If you noticed the site not responding or appearing to be down today or last night, it’s because I’ve been migrating hosts.
In January 2019, I switched to Bluehost which is one of the largest WordPress hosting sites out there, but lately, site performance has been miserable. After talking with some other bloggers who also use Bluehost, it seems poor performance was prevalent with other people as well, so I made the decision to try out Amazon Lightsail.
Lightsail is part of AWS (Amazon Web Services), those commercials you always see during NFL games about how they are powered by AWS. Well now Mike Eckman dot Com is as well.
Hopefully you’ll all notice that site responsiveness is significantly faster, and there should be no more 500 Errors.
well poop! I JUST signed up a new website a few months ago for 3 years on Bluehost. It was going ok until 2 days ago, when the editor disappeared for all of the published pages. After 3 hours on the phone with tech support, I have a workaround that I can live with but the proper editor is still not there. I picked Bluehost in a panic during a service interruption on my original site at Tripod, after a quick Google check suggested that they were the best service out there. At the moment I’m happier with Trips than Bluehost.
From what I understand, they throttle larger websites on their shared servers. If you have a dedicated server (aka spend more $$) it’s not an issue. My site was about 24GB and only recently had performance started to really suck. The other blogger that was having the same trouble as me was large as well.
Mike, your host change has accelerated page-loading by about 75%. Great improvement. The political blog I write for (which draws around 150K visits weekly) was also migrated away from Bluehost due to the same issues your site experienced.
Glad to hear you notice such an improvement. Even the behind the scenes stuff is a lot faster too. When I would author new posts, it would sometimes take 10-15 seconds for the screen to refresh, now it’s maybe 3-4 seconds. Much better!!!