Is BlueHost possibly the worst ever? DreamHost anyone?

DreamHost is a sister company of Bluehost and from what I understand* Bluehost has a new server facility and DreamHost is using part of it — so probably not.

* from a personal conversation with their CEO Dan Handy last fall.

I too am fed up with what seems like increasingly frequent and very long outages. Seems like they are tied to this new datacenter former the former CEO built nearby the Bluehost HQ and that Bluehost leases (along with some other sister companies owned by parent Endurance: http://www.enduranceinternational.com/our-company/our-brands

It’s so hard to pick an alternative, but am going to research MediaTemple (like their partial move to solid state drives) and some local options in the Bay Area since I am here.

I have a bit more to add to the above post and thoughts — I am wondering why Bluehost (and Dreamhost) are listed still on WordPress’s official recommended hosts page, to be honest, given the year of massive problems at Bluehost in particular (and the fact that Dreamhost is housed in the same server facility).

Bluehost has had an extremely bad last 9 months. In the midst of massive expansion at their UT facilities, they are having endless downtime problems moving into and operating their new datacenter. I have a fair amount of primary source information on this from a long one-on-one phone call with Bluehost CEO Dan Handy last November just after their 2nd or 3rd major outage in a few months.

Mr. Handy went into great detail about their work, plans and priorities, and stressed that the recent issues were related to ultimately positive outcomes in their new datacenter’s technology, speed and reliability, and also assured me that they were not dumbing down the service or parting it out to 3rd party providers for technology or support.

He went through details of the new datacenter they moved to last year, designed and built by former Bluehost CEO Matt Heaton, who’s more of an IT guy than a suit (my words). Handy also told me that as former COO and a tech person himself that he personally hired many of the tech support team and has a hand in all technology decisions — super, a CEO who knows IT.

Great. Sounds great, anyway. Except WHY does Bluehost keep experiencing massive outages, mostly during the middle of the day, and mostly for 3-5 hours at a time? What is the recurring achilles heel (or multiple achilles heels) they keep not knowing how to plan for? Is it growing pains? Staffing issues? Too bleeding edge (a possibility — they are known for creating their own solutions rather than out of the boxing it).

Anyhow, my question is rooted in that I need another reliable (more reliable) hosting solution, and they are really hard to research and find. And I keep coming back to WordPress’s hosting page and seeing the same answers year after year: http://wordpress.org/hosting/ One of the 3 (Bluehost) is having increasing issues; another (Dreamhost) is a sister company housed in the same building; and the third (Laughing Squid) doesn’t even seem to really be in the hosting business. What about WP providing some real info with some teeth here? Isn’t it about time to update this page?

Thanks for listening, suggestions welcome!

I will look into them — can you point my to some specific articles, so much of that type of material on the web seems to be bought and paid for. Thanks!