Josh Moody

I switched to a new web host a couple weeks ago, but it just didn’t work out. I’d still recommend this host to someone looking to host a static web site, or a site that doesn’t require heavy processor/memory usage on the server, but they failed miserably yesterday when I tried uploading a bunch of pictures from iPhoto to Coppermine gallery on my web site.

The iPhoto->Coppermine plugin I use uploads the photos to the web site, then tells Coppermine to resize the them into thumbnails and intermediate sized images. This is a fairly server-intensive task, but worked fine when I was running this on my own server. It seems that Bluehost either doesn’t allocate enough processor time or memory to each user for this type of activity, or is throttling somehow to prevent over utilization. Either way, I only managed to get 30 of the 60 photos uploaded after letting the upload run for over an hour, so I gave up and started migrating back to my old server. After migrating back to my old server, I was able to upload the remaining 30 images in less than 5 minutes.

On the bright side, Bluehost offers a 100% money back guarantee within the 1st 30 days (you can get a pro-rated refund after 30 days), so it didn’t cost anything but my time to find out it didn’t meet my needs. I called their always friendly customer support #, and they promptly refunded my credit card. One thing I can say about these guys is they have the best customer support I’ve ever encountered in any industry.