I certainly hope so. The past few weeks (months?) My blog has been slow loading. I have done a couple of things to help it along, but was tempted to switch hosts. It’s hard to grow readership when the blog takes forever to load – most folks have an attention span of 5 second or less when searching. And then comes this note from Bluehost:

Dear Bluehost.com Customer,

We finally have some good news to report.  After literally months of research into system performance techniques and I/O tuning we have rolled out a series of changes to our servers that have immediate and beneficial effects.  By the time you read this the server that hosts your website should have a decreased server load of between 100-300%.  This means that for those users that experienced constant performance problems with our server speeds that your problems should be significantly reduced.

Of course this isn’t a magic bullet, and we still have servers that have load spikes and other various problems and issues that go hand in hand with providing shared hosting services.  We should have more good news to report in the coming weeks and there is still much to be done to provide better uptime with fewer interruptions to critical services.

Also, as many of you may know a few months back we leased a new datacenter that is solely for our use and is only 200 yards from our offices.  It will allow us to grow to nearly 2,000 servers before requiring additional space.  This is a huge long term benefit for us as almost all hosting companies outsource their servers to a datacenter that is not under their control.  The downside is that it has been painful as we move all our servers to this location.  Downtime and unforeseen problems have been a big part of this migration process. I wanted to let you know that the end is in sight.  Most of the servers have been moved, and all of the mission critical portions of our network have now been moved.  Most of our intermittent downtime has been because of this enormous move.

Things are improving and long term problems are starting to subside.  Thanks for sticking with us as we look forward to the continuation of improvements that are sure to come!

Thanks,
Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com

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