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I began on Bluehost because it was inexpensive and simple. As my projects and clients grew, I needed more speed, stability, and control than shared hosting could offer. After repeated slowdowns and mysterious 5xx errors, I migrated to Cloudways and haven’t looked back.
Result: faster load times, fewer headaches, and a stack I can actually tune.
Cloudways is a managed layer on top of leading cloud providers (DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.). You get the power of the cloud with a dashboard that handles the Ops basics for you.
| Feature | Bluehost | Cloudways |
|---|---|---|
| Server resources | Shared accounts | Dedicated cloud instance |
| Performance | Throttled under load | Optimized stack + caching |
| Control | Limited | SSH, service management |
| Backups & Staging | Basic | Automated, 1-click restore |
| Support | Mixed reviews | 24/7 live chat experts |
Use coupon code USESTRICT at signup to get 20% off your first two months on new accounts.
When you sign up using my link and coupon, I’ll send you my Cloudways Optimization Checklist (PDF).
How to get it: forward your Cloudways signup confirmation to [email protected] and I’ll reply with the PDF.
Alas, no. This coupon is for new customers only.
The discount lasts for two months.
Yes, it most certainly is. And you can always count on me to help you out. Reach out at [email protected] to inquire about my mentoring services.
Yes! Migrating is pretty straight foward, but if you’re not comfortable doing it yourself, Cloudways offers 5 free migrations per plan. Alternatively, you can also reach out to me and I’ll migrate your site for you for a small fee.
Leaving Bluehost removed a constant source of friction. On Cloudways I spend my time building, not firefighting.
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2 Responses
Hi Vinny,
Very interesting blog. I understand now the reason as to why I was recommended to read it by a friend of mine who is a client of yours I believe.
We do not know what happened but all of a sudden, we lost several strategic pages from our WordPress Website including a large number of images as well. This happen a couple of weeks ago and till today we do not know the root cause of this strange outcome. In a nutshell, we lost half of our website which is hosted by BlueHost.
When we realised that we had a problem with the website, we immediately contacted BlueHost in order to restore it. As per our contractual agreement, BlueHost are supposed to back-up our site weekly and I am sure you will not be surprised if I tell you that they never did so for unknown reasons.
We contacted them on many occasions but were just unsuccessful. Each time we called, we had to repeat the same story. Since our first call, and we have not received any concrete solution yet except that “we are working on it. Be patient someone from level 2 we will be contacting you soon”. Ten days later, no one from level 2 has dared to reach out to us. This is the worst customer service I have ever experienced.
In the meantime, our site is a mess and we are trying to fix the surface the best we can. Since this issue, the lead enquiries has stopped suddenly and this is a great concern.
We have been reloading manually missing images but the worst is that we lost strategic pages and content which we do not know how to recover – not to mention the links that led visitors to our sales funnel that are broken as well. In our misery, we were fortunate enough to recover all the blogs from the trash. I wish it would have been the same for the images and pages.
We’ve had the site for many years and this is the first time we are facing such a dramatic event. We though we were safe with BlueHost for being able to restore our site whenever required. This is the service for which we have been paying but in return this service is not available.
And there is more…
This is a long comment but I just wanted to react to your blog by sharing our dramatic story. I totally agree with the title of your blog and I will start preaching the same message from now onwards.
Thanks,
Olivier
Hi Olivier,
Thanks for sharing your nightmarish story. That said, it is always a good idea to have your own backups set up via a different method than only relying on the hosting company.
I strongly recommend setting up an account with ManageWP.com (no affiliate link here), which offers offsite daily backups for $2.00/month. Backup plugins such as Updraft Plus are only good if you configure them to save outside your hosting company.
Even better (and now I’m tooting my own horn, wink, wink), have a look at my WordPress Care Services plans. I’ll take good care of your site so you won’t have to go through all that again.
Cheers,
Vinny