Some of you guys might be experienced a site down during these few days as Hostmonster is merging some of their servers (As reported by HM customer: Host300) to a new box.

You would be seeing this error message if your website is affected:

"The website you are visiting is currently offline due to system maintinance.

In order to give the best filesystem performance possible, and to ensure the integrity of data, a diagnostic process is being performed, and any inconsistencies will be repaired. This process may take approximately 30 to 60 minutes."

Fortunately, this site is not affected but in case you’re worry about yours, you can always check your server status here: http://serverstatus.hostmonster.com

A few minutes back I was talking with the technical guy at HM and he told me that a few thousands of sites were down due to this planned upgrades and he assure me that the websites will be back in roughly 30 minutes. Good thing about it is that all websites affected will be directed to a splash page indicating the problem.

July 2008, BlueHost Inc. announced that its combined hosting platforms of BlueHost.com and HostMonster.com have surpassed 1,000,000 domains hosted. In case you don’t know, BlueHost and HostMonster are managed by the same management, headquartered in Orem, Utah. The brand “HostMonster” was spun off from the BlueHost in year 2005 to target different markets and help expand the growth of the company.

Interested to learn more about Bluehost/Hostmonster? Visit Bluehost online.

Out of random curiosity, I decided to run a quick check on Hostmonster and Bluehost popularity in Google Insights. And here’s the results I found:

How does Hostmonster perform compare to Bluehost?

Obviously, Hostmonster is no where near to Bluehost in term of popularity.

While the growth trend looks more or less the same, Hostmonster is still way behind of Bluehost, losing 30 points behind Bluehost. The main reason for this, is of course because of the late-coming of Hostmonster in the business. More over, Bluehost’s affiliate program (both in-house and CJ.com) had been running for a long time – where top affiliates had already attached with the company. It makes no sense to switch promoting other hosting company where Bluehost is still at the top of its class.

Considering these facts, Hostmonster growth rate is, in fact, pretty respectable. They were rising from no where and growing fast for the first three years. I expect Hostmonster to grow better – provided that they remain (or keep improving) their current hosting services.

Here’s how Hostmonster’s server status looks like today:

The results?

Everything looks good and I remain positive on Hostmonster server performance – after all, I’m hosting websites on Hostmonster itself and I found no problem in maintaining and accessing my websites, why shouldn’t I like Hostmonster?

The disk storage issue with Hostmonster servers

There were some minor worries about Hostmonster’s disk storage being overloaded during June, but things had improved much in September.

Referring to the figure besides, you’ll see all the hardware are in healthy level.

Well that’s all for the moment, I’ll be updating you on the server’s situation in future.

Here’s a question often asked by web hosting shoppers: How soon can my website goes online?

Whenever you’re ordering your hosting service from Hostmonster, your account will be setup within the next hour of your purchase. As long as the payment is completed, you will receive your account details via email, at which point you can access to your website control panel.

At this point, your website is already accessible online – Uploading your webpages via FTP (If you already have your files ready) and pointing your domain to the right DNS are the things to do at this point.

Answering the question: your website actually goes online almost as soon as your payment is completed. However, it might took 24-48 hours for the world to see it fully online. Reason being? It normally takes a  day or two for the Domain Name Server (DNS) to fully sort out.

Thus answering the question (again) in more detail: You can access (and work out) your website as soon as your payment is completed but do expect a day or two for the rest of the world to see your website. Got it?

Troubled by email spam always? Well not anymore if you signed up with Hostmonster’s Postini premium mail filter services. At price of $1/month, Hostmonster users can have Postini helping to keep their inbox free from spam, viruses, phishing, and other email threats.

As mentioned by Hostmonster/Postini officials, Postini offers complete spam and virus protection where multi layers comprehensive security system is applied to stop spam, viruses, phihing, DoS, directory harvest attacheds. On top of that, users get detailed quarantine summary reporting via a convenient web console.

How much does this cost?

$1/month per email address.

Where to signup Postini services at Hostmonster?

Simple. Login to Hostmonster cPanel after you signed up with Hostmonster. (if you haven’t signup with Hostmonster, please do so at here.)

Check on your left bar (on the notice column) for the Postini logo; or scroll a little below for the Postini icon which named as “Premium Anti-Spam”. Refer to image below in case you couldn’t find any:

A little more details on Postini

Postini, a now wholly owned subsidiary of Google Inc., is the global leader in on-demand solutions that deliver on the promise of Communication Security and Compliance. The company is founded in year 1999 and based in San Carlos, California, United States.

At the time of writing, Postini claims that there are more than 40,000 businesses worldwide depend on Postini and they are processing over 1 billion messages per day. Official website: www.PostiniDirect.com.