I have been promoting and recommending Bluehost as the web hosting provider to clients and friends for the last couple of years. Â The immediate draw was the ease of use using the cPanel and lower cost from GoDaddy’s prices. Â I no longer recommend Bluehost. In my opinion Bluehost has gone from first to worst.
A couple of weeks ago I received an email message from a client of mine saying that he cannot log in to his WordPress website. Â The website, and several others I manage are hosted with the web hosting provider Bluehost. This particular website was hosted on a VPS server. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server, which means one server partitioned into several virtual machines with dedicated CPU and memory. Simply put it provides more functionality, more power, less likely to crash, and faster response for pages to appear in browsers. Â The fact that my client couldn’t log in to his VPS hosted WordPress website was very surprising.
My immediate thought, and is always my immediate thought, Â was something is wrong with the website and with WordPress I was thinking those pesky plugins that sometimes get uncooperative especially with the recent WordPress update. So as any good troubleshooter does you search the error that was showing. I searched in a variety of different combinations. Â I found nibbles, and kind-ofs, and maybes. I log in to Bluehost, check the cPanel, all good. I check file manager – no files found. I panic – Bluehost deleted the files? This can’t be? Â So now I’m thinking it might be the server. I think perhaps it was a quick reboot. So I Shift + refresh, delete cookies and history – still nothing.
About 45 minutes later I call Bluehost. As usual I’m waiting for at least 10 minutes, when it finally dawns on me to check Twitter. Sure enough, there was an update to the VPS cPanel and it didn’t go smoothly. The outage lasted approximately 6 – 8 hours. A whole day of lost potential customers, visitors, brand embarrassment for my client. About 4 hours in, I call Bluehost, waited the standard 10 minutes and spoke with a gentlemen who didn’t have a clue what was going on. Where he was asking me about information that he should have known. I asked him who is going to compensate my client for lost revenue? He informs me that the account will be credited for the lost server hours. I doubt if that will transpire.
Bad customer service aside, here’s my issues with what transpired.
- This was an expected update for VPS servers. VPS owners should have been notified of the install so that my client could have had an opportunity to send an email blast warning customers, or put up site under maintenance, or a simple auto forward to the backup website.
- Included in a heads up email to VPS owners and admins should have included the work around (which was provided half way through the outage). The work around was not something I was familiar with and after scouring the internet and finally finding enough information piecemeal on the Bluehost website I was able to complete the necessary steps to get the website back up and running.
- Why do I need to find out about the outage on Twitter? I know Twitter is the 2.0 version of news, but when more information is needed there should be a place for customers to go to get that information. Email heads up aside, why wasn’t this and other outages posted on a Bluehost forum or web page. Even their own sister site Hostgator provided a forum.
This outage is on top of the major outages this past summer as Bluehost transitioned it’s data connections to it’s new parent company EIG.
To end the year, today (12/31/13) Bluehost again had an issue with multiple data connections with shared and VPS servers. Downtime approximately 3 hours. The Bluehost website was down so I wasn’t able to chat. I tried calling – the calls failed. Again I was forced to Twitter with nothing more than “we are working hard to resolve the issue. ”
My new year resolutions include for myself and my clients: find a new web hosting provider. Â I’ve been reading good things about A-2 hosting, and of course there’s always GoDaddy. If you recommend one – post in the comments below.
Happy New Year!
Crappy customer service
worst, worst, worst customer service ever. Told us to upgrade to VPS to solve a problem with email being rejected WITHOUT telling us that the upgrade was to a self service format (VPS) As a small non-profit, we don`t have the capacity to do this with no IT staff or money to pay anyone. Their response? Oh that`s too bad, someone should have explained it to you. I asked for it to be undone. Their response? Oh that’s not possible. You have to cancel your account, get a new one and migrate everything over yourself!! Did they not understand that the problem is that they sold us a product we can’t manage and now they want us to migrate it ourselves!!! We will soon NOT be Bluehost clients.
Hi Mickey thanks for sharing your story. I was told to upgrade to VPS so that I’d have less problems with the servers crashing. So I did – turned out to be even worse. VPS servers had more problems than the shared hosting. Check out A2 hosting, which I’m using for another business. Free migration and they’ll do it for you. They did get DDOS attacked a month ago – but unlike Bluehost where you can’t even reach them – A2 managed to keep us operational for the most part which I was appreciative. No affiliate thing going on – just a happy customer of A2 hosting after dreadful Bluehost.
After using bluehost services for nearly 4 years, i quit bluehost. First time i installed magento on a new domain , i got an email from BH, saying i am using more than my allotted database. I was on an unlimited hosting plan. I asked them which website was using up the excess resources, they denied and refuse to give me the information. I was asked to delete the excess database tables. I was unaware of what I was to delete. After several days they threatened me that if i did not delete the excess tables from my MYSQL database they would block my account. I was worried as many of my domains were hosting on BH. so i decided to delete all my website files on the account, including my sites which were LIVE and running, just so that i get enough time to transfer my domains to another hosting.
Their live chat takes ages to connect and the CS reps the rude to the core.
Even after being on the so called ”Unlimited Hosting” i was told that i can have limited MY SQL database. I realized that magento was not meant to run on BH. If so , why does BH allow the installation of magento on their servers and why dont they mention that the account you are going to buy is only meant for wordpress and HTML website.
This is like misleading and cheating customers and I consider this as a scam. Goodbye BH.
Hi Ali. Thanks for sharing your story. Bluehost customer service is an oxymoron.
Interesting. I’m on the search for a place to host a podcast. I used to have an ice cast server and do live broadcasts, but I’m a totally blind college student, wanting to find a place to host my talking box podcast on a reliable server. I realize keeping up a podcast isn’t free, because it requires a place to store those mp3 files and a reliable website with which the podcast listeners could visit and subscribe to the podcast. I figured blue host would be a good solution and I was close to signing up, until I came across your article. I’ve been disappointed with the free podcast site my podcast was on, and I felt podcasting was a better option because I can record an episode when I have time, verses trying to commit to a live broadcast. I have a husband who is blind, has seizure disorder, cerebral palsy and a sleeping disorder, plus I have a guide dog who is an incredible guide, but also requires financial commitment and responsibility that he gets quality care and time is also an issue so I can keep up his training. That’s why I started focusing more on my podcast and now I’m really not sure where to turn. I was told by a fellow blind podcaster that she used blue host, and when I found out about their unlimited fire storage, I was very close to signing up, but I really don’t have time to deal with problems. I just want something that’s simple, inexpensive, and is not going to be a pile to set up. Has anyone ever heard of a company called 1and1? Supposedly, they are another web hosting company, but I haven’t heard of them as much as blue host or go daddy, and they are supposed to be priced pretty well. Will that be a good place to start? What are your recommendations. I’m really, really glad I came across this article before I jumped on the blue host bandwagon. I’m really urgently looking for a good place, because I promised my podcast listeners I’d have an episode released before Christmas, but this free website is giving me problems, so I need to get something set up whenever I come across a great service. Thank you again for this informative article.
Hi Melissa, Thank you for sharing your story. The host you end up with will always have issues whether caused by their own doing or by external factors – hacking, denial of service attacks. Bluehost had too many internal errors and poor customer service for me. This website is hosted on GoDaddy shared server and so far over the last 2 years I’ve had this site I’ve never had a problem. I’m not endorsing just stating my experience. Shop and ask around you’ll find one that will suit your needs and budget.
For podcasting I store my files on Libsyn (libsyn.com) for $15/mo so I don’t have to worry about storage space on the shared server.
There are many tools, resources, and variations to store podcasting files.
Let me know how you make out.
Larry
I’ve been hosting with bluehost for 10 years, I was advised by the tech to switch to a WP server because it was more reliable and safer against hacks and blah, blah, blah, 30 days after the switch my accounts all 35 of them were hacked. now as someone who is paranoid, the security on my wp sites were top notch, bluehost refused to even admit that they held some responsibility and blamed me. I used to recommend them to everyone I knew, now, I wouldn’t recommend them to a bum. Their CS has gotten exponentially worse of the years and they simply do not care about their customers the way they did when I first started using them. I am on hold right now with bluehost as I am typing this and have been hold for 75 minutes. it is ridiculous.
Thanks for sharing your story Apple. On a client site I switched from Bluehost to A2 hosting. A rather small company, but when they started to grow quickly, they too started having problems with servers and CS. Every hosting company is going to have problems eventually. It all comes down to customer service and most providers are horrible. I wish you good luck on finding the right hosting provider for your business.
I rarely comment on blogs, but I had to leave my feedback on this one. We used blue host for roughly 1 year (From 2013 – 2014). It was an absolute nightmare. We experienced down time roughly every 3 months.
We do anywhere from 3,500.00 – 20,000.00 in sales everyday. Needless to say, that every hour our website is down it’s costing us big.
Here’s the kicker. Our website would go down for 24 hours at a time. One time it actually went down for 3 entire days and nights. Costing us 10’s of thousands of dollars.
What happens when it goes down is the worst part of all. Blue host turns their phone lines off and leaves a message “Check our twitter page for updates”. The updates are extremely vague and never have an actual time frame on when the servers will be back up.
This isn’t an isolated incident either. When blue host servers go down it effects every customer that hosts with them.
Don’t walk away from blue host ——- RUN.
******WARNING***** BLUE HOST IS THE SAME AS HostMonster, HostGator & JustHost.
These hosting companies are all divisions of Endurance International Group.
If one of these hosting companies is down, chances are they’re all down. Avoid all of these companies.
Hi Mike, Thanks for commenting and relating your BlueHost nightmare. It is strange that the ONLY way to communicate a problem is via Twitter. When the phone lines are open I speak to someone who could care less in solving my problem.
I am also feeling bluehost performances to decrease. I have been using them for more than 2 years now. I experience some server down time too.
Holy Cow! Bluehost really screwed the pooch today. They are suspending accounts for having too many files they suspect are being used as storage. They didn’t even send a warning first. This once excellent web hosting provider has indeed been bought by a corporate overlord called EIG. The policies coming from corporate are extremely destructive. If this is how they treat long term business partners I have no choice but to look for another hosting provider. After this incident there is no way I can recommend Bluehost to anyone for anything.
Bluehost is not owned by the same people anymore. Crap service across the board. I don’t know who is better, they all have problems. However, my entire website was gone for 3 weeks. trying to upload files now, but they are likely dated files. they said, “don’t know what happen or why your website was erased, VPS people are supposed to backup their own accounts”. these guys need a day in court. only way is a common class action. who has time to get it started? I’m in.
HI James,
Thanks for commenting and relating your BlueHost experience. I hope you get your website back up and running soon. You’re right – all hosting providers have issues, but the differences are in the customer service and support. Bluehost is clearly lacking in that area.
My website was down 2 times, and now they are closing my account.
They say my wesbite was consuming too much resources, I think it was hacked or something. But they dont say what is causing this. they just want to delete accounts.
Its 06 04 2017 I dont recommend bluehost.