Well, we are now about the largest bandwidth consumer in the state of Utah. It has been a signicant challenge getting enough bandwidth from diversified providers to provide fast internet to the sites we host. In the last month we pretty much completely saturated all our pipes. The worst part was that I thought I had “thought ahead” when I ordered more bandwidth months ago. It took so long to get it sorted out that I wanted to throttle XO Communications for dropping the ball so badly.
This made us look bad and caused issues with our customers that we couldn’t fix. We HAD to wait for XO to solve our problems. That is a bad position to be in. The good news is that we now have 700 Mbits of bandwidth more today than we did yesterday and it shows. Things are running MUCH faster!!!
We have also taken advantage of the new huge bandwidth pipe to remove/scale back bandwidth limits that we had on customers with dedicated IP addresses and FTP downloading. There are still limits in place, but they are very high so if you are bumping into the limits you shouldn’t care because it is ridiculously fast now. We have also greatly improved the CPU situation on most of our servers. We still have about 10-15 servers that need to be further upgraded, but we have made excellent progress.
I am writing this to let you know that I am not all talk and that real dollars and real resources are being poured into the speed and stability of our network. The next major change is already 50% done and that has to do with our support. The number of people and the quality of our support will be noticably better in the coming weeks. We have more people than ever and our training process is good and will soon be great.
Thanks,
Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com