Blogging serves a whole series of purposes for me:

1. How does do these web hosting companies work?  Are they effective for small users/business customers?  How much trust can be put into them?
2. Improve technical skills with CSS and getting exposure to PHP.
3. Improve my writing skills.
4. Share my interests.  I’ll even share the occassional family photo, but I’m going to try and maintain some level of anonymity.
5. A place to vent until my co-workers discover the blog.
6. To see how some of the Web 2.0 practices actually work.
7. Remind myself, exactly how bad I am at graphic design.

I signed up for BlueHost as a hosting service a couple of weeks.

The research process on hosting services was not straightforward- lot of review sites out there – but with extremely questionable objectivity.

For example: A google search of “web hosting reviews” returned the http://webhostinggeeks.com as the top site.  Here’s a screen shot from their homepage:

Ok, so it appears they are either getting advertising or referral revenue from BlueHost.  If you scroll down the page, Yahoo is the only other advertiser/referral image listed.  Also, note that HostMonster is the same company as BlueHost.  You also need to look at their criteria for ranking.   Now look where these two companies are ranked.   Here’s the ranking criteria from the site -

Editor’s notice: Web hosting packages ranked by the best value/price. Host reliability, uptime, key features, bonus features, customer support, past and current user feedbacks, user-friendliness and hosting awards have been taken into account as well.

Ok…so really it just came down to price.

 This wasn’t the only example.  I found one other site for HostGator that was far worse, but I don’t have the energy to even find it again.  I couldn’t even find BlueHost on that site.

Part of the problem here is how these “review” sites make their money – user be aware!

Now, so what are my thoughts on BlueHost?

• They are extremely inexpensive for the bandwidth and diskspace.  $6.95 for 1.5 terabytes/month.  Wow!  Think about the possibilities of using their services for your offsite backups.
• Service was rather spotty on the shared server my site was on a couple of days ago.  This was a problem at the server level, not necessarily my site.  (If I can’t access htp://box377.bluehost.com where my virtual server resides, then there’s a problem above and beyond my site.)  This could have been caused by another user or by an upgrade/misconfiguration on their part.  I couldn’t even begin too imagine the headaches involved in try to manage x number of users on given physical server.  Even with throttles in place, its not hard for a couple of misfits to cause service/quality issues on a given server.  Especially when a lot of theses people do not have the technical skills to run dynamic websites.
• The online software to maintain your sites is pretty good.  Installing WordPress as the blog software was extremely simple and fast.
• I wish they had online control over domain name management.  Supposedly, they can take of this through support calls.  (And actually, this may be the best solution for them since DNS records aren’t necessary the most straight forward item and can cause significant headaches when they are wrong.)  To get around this, I’m still using GoDaddy.com as my domain name registrar for an add-on domain and then manually setting up the ip to the box where my server is hosted.  The downside to this approach occurs if BlueHost ever moves my server.

Right now, I recommend BlueHost as an economical hosting provider.  If you need gauranteed uptime and quality of service, then there are more appropriate solutions.

Yikes!

What an uninteresting greeting for the blogging world.  Although, given the number of different programming languages I’ve generated that output, itis entirely appropriate.

So after being on the Internet for more years than I should count (the start pre-dates the “web” as we know it now), I’ve finally joined the masses of people who blog.  I’ll write about anything and everything that may come to mind as well as sharing some of the technical knowledge I’ve learned.  I’ll also share some of the many photographs I take to keep myself sane.

Enjoy and let’s see where the journey goes …