Two months back I was reporting my problem with Bluehost’s database error. I was told that the database server is down due to routine maintenance but I do not think that’s the reason.

I sent a couple of emails to the customer supports since then and was replied with the same reason – site down because of database server maintenance. The situation is a little frustrating as the support do not tell the truths and let me know what’s happening behind the scene (or maybe because they didn’t know). There were several similar problem experienced by others.

Fortunately, the problem is fixed by now. There’s no more significant down time observed by now and the database connection errors had not occurred for more than a month. I’m glad that this is fixed but I still don’t know what happened for the entire January. I can tolerate with short term poor server performance but I don’t really like the way Bluehost handle their clients when there’s a problem. Their hosting offer – unlimited hosting, unlimited addon domains, free domain name, unlimited database, still looks good to me but their customer support lost my compliments. I guess this is one of those situation where you can’t get great real human services in low price.

Hopefully they’ll notice the issue and rectified things in the support department before it’s too late.

I didn’t really know the actual down time because I was not tracking closely on the website but it’s confirmed to be more than 3 hours. All three MySQL databases with my Bluehost account *disappeared* (thus the connection error). I wasn’t sure why that was happening but it scares the hell out of me.

Without any delay I emailed Bluehost and yelled for help.

The first the support staff I encountered wasn’t what’s happening but he quickly referred me to the upper level. In his own words – he’s referring me to their company ‘engineer’. The folks at support department was professional and didn’t do much ‘PR talks’. After about an hour of silence from the supports, all three databases were back and ReviewBluehost.com is back to normal.

At first I had the feelings that my databases were accidentally removed but Bluehost refused the possibility of that. I tried to ask for an explanation after everything is fixed but there were not much to be told. MySQL server down was the official explanation for the incident:

Dear Customer,

The databases are not deleted they just wont show up if the MySQL Server goes down because cPanel and your scripts wont be able to connect to them. It should resolve usually with in 5-60 minutes depending on what has to be done.

Thanks
Brandon O.
Level 2 Scripting Specialist
Bluehost.com
866.573.4678

Well if this is true, I hope you are not hosting on the same MySQL server with me coz this means your site/blog could be down at that time as well.

As a Bluehost customers, you’re offered with the choice between these two MySQL versions, but never both. For ReviewBluehost.com for example, the MySQL version is MySQL 5.0.45 Version.

To check the MySQL version of your account, all you need to do is login into your hosting control panel page, scroll down and look for the “MySQL version” on the right column.

Refer figure for the MySQL version at my hosting account.

What’s MySQL?

MySQL is an extremely popular “relational database management system (RDBMS)” which has more than 11 million installations according to the officials.

In fact, MySQL has become the #1 database choice for delivering web applications, where the program powers high profile web sites such as Yahoo!, Google, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia and millions of websites running on Apache servers.

MySQL is such popular mainly because of the program infrastructure implementation are highly leveraging the popular open source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python).

The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase.

Visit MySQL official website to learn more.