Today, I talked to Matt Heaton -- CEO of HostMonster and BlueHost -- about their recent quality issues.

One of their major problems was their CPU usage limitation that would frequently block customer scripts from executing normally. Matt told me this was now completely fixed:

"We went from 55,000 blocks PER DAY to just over 250".

The 250 remaining are scripts that actually go wrong, like entering endless loops and things like that.

The other major customer complaint we've been hearing lately was about support quality. Matt attributes this to their recent exploding growth.

"Support isn't there yet, but server quality is there. Support is ALMOST there. We hired 40 people in January. We will be to less than 1 min hold times in less than 20 days. There are all in the training class now (Actually 2 training classes) and will be out soon."

With the additional workforce HM+BH's staff will reach 200 people.

So check back by the end of the month to see if HostMonster's and BlueHost's tech support are back on track.

Looking at BlueHost's track record since 1996, we have reasons to believe they will indeed get things under control.

When I was in L.A. a couple of weeks ago, I visited LunarPages' data center located in the One Wilshire building. This is just one of Lunar's 3 different data centers. They have another one in L.A. and a third one in Vegas.

Interestingly enough, I learnt that One Wilshire is the 3rd most connected building in the world! A lot of other hosting companies actually have server cages there...

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MidPhase recently sent me those pictures of their new datacenter hosting their servers for AN Hosting as well as MidPhase.

I think they look cool. Actually I think hosts should always show their data centers on their website... but they rarely do. I don't know, is it me having a fetish for server racks?? ;)

Seriously, I believe how neat or how messy someone's datacenter is tells you a lot! ;)

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