Ever since I joined the blogosphere, all I heard was that you need a hosting service if you want to become serious about blogging. I am sure that is something you’ve all heard before. Being the diligent girl that I am, I did some research and the conclusion was that BlueHost was the way to go. Back in 2014 everyone seemed to recommend this particular service so I decided that I should join it as well. I mean, everyone I knew and every big blogger I admired was using it so why should I go with another service?
Choosing BlueHost was not a mistake, not at the time. The service was great, easy to use and up until last year I did not have any issues with it. However, lately my site has been going down quite a lot and that started to really bother me. Furthermore, the site was loading a lot slower than before and initially I thought it was my fault so I tried to clean it up, but to no avail. Nothing seemed to be working. After my site went offline more than 5 times in one day, I had enough. It was time to change. I did my research and I quickly and quietly moved. The decision cost me quite a bit and that is my own fault, but it was the right decision and so far I have no reason to regret it.
My site going offline was the last straw, but another reason why I decided to move was that it started getting more and more expensive to maintain my website and the overhead was not worth it considering that so far I have not made any income from this site. Since I never actually intended to turn the website in my full time job, when I first signed up to the hosting service I only signed up using the promotional price for one year. That was a big mistake in retrospect, but at the time it made sense. I was in a very different stage of my life and it was not the time to make big investments. Going back I would probably make the same decision as I have back then. Nothing really changed since then, one could argue, but it has. Now, I signed up for three years which I know is a big commitment, but also now I know that I am here to stay. Then, I was just testing the waters, but now it is a different story and if my economics classes helped with anything at all then it was definitely this: in the long run, the costs are a lot smaller.
So here you have it. This is why I decided to make the move to another hosting service which apparently is now considered to be better and faster than BlueHost. Let’s hope I won’t end up regretting this.
*According to a post on Dana’s blog, BlueHost has improved considerably in the last few months, but it was too late for me.