I spent yesterday evening putting the final touches on my server transition. The DNS update should be making its way through the ever clogging interweb tubes as you read this. Hopefully by Monday it’ll have made its way to the far corners of the interweb.
I do want to thank everyone that offered services and advice. There were a number of people that stepped up and offered discounted or even free hosting for this blog, and I really do appreciate those offers. In the end the server ended up on SliceHost running a xen Ubuntu 7.10 image. (I actually bought the SliceHost image about a month ago and, due to the holidays, had been unable to get everything migrated.) I’m glad to hear the good remarks in SliceHost’s favor. I hope I am as satisfied as the rest of you.
New Server Stats:
Information from /proc/cpuinfo shows four listings for “Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2212 HE”, which I’m sure is shared with a number of other “slices”. I have 256M RAM dedicated to my “slice” and it is running Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy” Server. To help maintain a healthy speed I’m running the latest WP-Super-Cache plugin for WordPress and memcached underneath. I hope this new setup can withstand Digg and its minions.
Thoughts About the Old Host:
Having been with BlueHost for about nine-months I think I learned a few things about bulk-hosting companies and more specifically about my needs as a webmaster. For your everyday site I’m sure BlueHost is more than adequate. I have nearly a dozen other sites and blogs that I maintain, all (previously) hosted there, which have seen minimal issues. This site however is a different story. As the number of active Ubuntu users continues to rise the load on this site gets heavier and heavier. In its earlier days this site was not a threat to any host, but as it has matured I’m sure there are many hosts that would tremble at the thought.
I’m sad to say that I’m really disappointed in the way that BlueHost handled the load issues. It isn’t an uncommon practice for hosting providers to temporarily suspend a site with a high load, but I think it is a bad practice. I think a better solution would be to contact the site owner and notify them of the server load. Offer to keep the site online and available (when it really is needed most!), perhaps for a small additional fee worked into the contract. When a hosting provider takes down a site under a heavy load all they are doing is making both parties look incompetent. If BlueHost had gone the extra mile with my server load vs suspending the site and making it unavailable I would be singing a different tune now altogether. Praises vs grief.
It’s water under the bridge now and we’ve moved on. Here is to 2008 and (hopefully) a very accessible, very active Ubuntu Tutorials blog!
“perhaps for a small additional fee worked into the contract.” – I tremble at the thought and think you would be *very* angry and complaining at the top of your lungs if the company brought in these extra charges on you.
You agreed to them shutting down your website, “in Bluehost.com’s sole and absolute discretion” when you agreed to their TOS: https://www.bluehost.com/terms_of_service.html if you were affecting other customers.
I’m sure you’ll be pleased with Slicehost, I encountered a similar situation and got booted. Haven’t looked back since.
My 2 cents on Bluehost and their TOS.