MacUser wrote:Hey.. what was the problem with Bluehost?
Well, a couple of things.
The main kicker: While they DO offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, and unlimited domains, they NO LONGER offer unlimited files. There is a limit of 50,000 files per account. This is supposedly because large accounts were causing issues with their backup system (if they lost a server, it would be 4-5 DAYS before the restore completed and the affected sites were back up.) Their answer to this problem: Make a policy of 50,000 files per account and terminate anyone who goes over that. (Now, I understand they don't want you using it as a personal hard drive/file backup service, it clearly states that your stuff has to be website related, but they even terminated a digital photographer who had 700,000 files because he had "too many" pictures on his site.)
Now, you'd think 50,000 files seems far-fetched, right? Keep in mind that EVERY AVATAR on Jude 2 (unless you are linking to an external image) counts as one file. Every attachment you upload counts as a file. All of the images, smilies, etc. you see on the board each count as a file. All of the PHP code files that execute in the background (to make J2 work) count as a file. Keep in mind I also host a couple of other domains, and they are the same way. A friend of mine has her E-Mail there, too, so EVERY MESSAGE she has counts as a file.
Not hard to hit 50,000.
When I heard about this news circulating the Internet, and found out it was true, I was around 100,000 files.
Plus, those other few sites I have are rather small, I haven't really fully launched them yet. I plan on adding a photo gallery site (so I don't have to use Flickr etc.) so there's several thousand more files...
In other words, it would be a matter of time before I was terminated.
On top of that, their servers seem to be a lot slower lately (that, or they are throttling me), it took FOUR minutes to dump Jude 2's post database out of Bluehost. Dreamhost imported it in under 30 seconds. Lag.
Ended up with Dreamhost because they had a good deal going, I signed up to play with it and found I like it better. It's not cPanel-based, which is good. It's possible to run different sites under different physical accounts. What's this mean? If my blog gets hacked, on Bluehost, they could also mess with Jude 2. On Dreamhost, my blog is under a separate shell account, so if it gets hacked, they aren't messing with Jude 2.
It's just a lot more secure.
Plus, the databases run on separate servers than the web sites. So, Jude 2 now runs on two physical servers (one for the website, and another for the database.) Better performance.
There you have it. I wasn't utterly *dissatisfied* with Bluehost, it worked fairly well, other than the lag lately and the fact that they are now going to start terminating people over 50,000 files... I knew that would definitely become an issue over the next few months.
I usually manage to break *something* when moving stuff!
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