How to Know When You’ve Outgrown Your Web Host

We’ve been running our firm website, this website and a couple of others (like our marriage counselor site – Stay Happily Married.com) on a hosting account with BlueHost. They’ve done a great job and been very helpful when we call with questions.They charge a very reasonable fee. By “reasonable” I mean amazingly cheap – $6.95 per month for “unlimited” use.

Unfortunately, our sites have been slowing down – way down. We’ve been noticing it when we’re editing the sites and we’ve been getting alerts from our monitoring service. We’ve even had comments from visitors.

Our traffic has been up – but Bluehost kept giving us the sense that the problems we were having were on our end. We made some technical changes. We even added a second hosting account and moved part of the site to that account hoping to fix things.

No luck.

Finally, we talked to a Bluehost representative that explained that we were really doing more with our account than it was designed to handle. I think they’re hesitant to tell you that you’ve exceeded their use limits because they have “unlimited” plastered all over their marketing materials.

Their reluctance to give us this information made diagnosing the problem difficult. We would have quickly moved to a different host if we had understood the limits. It’s hard to get mad at Bluehost given the $6.95 a month they’ve been charging us. We just needed to know that we’d outgrown our situation.

Over the coming days we’ll be moving all of our sites to Rackspace. They have a good reputation and provide accounts that can accommodate our growth.

I tell you this story simply to illustrate that “unlimited” may not really mean unlimited. When you run into problems and you’re relying on the discount service offering unlimited anything it probably makes sense to examine that situation first, before you get bogged down in deeper analysis.

What is it the doctors say? “If you hear hoof beats, think horses – not zebras”. If you’re having a problem with a $6.95 server account – think overcapacity – not programming error (whatever, I’m doing the best I can here). The bottom line- don’t expect $100 per month capacity for $6.95.

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Post written by Lee Rosen on September 24, 2009 in Technology