Interview with James Grierson of BlueHost / HostMonster

It’s been a while since we last did an interview but this time  we got one of the industry’s veteran onboard, BlueHost and HostMonster’s VP of Business Development, James Grierson. Enjoy!

For the benefit of our readers, can you please introduce yourself and explain what is your role over at BlueHost?

My official title is VP of Business Development.  I oversee the company partnerships, marketing initiatives and the affiliate program.

A lot of webmasters and website owners don’t know that Bluehost and Hostmonster are owned by the same company. Is there any difference between them aside branding?

The companies actually have different ownership and therefor there are a few small differences between them.  Both companies utilize the same data centers and many of the same employee resources.

BlueHost and HostMonster were founded in 1996, the early years of web hosting. How do you explain that your web hosting company has managed to survive this long?

The owners of our company first started off with 50megs then 0catch and many other hosting platforms in-between.  With each project they have changed the business model and offerings and have been very successful in creating products that have excelled in the marketplace.  We are about to release some new server side resource management tools that will change the game again as no other shared hosting companies will have the ability to give dedicated and protected resources to their customers in a shared environment.

With the current hosting industry being so competitive, a lot of them rely on outsourced support staff to maintain their low prices. What’s your take on this?

Outsourcing is not an option for our company.  We are proud of our local staff and with the purchase of our new 50,000 square foot headquarters building last year we are planning on staying here for the future.  Our customers average less than 30 seconds on hold before they can speak to a live representative who is trained and ready to help them resolve any questions they have.

While green web hosting can be viewed more as a marketing strategy than an ecological effort, why Bluehost and Hostmonster haven’t got down this path yet?

Our owner believes that purchasing carbon credits to offset power consumption is not true to the spirit of going green.  If you look into all of the “green” hosting platforms out there they are all purchasing credits.  We believe in making real world changes to help reduce our consumption.  Our new resource protection software actually reduces our power consumption by 8-10% per server.  That is a real difference in power consumption.  We also pipe in cold outside air for 6 months of the year into our data centers which reduces the amount of power needed for cooling.  During the winter months, we use the hot air returns from the servers to heat our building rather than use power and gas to heat our offices.

Some of the things that matter most when it comes to web hosting is reliability and performance. How do you ensure the best uptime and speed to your customers?

Our resource protection tools make it so one slow website or one person who is trying to pummel the server with poorly written scripts cannot adversely affect the rest of the users on the system.  What this means is a user hosting with us should never have slow site loading times.  Our servers are also backed up with UPS power and generators to handle power outages.  As for bandwidth redundancy we have over 20GB of bandwidth coming into our data centers via multiple providers.  That way if there is ever an outage we can route the traffic through a different carrier.

Do you own your own data centers? If so, how many do you have and where are they located?

We own all of our own datacenter equipment but not the buildings themselves.  We currently have 3 data centers and are currently building a new facility that we will own and operate here at our headquarters.  The new datacenter will be larger and house more servers than the other three centers combined.  Our data centers are located in Provo and Orem Utah.

Your web hosting company specialize in shared web hosting. Any plans on adding new hosting products such as reseller hosting or dedicated servers in a near future?

We will explore the possibilities of dedicated hosting and reseller hosting once we have finished our new data center project.  Until that time we do not want to overload our existing data centers.

Well thank you for your precious time James. Anything else you would like to add to this interview?

Thank you for the interview, I would like to let everyone know we have a new website redesign coming in the near future and to be on the lookout for our new resource protection systems.  For more information and updates take a look at our owners blog at http://www.mattheaton.com.

Links

• BlueHost Official Website
• HostMonster Official Website
• BlueHost Special Offers & Discounts – Special Pricing Only $3.95!
• HostMonster Special Offers & Discounts – Special Pricing Only $3.95!