Bluehost Blows Dreamhost Out of the Water
Yesterday, a client's site stopped working. It took a while for us to figure out what happened, but it turned out to be a decision by Dreamhost, my hosting service for the past three or so years, to install a PHP security upgrade to version 5.2.6. That upgrade -- perfectly properly installed -- broke the way my application's license for some underlying technology was expected to be referenced. Pretty obtuse stuff, at least for me.
Now I've used Dreamhost long enough to be pretty comfortable finding my way around but the recommended solution to this problem was to recompile PHP to change the way my app looked for the license file. WTF? I don't want to compile code; that's why I use a managed hosting service. And that's when Dreamhost's absolutely abysmal tech support jumped up and bit me. (More below.)
I asked one of my colleagues, who's also a developer on the code base and an expert on systems stuff, what I should do. He suggested changing hosting services. That seemed a little drastic but I was in a place where my client was rapidly losing confidence in me. So while he went off to see if he could figure out an easier way to solve the problem at DH, I went to the new service he recommended, Bluehost.
Wow. The difference in support is night and day. Dreamhost's "support" consists of posting an email from a Web form and waiting to hear from someone. No phone number. No chat. You can ask that they call you with resolution but frankly that's never worked once for me. So I posted the note and went off to look at Bluehost.
Bluehost has a toll-free number staffed 24/7. They also have an online chat support system that seems to be up most if not all of the time. I asked five questions about Bluehost -- including how to solve the problem we were facing at Dreamhost -- and got immediate answers, twice on the phone and three times via chat. Holy crap. Actual support by real people who seemed to understand my questions and know the answers. Unheard of.
In less time than it took Dreamhost to give me their unacceptable compile-your-own-PHP response, I had signed up for Bluehost, established my client's domain there, transferred all the files, and had things 80% working. We'd have had it all done by that time but we didn't take time to discover that Bluehost had built-in support for the licensing technology we were using.
My system administrator took a look at Bluehost for me. He started out skeptical. At $6.95/mo. (for a 24-month program), he sort of wondered out loud how good it could be. Then he spent about 30 minutes exploring it and announced he was moving his personal sites over to it as soon as he could get the time.
Between Bluehost and Yugma, I'm starting to have my faith in the service aspect of our business restored!
