KellanC wrote:
I currently have a VPS with Bluehost that costs us a lot to run two basic sites, one complex site (but not a ton of traffic) and e-mail hosting.
We pay about $700 a year for this and that includes paying extra for more RAM and more CPU to keep the main (more complex) site happy as it has a plugin that does some mildly heavy lifting that didn't work right with standard RAM and CPU (2GB, 2 Cores). We pay $25 a month for 2 addition GB and 2 additional cores) so base bill is like $500 a year plus $250 for these upgrades.
These are all Wordpress sites and forget shared hosting. Every time I've tried that the performance was so piss-poor due to the shared environment that the sites often would just get crushed. I've also tried a couple other VPS hosts (like SiteGround) and found their support to not work for me. I'm an old tech guy, but not a web guy and when I run into problems I love being able to call up Bluehost VPS support and I get instant, generally excellent help. Chat support or e-mail support often takes MUCH longer, often days -- while the site is down or not functioning right.
I keep waiting for Bluehost to get competitive and upgrade their base or lower their pricing, but it's been at least 10 years without that happening.
Are there hosts out there that are as helpful as Bluehost and as reliable?
Have you ever considered that perhaps the web dev who designed the WP site just sucked?
I think that you should start there ... have the site(s) optimized.
But to answer your initial question, I have never heard of a VPS provider which has phone support, so if you have that at BlueHost, you might as well stay there.
Oh, and FYI, BlueHost is one of the worst companies out there for hosting - so your problem may actually just be the fact that you are hosting with BlueHost.