Blog Upgraded: A Good Experience With Bluehost
February 23 2016 in Uncategorized | Tags: | Author: Christopher Rackauckas
My blog is back up and now it’s on a more powerful server to deal with the increase in traffic I have been getting. I really want to give a shout out to Bluehost’s customer support, I went onto their live chat and talked with someone who really knew the different options. I am going to explain what I learned from Devin and what choice I finally made.
A Rundown of Bluehost’s Hosting Options
Bluehost’s hosting options can be summarized as follows:
- Dedicated hosting. If you need this you know what it is.
- VPS. A Virtual Private Server. If you get this kind of server, the server management is up to you. This is the “second most powerful” option (only less than Dedicated), but I did not want to take on the overhead of managing the resource, especially since it would be more than I need.
- WordPress Hosting. This is a VPS setup specifically for WordPress. However, don’t let it fool into thinking that means it’s easy to maintain. It’s still a VPS, and so it’s for much larger sites and requires know-how and time to manage the server
- Shared Hosting. This seems like it would be the way to go, right? Well, Devin from Bluehost explained that these resources are older than the cloud resources (which make much better use of economies of scale) and so in practically every way, they are worse than the cloud hosting.
- Cloud Hosting. This is the option I went with. When you look at the specs, it’s cheaper and better than shared hosting for the reasons I already noted. But it’s also more secure, and you will have less downtime because there are actually multiple servers that it is hosted from. Also, it has little/no maintenance. Even though I am a “computer guy”, it’s just not worth the time to have to play with a VPS.
So I went with Cloud Hosting. In about 2 hours my blog transferred over to the new server. I went with the middle “Performance Option”, ended up being ~$300 for 3 years of hosting since they deducted the credit I had from my previous hosting plan. At any time I can add more RAM/CPUs/etc. as needed. Other than that, it works just like the shared server I had before but faster. I highly recommend you give it a try. It was pretty painless.