Here you can voice your experience with Bluehost’s Customer Support. While most companies have lapses from time to time, in our opinion, Bluehost’s Customer Support falls way below the line of tolerable. Whether it be a problem with our databases, downtime, or excessive MySQL queries, we usually heard the same thing; it’s not our problem. This kind of Customer Support is in stark contrast to what we’ve received from every other hosting provider.
Post your experiences here and let others know why you think Bluehost’s Customer Support sucks!
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“Bluehost panel is wonderful. Clean and with a lot of tools. ”
Yes but their tools don’t work! I can’t even renew my account! Figure that.
Bluehost story and accompanying song
I had a similar experience as those described by many others on this website. My website was hacked, and I naturally called up customer service to ask what I could do about it. They informed me that the issue could be related to the fact that I was running an out of date script, which was installed by their control panel by the way. In any case, that was easily solved; in fact the customer service representative updated the script on his end and restored my site from a relatively recent backup. After that, I got another hacker attack 3 hours later and called customer service again. This time, they were less helpful. They told me that their servers are secure, but that they cannot guarantee security of individual accounts. I didn’t quite follow the reasoning, but asked what they would be able to do to help me solve the problem as I had clearly followed their previous advice. The representative told me that they couldn’t do anything, and stated that my best bet would be to go read an article on their website about programming security considerations. This was the last straw for me, and I left them the same day.
I also had issues where I had to shut down my email list because I was constantly going over the hourly email limit. All of this added together caused me a great deal of frustration, and so I figured I should at least get my side of the story out in one way or another. This song is the result. Enjoy, and please give me any comments you may have.
The link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyFfn7BY91g
At one time, I felt that the worst company to deal with was GoDaddy.com. But after my companies experience with BlueHost, I have realize that GoDaddy is an angel by comparison. BlueHost touts unlimited space, but when our site got a little large they went so far as to offer us all of the money that we had spent with them back, if we went to another host. When we refused all of a sudden our site was shut down because they claimed we had been infected with malware. They also claimed that our password was insufficient. So we cleaned out the bad files and changed the password. They turned the site back on, and then a few days later it was down again claiming we had malware again. This time they claimed that our code was not secure enough with no explanation what that meant. Also again they asked us to go to another host. I did some checking and found that there were many complaints from people who had the same problems when their site got large. To me the security problem is theirs, with a possibility that they placed the bad code on our site. Also found complaints where sites were shut down for having any sexual comments, partial nude pictures, or anything their mormon religion feels inappropriate. This is extreme censorship.
When I first started using Bluehost over 5 years ago they were OK as a host, not great, but OK. As time went on more problems appeared CPU quota exceeded errors were occurring all the time during the end of my first year with them. I was going to cancel my account at that time but tech support assured me, that this was not the norm for Bluehost.
The next thing you know Bluehost went unlimited. Soon after I was notified by them my account had too many files. So I got rid of 4 out of 7 of the domains I was hosting with them which brought me under their 50,000 file limit. Also my traffic dropped off significantly as all my sights were tied together.
My sites went from slow to a crawl after Bluehost started “CPU Throttling.” Bluehost tech support blamed the problem on the plugins, I was using with Wordpress. Well after disabling my plugins, the problem of CPU throttling continued. I later found out from the Bluehost forum everyone on my server was experiencing high CPU throttling with little to no traffic.
Then out of the blue a friend emails me letting me know my site is down with a your account has been suspended by Bluehost notice. I contacted Bluehost by chat. They tell me there is nothing they can do and advised me to contact Bluehost’s abuse department Monday. It is Friday night, Bluehost has killed all my websites and I am pissed my sites will be down all weekend. Monday mourning rolls around, I call the Bluehost abuse department and get the run around while my sites are still down. Tuesday I call the Bluehost abuse department and ask to talk to the supervisor. They tell me she is in a meeting . I ask when will she be out of a meeting . They say they don’t know. Wednesday I call Bluehost abuse department again asking for their supervisor. They connected me to Heather Richins, which happens to be one of the meanest people I have ever run across, who said I was using too many resources. After I listened to her talk down to me for 15 minutes she said she would give me one more chance. Keep in mind I have almost no traffic at this point, plugins disabled and only 2 websites.
Not even a week later I get a notice from Bluehost telling me they have terminated my account for a terms of service violation and I had 15 days before they remove my files from their server. So how in the hell am I supposed to access my files when I am not allowed to log into cPanel. After dealing with the battle ax, Heather Richins, for an hour on the phone, I was given access to my account so I was able to download my files and databases. Since they terminated my account, I lost over a years worth of webhosting cost which was prepaid to them.
If you choose Bluehost, don’ t expect good service, or honesty, or reliable hosting. Don’t be surprised if you experience frequent down times. You can expect technical support to lie to you when there is a problem. After all, no matter what the problem is, it is always your fault and never theirs. Don’t believe the nonsense of unlimited space, they have arbitrary hidden limits in their TOS. Don’t be surprised when they change the rules that were promised to you when you signed up. And finally don’t be at all surprised when they terminate your account , demand you leave, stealing the remainder of your hosting funds.
My story sounds like Phillips… my site gets hacked and costumer service says they can’t do anything… then try to push me to a third party service. to secure it for me. I said, if you’re good at telling me my site is insecure, why don’t you apply those skills and help me secure it…. ARG!
Hi there, just wanted to mention, I enjoyed this post. It was helpful. Keep on posting!
Bluehost is so fake…
I know because I used to work for them…
Just so you know…. those testimonials on their site are fake…. They are not real.
they purposely dont have the total when you create an account so that you press next and you get charged…. and when you see the ad for like $5.95 a month… they dont tell you it will all be charged up front for whatever term you start at….
of course it states all this in the terms of service… but who actually reads the terms of service before they continue….
after they charge you everything all up front… they have a special team on standby called the renewals dept or the cancellations dept. this is a special team who has been trained in retaining customers…
they feel its better to screw you over and get your money first and then try to convince you to stay… rather than being honest.
even when you set your account to manually renew… after you “manually” renew it, the system will auto adjust back to auto renew if you dont personally change it so you will be charged automatically again without notice 15 days before the expiration date….
they have really shady business tactics. I had to quit because I was so sick of hearing good people on the phone who really wanted to think good about bluehost make suggestions that we should just give them a heads up before we charge their card or let them see the total before they buy the hosting….
I wanted to help them and I felt so bad to them and even though I knew I wasnt personally doing it to them.. I knew that the ethics of that company were really messed up…
They even treat their employees like crap… that place only hires people that are related to people that already work there or have a friend or an in somewhere in the company
they lie and cheat their employees….
They are a horrible company to work for and to host with….
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