbors are hard to deal with in pure 'shared hosting' environments, and are regrettably unpredictable, and hence harder to mitigate against.

I've had similar problems in the past with Dreamhost and its ilk.

For a little more money, you can switch out to Linode which is at least VM-based instead of fully-shared platform, but the tradeoff is that it is more expensive, and you also have to administer your own services. It's also possible that you lose some of the burstability of a shared hosting platform as the caps are hard caps.

ohashi
BlueHost doesn't rate all that badly on the shared hosting chart (I am tracking this data - they are 6 out of 19 among some of largest providers). That sort of behavior sounds like crap, but it happens to most of them because of the nature of shared hosting. I am not sure that half a day to get a SQL load under control is normal though. I've had hosts just suspend my account right away when I go over or they kill the offending script.
uberc
That's what I figured they should do -- just kill the offending script automatically. They confirmed to me after several hours of outage that they had their best admin working on it. Not sure what there would be to work on that would take that long.

The shared hosting chart you mention sounds great! Is that available somewhere?

ohashi
It's the startup I am working on - it's not launched yet but I can send you a link to take a sneak peek. What's the best way to reach you?
steventruong
This can happen with any shared hosting environment. Bluehost is no exception.
sgricci
Had similar experiences with DreamHost, the server load avg was 13!!! nearly all the time. For 20$/mo, I got a linode and have never looked back.