BlueHost Vs GoDaddy

[saulss]

Wich one is better? does anyone use either one and why? i would like some feedback, im about to make my .com site, im looking for the best offer (aparentky blue host gives you more hosting space and cgi, php and some other things).
thanx
BlueHost (http://www.bluehost.com/) |GoDaddy (https://www.godaddy.com/)

[crc5779]

I work for a company that has acquired several companies in recent years. One of the companies we bought had registered their domain name with godaddy.com. Part of the acquisition was buying out one of the partners. The partner who was bought out (under bad terms) was the person who the domain name was registered to. When he finally read his credit card bill (MONTHS later) and saw that he was being charged for the domain name, and hosting, he put a stop order on payment from his card. Godaddy.com, without ANY correspondence, shutdown the account.
We tried to change the registrar name, and billing information for 6 months. It was a weekly routine, that typically involved us faxing a copy of a drivers license, e-mailing a copy of that driver's license, and snail mailing a copy of that drivers license, along with a couple pages of paperwork. EVERY TIME customer support would decline our photo ID as being "Too dark to read". The only person we could ever get a hold of was a level 1 support tech, who had ZERO control over what we needed taken care of. Furthermore, the tech admitted that there was NO way to get ahold of those in charge, and he recieved those kinds of complaints often. After mending bridges with the ousted former partner of the company, we managed to get him to change the registered name of the domain, along with the account information. This was a long process.
In short: godaddy.com will work fine if you never need service. But in this field, service is inevitable, and when you need them, godaddy.com will not be there for you.

[finqoo]

I will suggest joker. I am using joker in 4years to my different domains.
Never got a sigle problem. Never!

[TheGoblet]

I have been using BlueHost.com in a few days and it SUX. End of story.

- Exceded processor quota
- Verry unreliable (your domain don't load some times)
- Slow (takes ~10 seconds to save a 30kB trough FTP with 3mbit)

BlueHost is writing reviews about themself in Ghost pages and cloacked domains.

You are warned.

[Bink]

I'm not shocked by what Goble said.

A few minutes ago I spoke to Bluehost.com's Admin Rick. (They are closed on Sundays.) I can't tell you what I had to go through, how ignorant I had to act and how threatening I had to become just to have the (as they deem) "privledge" of having someone "technical" speak to me. The reason for my ranting was that my e-commerce site went down. This site was up and running SMOOTHLY until today then ALL OF A SUDDEN without fingers touching it, it goes down.

They claim it is not a server issue (of course). Then when Rick gets on the phone he says I'm taking time away from his family and children. I responded, "I pay for emergency service. This is an e-commerce site, not a blog. My site being down is taking food away from my children." Then he hung up the phone. Before he came to the phone I asked the customer service representative to just have him restore their latest backup as he said (through her) that he could not find the problem.

Now as I type I'm holding for him to answer the phone again. This week my sites are going to be moved from bluehost.com and I'm going to share my experience on every site. I'm in complete shock now that he would say I'm taking time away from his family and children. He is an Admin for a web hosting provider. Did he expect 9-5 days? If it were not for the customers he would not be able to take care of the family that he so preciously wants to spend time with we need to share bad experiences so others don't get screwed.

[jobe]

Been using Bluehost for awhile now. Recently they have been inserting code into my pages. Haven't found out what it does yet, but it is a javascript code that loads A LOT of info.

I am redhot and want everyone to know what is going on. I have many sites on their servers, and it is not just one site. It is many different sites that have this javascript inserted in the index page.

I wouldn't recommend bluehost.com (bluehost).

[felgall]

I would definitely recommend BlueHost over GoDaddy.

BlueHost offer CPanel 11 while GoDaddy offer their own heavily customised version of Plesk that is far more restrictive.

Neither site add any additional code to your pages - if you are seeing that then either your firewall is inserting the code, you have a virus or spyware inserting the code or your site has been trashed by a third party having guessed your password.

GoDaddy will shut down a domain name at the first sign of someonne complaining about anything.

BlueHost provides such large disk space and bandwidth that they are effectively unlimited. Where they do limit things is in CPU usage. If you have a really badly written script that is exttremely inefficient they will throttle its execution before it impacts on the other sites sharing hosted on the same server. That is a good thing except for the person with the adly written script since it means that the effect that other people's sites can have on yours is limited. The other thing that BlueHost limit is the number of emails that can be sent through your hosting in a given period so as to prevent their servers being used to send spam. Also a good thing unless you have some reason for needing to send thousands of emails every hour.

BlueHost is definitely one of the better hosting providers although as with any hosting provider there is always a small fraction of .0001% of users who are not satisfied for some reason and very vocal about it. In many of these cases the sort of site they are running may not be suitable for shared hosting and should perhaps be running on its own separate server.

[braydond]

You sound like a bluehost employee. I've been using godaddy for years now. I agree that their techs don't know crap, but i haven't neede much support because everything runs as it should.

[felgall]

No just a satisfied BlueHost user. The couple of times I have had issues with my hosting the BlueHost techs have fixed it for me almost immediately.

I did some work for someone using GoDaddy once and had to patch my Paypal IPN script to get around proxy restrictions that their hosting provided. It took several weeks of testing to identify that the problem was the Godaddy configuration. Fortunately once I identified the problem a member of Paypal staff was able to provide the solution.

[elaurvick]

We were with Earthlink until they fell apart (started crashing several times a week), then tried GoDaddy . . . big mistake. I could never get a simple form to work, and their technical support is a joke.

We then went to a small, local host, Nikira.com. We've had very few problems, and their technical support is excellent. They furnished all the features we needed (at no extra charge), and they are more stable than the two big companies were.

[LeeU]

Been using Bluehost for awhile now. Recently they have been inserting code into my pages. Haven't found out what it does yet, but it is a javascript code that loads A LOT of info.
I use BlueHost and never had that happen. Did you contact the techs?

I agree with felgall. I have never had a problem with BlueHost. They are quick to answer questions and very helpful. I'm still waiting for GoDaddy to answer a question I asked two years ago.

[innominds]

I've been using HOSTMONSTER for a long time. I'm happy with their support. HOSTMONSTER and BLUEHOST are one and the same.

[benjee68]

Wow. What's up with the hate for Bluehost in here?

Bluehost has been hosting dozens of my sites for years and I've had very minimal issues with them.

Bluehost has been named top 3 in almost every Top 10 domain listings category for the past 3 years that I know of.

Here's my take on whose better. Just because you like apples better than oranges doesn't mean apples are better. I love oranges more than apples lol. corny but true!

Godaddy's support charges you for EVERY minute your on the phone. How's a large company like that charging you for tech support? Bluehost has 24/7 free tech support so you shouldn't be complaining :)

But i guess you can shoot all this out the door because there's an article that talks about keeping your domain WITH your registrar....read up! http://greatdomainstoday.com/having-your-domain-name-with-your-hosting-company-is-always-a-great-idea/

[LeeU]

Also note that what Bink said (re: not being open on Sunday) is a year and a half old. They now provide service (and good one at that) 24/7.

[benjee68]

I'm not shocked by what Goble said.

A few minutes ago I spoke to Bluehost.com's Admin Rick. (They are closed on Sundays.) I can't tell you what I had to go through, how ignorant I had to act and how threatening I had to become just to have the (as they deem) "privledge" of having someone "technical" speak to me. The reason for my ranting was that my e-commerce site went down. This site was up and running SMOOTHLY until today then ALL OF A SUDDEN without fingers touching it, it goes down.

They claim it is not a server issue (of course). Then when Rick gets on the phone he says I'm taking time away from his family and children. I responded, "I pay for emergency service. This is an e-commerce site, not a blog. My site being down is taking food away from my children." Then he hung up the phone. Before he came to the phone I asked the customer service representative to just have him restore their latest backup as he said (through her) that he could not find the problem.

Now as I type I'm holding for him to answer the phone again. This week my sites are going to be moved from bluehost.com and I'm going to share my experience on every site. I'm in complete shock now that he would say I'm taking time away from his family and children. He is an Admin for a web hosting provider. Did he expect 9-5 days? If it were not for the customers he would not be able to take care of the family that he so preciously wants to spend time with we need to share bad experiences so others don't get screwed.

Bink -
All I have to say is, you'll find something wrong with someone at any time. There is no perfect solution or company out there. They are open on Sunday's...I've experienced some bad things with network solutions and godaddy. Also, I love Bluehosts cPanel 10x's better than Godaddy's plesk

[felgall]

BlueHost are now using cPanel 11.

All big companies will have a percentage of people who are not happy with the service and are very vocal about it. They would make up about 0.0001% of BlueHost and GoDaddy users if that. With the huge number of people using both hosting providers this still means that there are lots of people complaining but they are such a small percentage of the total users that if they weren't so vocal about the problems that they are having (most of which are probably their own fault) you would never spot them in the crowd of satisfied users.

[benjee68]

BlueHost are now using cPanel 11.

All big companies will have a percentage of people who are not happy with the service and are very vocal about it. They would make up about 0.0001% of BlueHost and GoDaddy users if that. With the huge number of people using both hosting providers this still means that there are lots of people complaining but they are such a small percentage of the total users that if they weren't so vocal about the problems that they are having (most of which are probably their own fault) you would never spot them in the crowd of satisfied users.

very well said felgall :)

[mattE]

I would go with neither,
media temple has by far the BEST support I have ever received from a hosting company and have very reasonable prices.
I currently have around 40 domains hosted through them and with my base subscription still have another 160 to go
they were highly recommended to me, I can only pass on the favor

[braydond]

Most of the large companies treat you like nobodies...

[felgall]

I have had almost no problems whatever with Bluehost. Those few problems were quickly resolved when I contacted their support staff. I currently have two domains hosted in my account there with space for another 10,000 or so (probably take me a few centuries to set up all those sites and Bluehost will probably have quadrupled the space and bandwidth allocation by the end of the year so I will take even longer to fill the extra space - will never need the unlimited number of domains that they allow).

The one experience that I had with GoDaddy was in helping someone who had purchased a Paypal IPN script from me on their hosting. The script didn't want to work there and GoDaddy support wasn't interested. I finallg got a solution from a Paypal staff member who knew about the weird nonstandard proxy setup that GoDaddy use that makes them different from most other hosting and how to correct the script to handle both the World Wide Web and GoDaddy.

[braydond]

Alexander Karamushko, Sun Aug 12 11:00:04 2007
Ticket Status was changed from Open to Resolved

Hello
Thank you for the word to support.

I regret, but in current moment we cannot do anything with this, because our php running as module for Apache web server, and therefore php also running under apache user httpd, but he cannot write to your folders with permissions 755, therefore all folders in which php will write files or create folder should have 777 access permissions.

Should you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us anytime, we are available 24/7.
Kind regards,
Alexander Karamushko
Technical Support


___________________________________________________________

Stay away from IX web hosting. I'm doing a CMS site for a cutomer on there now and you have to set all permissions to 777. Insecure servers and bad support. It's only first level tech support on phone they do not have access to servers. You have to email a ticket and then you'll hear something back in 24 hrs. SUCKS!!!!

[inaga]

It depends.

GoDaddy is great for buying domain names alone, but BlueHost is great for hosting because its prices are so low.

I would reccomend BlueHost since I use it for a certain website I own and it works fine. Probably I'm not getting any errors because the site does not have many scripts and traffic, but I think I will return to BlueHost in the future.


______________
WebLOAD (http://www.webload.org) is an open source performance testing tool for internet applications.

[sitesbuysell]

I think Bluehost are ok for hosting but I haven't tried them for domains, for domains I prefer Godaddy or latley I use MyDomain.com & I have been getting 15% off their using coupon bargaincat.com with orders plus cheap .info domains. I have also found Moniker and Stargate are also good registers. There are also quite a few sites offering coupons for gadaddy to save on your ordersm at the moment you can get dot coms for around $7.

[crazypenguin]

Wow. What's up with the hate for Bluehost in here?

Bluehost has been hosting dozens of my sites for years and I've had very minimal issues with them.

Bluehost has been named top 3 in almost every Top 10 domain listings category for the past 3 years that I know of.


I would rank Bluehost in the top ten WORST hosting companies. My experience has been nothing but problems one way or another with Bluehost. My email was down 2/3 of the time on one of my accounts for almost a month. Read about it here
(http://www.bluehostforum.com/showthread.php?t=351) Even after they said it was fixed I still had problems receiving emails. Without the ability to send email notifications the website was worthless to me. Bluehost never tried to make any compensation to me for the down time problem. I finally ended up using a gmail account to get around my email notification problem for my forum.

On another Bluehost account I also had email problems and the website loaded very slowly. This may have been due to hard drive being nearly full. Look here (http://www.crazypenguin.us/images/bluehostdiskfull.png).
It is my opinion that Bluehost crams too many accounts on one server therefore overloading the resources on each server.

The bottom line from my experience with Bluehost it did not work for me. My advice would be to keep on looking and not go with Bluehost or Godaddy.

Read the forums at Bluehostforums.com, search the net, and read hosting reviews and I guarantee you - you will find that many people find Bluehost to be unacceptable. It is definitely is not 0.0001 % as Felgall would like you to believe. It is much, much higher.

BTW Felgall is a fanboy moderator at Bluehostforum.com

[felgall]

BlueHost are hosting over 600,000 domains. If more than 0.0001% of them were having problems then their forum would be swamped with complaints.

The only reason I ended up being a moderator on the BlueHost forum is that it is one of several different forums that I visit each day where I try to help people out with solving their computer problems and looking for ideas for pages to add to my web site. BlueHost were looking for extra moderators for the forum and since I am posting hopefully helpful answers on a regular basis they asked me if I would assist in moderating the forum as well.

Hosting providers such as BlueHost (and most others for that matter) have a particular target market in mind for the hosting that they provide. If the type of site you have fits their target market then you will seldom have problems with their service. If the type of site you have doesn't fit their target market then you may have problems. BlueHost give people the opportuniity to find out if your site fits their target market by offering to refund your money if you are not happy with their service (prorated after the first month). So if your site doesn't work on BlueHost then you can get all your money back and move elsewhere.

BlueHost hosting is primarily designed for static sites (regardless of visitor numbers) and dynamic sites with smallish numbers of visitors. You should be able to have millions of people visit static pages on BlueHost each day without problems. If you use caching properly on a dynamic site you should be able to have at least tens of thousands of visitors daily without problems. If you have really huge numbers of visitors or are using a dynamic script that is resource intensive with small numbers of visitors then BlueHost hosting is not designed to suit your type of site and you will have problems if you try to host your site there. Those types of sites need a different level of hosting to that which BlueHost (and similar providers such as GoDaddy) provide.

BlueHost hosting happens to suit the sites that I have hosted there (several thousand static pages, a couple of wordpress blogs with caching enabled and a membership site using code I wrote myself - and several thousand visitors a day). If I had a lot more people visiting the membership site then I would need to look into either implementing caching into that site so as to reduce the amount of CPU that it uses or move to hosting that has higher CPU limits (which would probably be more expensive hosting).

Basically you pay for what you get and if several hundred static sites can share one server without overloading the CPU then it is much cheaper for those sites to host on a server that places several hundred sites on a server like that than it would be for them to host on a server that only hosts a dozen or so sites on the server in order to make available a much higher CPU usage that the static sites don't need (but which a dynamic site that gets lots of visitors and doesn't cache pages would need).

If you have a supercharged V8 engine then you don't buy a small car and expect the engine to fit, you'd buy a larger car that has space for a large engine. The same applies to websites and hosting as applies to engines and cars. You need to choose hosting that supplies the resources that your site requires and if you need more than minimal CPU for your site to run you need to buy more expensive hosting that puts fewer sites on each server so that the required CPU is available.

It all comes down to purchasing the appropriate hosting for your site. Those who are unhappy with what they have got from any of the major hosting providers have simply selected the wrong sort of hosting for what their site needs. In tat situation what distinguishes the different hosting providers is their willingness to refund your money. The better web hosts will give you a refund even though you were the one who made the mistake of choosing the wrong sort of hosting in the first place.

[crazypenguin]

BlueHost are hosting over 600,000 domains. If more than 0.0001% of them were having problems then their forum would be swamped with complaints.

BlueHost hosting is primarily designed for static sites (regardless of visitor numbers) and dynamic sites with smallish numbers of visitors. You should be able to have millions of people visit static pages on BlueHost each day without problems. If you use caching properly on a dynamic site you should be able to have at least tens of thousands of visitors daily without problems. If you have really huge numbers of visitors or are using a dynamic script that is resource intensive with small numbers of visitors then BlueHost hosting is not designed to suit your type of site and you will have problems if you try to host your site there. Those types of sites need a different level of hosting to that which BlueHost (and similar providers such as GoDaddy) provide.


The reality exists many people are not happy with Bluehost and are leaving to a company that can meet their needs and expectations. From what I have seen technical support is over whelmed at Bluehost and cannot handle the load put on them. People are complaining all over the internet about waiting 30 to 40 minutes on hold just to hung up on and had to call back again. The same goes for unanswered support tickets. As far as making negative comments about Bluehost on Bluehostforum.com, the comments have a tendency to be deleted as to reduce bad publicity for Bluehost.

The one thing I will agree with you on is about all Bluehost is good for is hosting static sites as long as their servers are up.

BTW did you even check on the link to the Bluehostforum.com to see what problems I had with Bluehost? They were all technical problems on Bluehosts end and none on my end.

So one other question, are you a Bluehost affiliate seller?

The bottom line is Bluehost did not work for me. Everything I had run on Bluehost I have run on at least three other hosting providers without any problems.

My experience with Bluehost has been very, very bad. I have tried over 20 hosting providers so I do know the good ones from the bad. Yes, I rate them as one of the WORST hosting providers.

I am not here for an argument, debate, discussion, or a flame war.

I came here to let people know my experience with Bluehost has been horrible. I am glad you are happy with them.

[felgall]

As far as making negative comments about Bluehost on Bluehostforum.com, the comments have a tendency to be deleted as to reduce bad publicity for Bluehost.

As a moderator on that forum I see all of the deleted posts and there are extremely few posts that have been deleted and most of those are because the original poster resolved their own problem without saying how and so the post doesn't contribute anything to anyone else.There have been perhaps two posts complaining about BlueHost that have been deleted in the last six month. I certainly wouldn't go deleting a post from there just because someone had a pcomplaint about BlueHost.

As for contacting BlueHost - yes their ticketting system has a huge backlog and so you can wait a long time to get an answer feom them that way. The best way of contacting BlueHost when there are problems is vis the LiveChat button that is usually on their home page.

Sure there are problems with BlueHost hosting. With so many servers there are bound to be one or two that don't run as well as the others. Also with shared hosting the quality of operation of the server you are on is also dependent on the other sites that are hosted on the same server. My site has only been down once in the last 12 months for more than 10 minutes and on that one occasion the cause was that the server had crashed due to a bad script someone else hosted on the server had installed to their hosting that caused the problem.

Whichever hosting that you choose is going to have a number of people who have problems with that hosting. With the larger hosting suppliers the number of dissatisfied people will always be higher than for smaller hosting suppliers even though the larger supplier may provide a better service for the majority of their customers. You can't really properly judge any web hosting supplier based on the comments of just a few people as different people have different requirements for their hosting and also have a different experience of the web host. When I was last looking to change hosting I asked around people whose opinions I knew I could trust and decided to give BlueHost a try since it was the suggestion that was most highly recommended.

Sorry that BlueHost did not work out for you and I hope that you are having a more successful time with whichever host you decided to go with instead.

We are fortunate with web hosting that there are so many hosting providers out there so that when we do eventually become dissatisfied with our current provider that there are plenty of others to choose from.

[crazypenguin]

Hi Felgall,

Wow 6,148 posts, you must be here a lot.....

I see you are a computer consultant. So what is your area of specialty? Hardware? Networking? Phone support?

CP

[crazypenguin]

Hi Felgall,

A bit about me, I have been in the IT world for a little under 30 years. I am proficient in coding many languages and within a wide variety of applications. I have dealt extensively with Sun/Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows server environments. As well as providing support for very large user groups involving Windows and Linux on the desktop.

I had been with Bluehost for two years and had three different account each on a separate server. I had major problems with each account. Such is not a matter of a mismatch in a hosting provider, it is a matter of extreme incompetence on behalf of Bluehost. My experience with Bluehost is a classic example of where incompetence far out runs their level of technical expertise. I wouldn't trust the entire Bluehost technical staff with a 486 for a science project.

So Felgall does Bluehost still provide its moderators with a free web hosting account (http://www.crazypenguin.us/text/bluehostcomforummessage.txt)?

I asked you earlier if you were selling Bluehost web accounts through their affiliate program. I received no response so this is what I found. It is one of those nifty little flashing Bluehost banner ads (http://www.crazypenguin.us/images/bluehostfelgall.png) on you website in a couple of places. I also have a screen shot with this in it http://www.bluehost.com/track/fellgall/CODE(and your tracking number here) So this sure looks like to me you are in the affiliate program. So what are they paying you now per account 65 bucks (http://partner.bluehost.com/)?

My point is you have vested interest in making Bluehost just as shiny as you can because you are selling it.

[callumd]

I use InMotion (http://www.inmotionhosting.com/) hosting.

I have been blown away by their level of customer service. I get prompt replies to my emails. I have never experienced any down time. Their rates are extremely competitive. I once emailed them about a problem and a few minutes later, my phone's ringing - it's them with the solution.

Another time: My site was sitting on a PHP 4 server, and I emailed them asking if they offered PHP 5 servers. I get a reply email saying "Just reply to this email with your confirmation, and we'll move your site over to a server running PHP 5. If you need to switch it back for whatever reason, let us know". That's it, and it was done.

I highly recommend them.

[crazypenguin]

I don't reccommend Bluehost and here is the reason. (http://www.inetintegrity.com)

[LeeU]

I don't have an affiliate account and I recommend Blue Host. I don't think Felgall does it because he has an affiliate link. As he said, "We are fortunate with web hosting that there are so many hosting providers out there so that when we do eventually become dissatisfied with our current provider that there are plenty of others to choose from." Let's not make this personal.

[felgall]

Although I have an affiliate link for BlueHost on my site, I do not promote it above any of the other Hosting providers that I have links to and I have never actually ever made any money from having that link there.

If I weren't happy with BlueHost's hosting I would not have my hosting there, the greatest benefit that BlueHost provide is that they make it extremely easy for those who are not happy with their service to pack up and move elsewhere and will refund the money for whatever period you paid for that you havent used. So if someone purchases BlueHost hosting and then finds it isn't the right hosting for them then they can get their money back, The last hosting provider I was with, I still had 6 months to go that I had paid for when I decided that their service no longer met my needs and they didn't refund anything.

The most vocal people regarding any web host are those who are most dissatisfied with the service that the host provides. The majority of their customers who obviously are satisfied (as why else would they stay on as customers) are mostly silent.


There is no one size fits all web host and you have to hunt around to find the one that best suits you. Those hosting providers that provide a refund if it turns out your site is not suited to their hosting (as BlueHost and some others do) make it easier for you to move on if your site doesn't suit their hosting.

[crazypenguin]

I don't have an affiliate account and I recommend Blue Host. I don't think Felgall does it because he has an affiliate link. As he said, "We are fortunate with web hosting that there are so many hosting providers out there so that when we do eventually become dissatisfied with our current provider that there are plenty of others to choose from." Let's not make this personal.

Well taken. I am done with my ranting....

[dirtyelection]

No just a satisfied BlueHost user. The couple of times I have had issues with my hosting the BlueHost techs have fixed it for me almost immediately.

I did some work for someone using GoDaddy once and had to patch my Paypal IPN script to get around proxy restrictions that their hosting provided. It took several weeks of testing to identify that the problem was the Godaddy configuration. Fortunately once I identified the problem a member of Paypal staff was able to provide the solution.

Felgall is a moderator on the bluehost forum. It is dishonest to say you are just a heavy user. I came here trying to honestly decide what service to use. I have no problems with Godaddy now on my blog http://dirtyelection.com and i am considering switching to BH. I want honest opinions not a sales pitch.

[felgall]

It is dishonest for me to claim to be a heavy user of BlueHost because I am not. The sites I run there use a small fraction of 1% of the available resources. That they asked be to be a moderator on their forum is due only to their needing more moderators for the forum and since I was already visiting there trying to help people out (the same as I visit this forum trying to help people out) they asked me if I would assist with that. Beyond that moderator access in the forum my association with BlueHost is no different from that of any of the other 700,000+ users (except that I probably use less of the resources than most of the users). All I ever give is my honest opinion. I never give a sales pitch as I don't believe in them.

[LeeU]

OK, I'll give you an honest opinion regarding BlueHost and GoDaddy (I have no financial interest nor am I a moderator there, although I do play one on this forum.).

A few years ago I was looking into GoDaddy and posed a question to their techs (e-mail). I'm still waiting for the response. I posed the same question to BlueHost and they responded quickly, w/in an hour. I went with them for that and several other reasons and have not been sorry. The one or two times I had a problem (just minor) or a question, they were right there and fixed it, or helped me out. I have used a few other hosting companies also but have found, at least for me, BlueHost has very dependable service and well-qualified techs. Even the salesperson knew the technical side of things and didn't just read from a flip chart.

But then there are others who swear by GoDaddy, so it's just my opinion.

[dirtyelection]

Sorry to attack felgall.

I have found Godaddy people to be pretty helpful but then again I am not the biggest techie.

Question, if I moved hosting would I have to leave my site down for a day? That is what Blue host told me.

[LeeU]

Nope. You would keep your present site. Then get the new host, upload your site and make sure it's working. Once that is done, then change the domain host IPs at the place that has your domain. It should take 24-72 hours for the new site location to kick in.

What I do is place some type of a comment on the new page. Then, once I know that the new site is the one being used (by making sure the home page has that comment on it), then I just delete the old one.

[felgall]

I have step by step instructions on how to move a site from one web host to any other web host with no down time at all at http://www.felgall.com/hosts.htm

The only things that would be affected during the move are email accounts and interactive features such as forums. Basically you have the hosting active at both places during the several days that it takes while the domain name updates from pointing to the old host to pointing to the new on the thousands of domain name servers around the world.

By using appropriate entries in the hosts file on your computer you can check the stats on both hosting accounts so as to monitor how things progress during the transfer so as to know when you can turn off the old hosting.

When I last transferred my hosting I made the mistake of also transferring the domain registration at the same time and I ended up with one of the nameservers on the new hosting redirecting back to the old hosting so that several weeks later 10% of my visitors were still ending up at the old hosting. The Domain Name Services at DNSstuff.com allowed me to work out what was happening so that I could ask the support staff at the new hosting to fix it for me.

[webgovernor]

Ugh, Bluehost. I've been attempting to backup my databases (so I can just copy over my CMS installs, hopefully), I can't handle them anymore. I read the review on octonline.org and they gave the Hostmonster.com/Bluehost a 97% uptime average (using basic state and site probe). Apparently this average drops as the response times increase, and Bluehost racks up a 81ms average, while Godaddy only had a 20(something)ms response time, and better uptime.

What I found interesting is that it took approximately 7 hours to transfer 506 MB of data onto my Bluehost account (1.5Mb upload, shared), and only half an hour on my Alterhosting account (same line). Also, only with Bluehost does filezilla spit out "Your bandwidth is limited."

Although I've heard some bad things about godaddy too, but at least they have better stats in the review. Go with godaddy IMO.

With the moving situation, it can be quite tedious. PHPMyAdmin helps (export DATA and STRUCTURE), and with Bluehosts transfer times it may take decades to accomplish.

Oh, and thanks for publishing that info felgall, it's pretty interesting.

[felgall]

Different hosting is going to suit different people depending on what their requirements are and what the hosting offers. Different people will also have different experiences with the same web host particularly the larger ones such as BlueHost and GoDaddy where there are hundreds of different servers in use and where your experience will depend in part on which other sites you are sharing a server with.

[novemberGrey]

All I can say is use SiteGround (http://siteground.com).

[JPnyc]

I've had great experience with godaddy. I can also say AVOID startlogic at ALL costs, unless somehow your life, or a loved one's, depends on it.

[jeeba]

It all comes down to purchasing the appropriate hosting for your site. Those who are unhappy with what they have got from any of the major hosting providers have simply selected the wrong sort of hosting for what their site needs. In tat situation what distinguishes the different hosting providers is their willingness to refund your money. The better web hosts will give you a refund even though you were the one who made the mistake of choosing the wrong sort of hosting in the first place.

Just my two cents, Currently Im searching for a Host with a lot of databases, I plan to use it for a full WEB 2.0 service, so, i need fast access to the database... ergo, a lot of processor time. I looked at bluehost because they sell you 100 Mysql and 100 Postgres databases with the package but is like contradictory at least (not to say misleading) that if Bluehost its about Static Pages, why they give us 100 databases? ( and im not talking about using the postgres databases) , I would like to know if bluehost is a good option if i want to use at least 50 of their databases, every one with at least 50 tables, and alot of queries going around ( so the option of cacheing pages will not be good).

I had a bad experience with godaddy like 4 year ago, i was looking for a host and i was an absolute newbie on that, i look at goddady because of google adds, it "hosted" good (my page was static at the time) , but when i wanted to make it dinamic, and ask a few question to their customer support, they just couldn't help me , and it was a simple technical question. their answered me every question i had by email in a day interval, but i dont know how they serivce will be now.

BTW this is an excellent thread , it make me register here :)

[felgall]

If you are going to need lots of processing time then you need to be looking at VPS or dedicated hosting where you get most or all of the processing power of the server available for your use rather than shared hosting where you get only a very low percentage. BlueHost currently only offer shared hosting (but are talking about adding more powerful options once they get their new data centre set up). For sites that only get a few visitors trying to access the databases at a time shared hosting can be quite adequate provided that you have properly optimised databases. If you have thousands of visitors trying to access the database at the same time then shared hosting will not have sufficient resources.

[bluehostrocks]

Ugh, Bluehost. I've been attempting to backup my databases (so I can just copy over my CMS installs, hopefully), I can't handle them anymore. I read the review on octonline.org and they gave the Hostmonster.com/Bluehost a 97% uptime average (using basic state and site probe). Apparently this average drops as the response times increase, and Bluehost racks up a 81ms average, while Godaddy only had a 20(something)ms response time, and better uptime.

What I found interesting is that it took approximately 7 hours to transfer 506 MB of data onto my Bluehost account (1.5Mb upload, shared), and only half an hour on my Alterhosting account (same line). Also, only with Bluehost does filezilla spit out "Your bandwidth is limited."

Although I've heard some bad things about godaddy too, but at least they have better stats in the review. Go with godaddy IMO.

With the moving situation, it can be quite tedious. PHPMyAdmin helps (export DATA and STRUCTURE), and with Bluehosts transfer times it may take decades to accomplish.

Oh, and thanks for publishing that info felgall, it's pretty interesting.
Bluehost does not throttle the ftp upload speed. Since your on a shared server you could be uploading at the same time others are.

edit by admin: we are more cordial than that here. Thank you

[felgall]

Probably the biggest difference between BlueHost and GoDaddy is that GoDaddy is primarily a domain registrar who does hosting as an add-on to their main business while BlueHost is primarily a hosting provider who registers domains as an add-on to their main business. In each case you would expect them to spend more resources on their main businessand less on the add-on.