Chuck The Geek is now on Bluehost
July 31st, 2008 by Chuck Sharp
Well, over the weekend I moved this site from 1and1’s hosting service to Bluehost. This was a fun move, and I think the site will be much better for it. 1and1 was never an outstanding provider, although I personally never had many problems with them. Their servers were slow, they imposed some odd controls over their clients, and they’re Europe-based. While the last item isn’t bad by any means, I’m personally much happier dealing with a company that’s entirely based locally. It’s the same reason my friend uses GoDaddy, which is based right here in Phoenix. He’s comforted by the fact that he can call up their helpdesk and speak to someone who’s actually in the same city. Kind of makes sense, I think.
Finally, and this was the kicker, 1and1 is not cool in the billing department. When my father-in-law’s debit card expired, as all cards do, and his card therefore declined automatic renewal payment for his business website with 1and1, their customer support promptly shut down his website, actually called him a deadbeat over the phone, and sent him to collections with massive fees, even after he immediately rectified the situation. I don’t want to deal with that kind of company.
In any case, Bluehost is run by a cool guy, their pricing is great, and it appears that they have real expert engineers working on Bluehost’s architecture. They also offer some great freedom to a geek such as myself. I’ll try to give some updates and thoughts over time on Bluehost, but overall, they meet my needs and what I want with a webhost, and they just feel like a good group to work with. We’ll see!
2 Comments Add your own
1. Bobby | August 2nd, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Be sure to post on your experience with them, maybe they have some features that might work better for me. Are you just hosting php/mysql wordpress stuff? Or any other website projects in any other languages?
2. Chuck Sharp | August 3rd, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I’ll definitely update the results of my time with Bluehost. Right now, I’m only using PHP apps, but I’m toying with learning Rails. Bluehost gives full Rails support, good SSH access, and a host of scripts, one-click app installs, and mailing lists through the Mailman application. It’s a geek’s playground, for sure. They also have 24×7 phone tech support. You can see their feature set here and the CEO’s blog (a true geek) here.
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