Why I left bluehost: shared hosting doesn’t work
Posted 1 March 2010 @ 11am | Tagged bluehost
This blog is now proudly hosted on slicehost.com! It seems somewhere in the last couple days, bluehost touched something on my shared hosting account that caused php-mysql to break, and this blog was displaying a message about this breakage.
This was the last straw for me. I previously wrote about how bluehost would not admit to overselling even in the face of clear problems and claiming that restarting mysql regularly was an accepted practice to solve problems, and storing my password in plain text. I was reminded last night why shared hosting is a failure (besides the problems of shared resources in a non-isolated way) – you simply don’t have control over what the host decided to do with the server.
Isolated, virtualized hosting is the way of the future. You get completely predictable behavior – no one will be messing with this server but me. I would run this blog on EC2, but at this point the processing needed is just way too small so I went with slicehost and their $20 256M slice because EC2 does not offer a comparable cheap product. Slicehost is not ideal because they don’t allow you to provision your images from the outside (in other words, to use a product like CohesiveFT’s elasticserver.com to create a bill of materials for a server and provision it predictably (disclaimer: I work for this company, but I also use the product for personal use with Planypus)), but it cheaper than EC2 and for my personal blog, that wins over the convenience of dynamic provisioning for now.
Goodbye bluehost, and good riddance.
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