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!
{ 55 comments… read them below or add one }
I used to like Bluehost… when they were good.
From the time I was new to this whole internet marketing deal, I’ve worked with BlueHost as my hosting provider. That was a special time, indeed. My sites were always up, communication was frequent and all information you needed were given without reservations. In fact, the owner used to send very assuring emails when upgrades were being performed and kept us regularly updated on the status of his business.
Unfortunately, that time has long since passed.
Is it really the fate of all small businesses to be greedy money-grubbers once they hit their stride? I don’t know. What I’m pretty sure of is that the BlueHost I’m working with now is not the same one I started with.
Do you know what happens today when BlueHost performs server swaps? They tell you they’re doing simple file maintenance and that your site will be back up shortly. In truth, though, your site ends up inaccessible for the next 14 hours.
Call customer support and you’ll get a smattering of answers that pretty much translate to either one of these:
* “There’s no problem.”
* “We won’t do anything.”
* “It’s not our job.”
* “We’re working on it. It will be done soon.”
Just like an old favorite band who have gone big and sold out, I guess it’s time to utter the cliche, “I used to like them…back when they were good.” Damn you, BlueHost, you used to be so good.
I don’t know what happened to Bluehost, but they are definitely no long the reliable giant that they used to be. Now they are just an old giant trying to keep from collapsing under its own weight. At least that’s what it seems like to me. I have used Bluehost in various projects dating back almost four years but six months ago I packed up and left for good as they were just killing my business with slowness and outages.
I have to say the most miserable failure in Bluehost’s long and painful demise is the customer service. It’s a miserable failure because they don’t have any, just tech support. And while tech support is not very good at their own job, they are even worse at customer service. Or you can try the sales department, but after getting put on “infinite hold” twice you’ll probably give up on that as well.
One time they changed the backend software to my hosting, leading me to spend the next 24 hours fixing everything so the website was functional again. And after nagging e-mail after nagging e-mail trying to get me to renew domains, they failed to notify me that an entire account was up for renewal. And like usual, it was the general “not my problem” attitude when I called tech support.
Really the only reason I think they’re still in business is because Bluehost was such a big name for so many years. Trust me though when I say that the name is all that’s left. They have too many users and not enough resources, which naturally leads to crashes and outages. That’s all there is too it; they need more equipment to handle the load they have now and for whatever reason they’re not getting it.
Maybe they’re just trying to see how long they can go on making money just on the name without providing any real service besides some space on a server from the Mesozoic Era. Regardless, any intelligent webmaster should take a quick glance around the internet, see what people are saying about Bluehost, and draw your conclusion from that. If you don’t heed that advice, all I can say is that you deserve the crap that they give you.
I’ve been on the phone incessantly since yesterday because my hosting’s down. According to one support agent, the servers being changed. Another one I talked to said there was a problem on the system and it’s being fixed. Still, the one I called just two hours ago said there were no scheduled upgrades so things should be working fine. Can you even reason with idiots?
In all honesty, the only people I can imagine tolerating the crap that BlueHost puts customers through are either those who don’t know any better (newbies) or those who are dumb enough to take it (stupid people.)
I first encountered BlueHost after a former client (I’m a programmer) who started his site with them contacted me regarding issues he was having with their service. He was getting a high volume of spam on his domain mailbox and customer support just couldn’t be persuaded to do anything about it. In fact, by the looks it, BlueHost quit blocking spam, rendering his hosting prime target for hundreds of retarded emails daily.
After trying to get BlueHost to fix it to no avail, I decided to have him move the site to my hosting temporarily (I had a pretty good plan with Lunarpages) while he figured out his next move. Unfortunately for us, we sought BlueHost’s advice in transferring the site, leading to more headaches than we bargained for.
We contacted customer support regarding the actions needed to undertake the transfer and they were helpful on that end. Among the things we were told to do was to update registrant information with the domain registrar, which made sense since the email address on record was no longer valid. The tech support on the other end of the line even guided us through the process step-by-step, which was something we never got before, prompting the whole move in the first place.
What the technician failed to inform us of, however, was that updating the email address essentially locked the domain with BlueHost, keeping the DNS addresses from being updated for the next 60 days. Granted, we were both inexperienced enough to listen to stupid advice, but it really showed us how uninformed BlueHost’s own support team was.
After discussing it at length with the registrar, they decided BlueHost was at fault in the matter and decided to allow us to move the domain to the other host. Instead of simply admitting the problem on their end, however, BlueHost sent us an email saying the transfer should not have been allowed and requiring us to go through a lengthy process in order to move the hosting somewhere else.
The transfer was finally completed and everything was running fine. To our surprise, we received another email from BlueHost (customer retention, probably) informing us that the domain in question is “no longer registered to BlueHost.com….And, just to let you know, (the domain) is totally non-operational at the moment. I’m sorry that your new hosting provider isn’t working out so well….(some sales pitch.)” Just when I thought I’ve seen everything, I never imagined that hardsell coming. Of course, the site was completely operational when they sent that email.
BlueHost is one of those hosting companies that have a great offer on the surface. Unfortunately, that attractiveness is purely skin deep, offering absolutely nothing of substance underneath.
First, I’d like to say that I do find fault with most hosting companies I’ve tried and BlueHost is definitely not alone when it comes to being a sub-standard provider. However, few of those hosting companies seem to have the professional appearance that BlueHost has managed to sculpt on the outside, while being an absolute nightmare deep down.
My biggest problem, thus far, is the support. I’ve seen my share of bad tech support in my day and BlueHost ranks right down there among the pits. It seems that anytime you ask a question that isn’t word-for-word in their stock answers database, all they’ll do is throw bullshit your way until you give up. Forget asking about anything that requires them to think for any more than 10 seconds. It seems their tech personnel incur headaches whenever they try to try to use their brains.
At the moment I write this, my site has been down for 16 hours with no sensible answer from tech support, which likely means they have no idea what the server guys are doing! Instead of calling support for any problem, I suggest you just check the FAQ and Terms Of Service to save yourself the trouble.
I really wonder how BlueHost gets so many positive reviews online. Could that many people hosting 5-page HTML websites actually care enough to put in a positive word for this company?
I have been a loyal customer of BlueHost over the last four years. While I’ve always been aware of CPU usage issues and the various performance problems experienced by other customers, I’ve never seen it fit to move because I essentially a company profile site. With an average traffic consisting of mostly business customers, their shared hosting was adequate for my needs.
Two weeks ago, my site experienced a DDOS attack that left it inoperable. Any decent and responsible host would have recognized the problem and made changes to put a stop to the assault. BlueHost, apparently, has a different idea in mind – when your site gets attacked, it’s your freaking fault!
BlueHost disabled my site during the attack. While I would have preferred that they fix it without putting me offline, I understand it was a shared server and bringing the site down temporarily helped relieve the repercussions for other sites hosted on it.
What’s unforgivable, however, is that BlueHost saw fit to blame me for the attack. When I called customer support, the reps told me I violated their terms of service and had to move my hosting elsewhere. I couldn’t wrap my head around it but the hired support staff at the company apparently have themselves convinced that I attacked my own site and brought it down out of my own volition.
Trying to plead my case, I was introduced to BlueHost’s Abuse Department, which has some of the most moronic and unnecessarily rude people I’ve ever encountered in my life. BlueHost, you should be ashamed of yourselves, blaming good customers for unfortunate events that you should have been protecting them from in the first place!
Yes, I share the same problem as you. They blamed me for the virus that infected my website. It seemed their customer service only work from 8am – 5pm. So if i am from Malaysia, i have to wait until late at night to communicate with the Abuse dept.
A few months ago, one of my employees informed me that there was something wrong with our company site. While the main page showed up when you typed in the URL, neither the subpages nor our installed CMS would launch. We called up customer support and never got any straight answer – we did get plenty of suggestions about what to check, though, on our end.
My developer poked around a bit and discovered that the server we were on had changed IP addresses. Whether BlueHost updated the machine or moved us to a different server over the weekend (we discovered the problem on a Monday) wasn’t known. In fact, we asked customer support about that specifically and, according to them, there wasn’t a scheduled move.
Now, an obvious problem was present (no thanks to BlueHost’s tech support, by the way). Our hosting was on a different IP than what was on the main URL’s DNS. Customer support told us to wait till the DNS updated across all servers which would take anywhere from 12 to 48 hours.
After 48 hours (yep, we waited), the problem remained. We called up our local ISP and asked them to update their DNS information so the site at least worked on our end. After they refreshed, however, things still didn’t work. We ended up putting BlueHost’s tech support with our ISP’s tech support on a conference call where the BlueHost employee repeatedly claimed it was a problem on the ISP’s end. After going over the problem step-by-step (and wasting both our and the ISP’s time), the BlueHost tech finally admitted that the issue appeared to be in their backyard.
Despite the admission, however, the site remained broken. At that point, I just wasn’t interested in dealing with BlueHost’s incompetence anymore and decided to move our hosting somewhere else. I lost money (both from the time we wasted and the paid hosting costs we eventually didn’t use) but that loss was much easier to absorb than having to deal with them ever again.
As a hosting provider, isn’t it only prudent when you’re performing updates on a server to inform your customers? When you move my account to a different machine that’s not point-by-point the same as my old server, don’t I deserve to know the details as a paying customer?
BlueHost’s server team, apparently, doesn’t think so.
I’m not going into the intricate details but suffice to say that my site was down one day for reasons no one can explain. I called support and they said the account was peachy. I called again and all they could muster was, “Check your CMS. Maybe you updated something and you forgot about it.”
I know I didn’t update anything. I’m not even a coder. In fact, I’ve been using the exact same CMS I had someone from eLance code for the good part of a year and a half. Called support again to check if an unauthorized access of my account has been made, trying to match their logs with the times I knew I accessed the control panel. Everything was in sync.
Getting absolutely no help from BlueHost for days, I decided to bring in the developer who originally developed the CMS to look at it. It took him about three hours to discover that BlueHost updated their Apache installation and that a couple lines of code needed to be changed. Will you look at that? I never got an email about it. Support claimed no changes were made and everything was exactly as it used to be. Yet, there was an Apache update!
The problem I encountered with BlueHost was partially my fault. I neglected to update the necessary personal information right when it was needed. However, the utter disregard BlueHost showed during this time was wholly inappropriate. Perhaps, that might be how they treated all their individual shared hosting customers: inconsequential pieces of shit.
I’ve been hosting four sites with BlueHost, all related to one another. The most important of these is a gallery and directory of local tattoo artists – a central destination of sorts for customers looking to get inked in and around our state.
There have been a few small glitches in the past. For instance, email on BlueHost’s end was very restrictive and we’ve had to request for our limits to be bumped up several times (both size quota and sending quota). Since we allowed artists to create an email address on our site and access it via webmail, we needed a lot more than BlueHost’s default (which I didn’t know they had since everything looked unlimited during the buying process). No biggie for that since we eventually got what we needed though.
Some months ago, however, I decided to cut down on my credit cards and bank accounts, cutting off some and consolidating what remained. As it turns out, the payment info I had with BlueHost were among those I decided to streamline. When billing came around (a few days ago), BlueHost couldn’t charge me so they decided (with absolutely no notice) to delete my entire account. They didn’t suspend it or deactivate it – just took it off the server with nary a whimper.
I only found out the site was down when one of the artists tried checking his email, couldn’t access it and informed me. When I called up customer support, I was simply told that it was policy to remove unbilled accounts and to contact billing. My main concern was not the account but the mailing info and site updates. I told billing I was going to reinstate my account IF they have a backup of my directory that’s at most two weeks old since I already have a backup from three weeks ago. Response has been slow from BlueHost which makes me suspect a recent copy of the site is not available. I’ve already been shopping for a new host and I’ve contacted most of the artists to apologize for the trouble.
I am not an internet dude. In fact, the reason I got duped into hosting with this company in the first place is because of my naivety and simple-mindedness when it comes to all this technical stuff.
What I am is a guy who runs both an offline business and a nonprofit organization who wanted some web presence to go with my real-world activities. I asked a local kid to design a website for my company and while looking for a place to host it, I chanced upon a glowing review of BlueHost.com.
Being completely uninitiated in the ways of the web, all I really wanted was a hosting company with great customer support that can help me through problems with the site every step of the way. Based on the review, BlueHost seemed a perfect fit for that.
So I bought the hosting, registered a domain and asked the local guy to upload the site to BlueHost. Since the kid knew what he was doing, things went pretty smoothly. Every time I typed my website URL on Internet Explorer, there was my company. I was satisfied.
A few months after that, I had another guy do a website for my nonprofit. Setting it up on the host wasn’t part of the deal so he just gave me all the files, along with instructions on how to install it. Since I heard those adulating testimonials about BlueHost’s customer service, I figured it wouldn’t be too much to ask them to give me phone instructions while I installed the site myself.
It’s now been two weeks and it has been the most frustrating experience of my life. Customer support is unbelievably unfriendly, rude and just plain disinterested in helping me out. I still haven’t successfully uploaded the new site, even after following tech support’s dismissive instructions. While I understand my problem might be basic, isn’t it part of their job to at least take 10 minutes to talk me through it instead of dismissing all my questions by spouting, “Look at the FAQ” or “Hire someone to help you?”
I have been writing a hosted blog on the Wordpress domain for the good part of two years and have been able to secure a sizeable audience during that time. Early this year, I decided to make the jump and move the blog to its own hosting, looking to take advantage of monetization opportunities that a growing blog such as mine can enjoy in the current space.
Since I remember BlueHost being among the most prominent hosting services on the Wordpress recommendations page, I did not hesitate seeking to make my move with them. I called up BlueHost’s customer service to inquire about their offerings, asking them to specifically look at my blog, my audience stats and to recommend a suitable plan based on that. It all went smoothly, from registering an account, adding the domain and moving my content over to their server. I loved BlueHost.
Two weeks into it, however, everything changed. When I tried logging in to update my blog one morning, it was inaccessible. I fired up my hosting account – disabled. I immediately called up the support number and spoke to a customer rep who informed me that my site was put down for excessive use of profanity and was told to look up the Terms Of Service to verify what rules my site broke. What the…
I complained, saying that I showed them my site before I registered for an account and was recommended a particular hosting plan, with no mention that I could be in trouble for my liberal use of cuss words and phrases, which, incidentally, dotted both my posts and comments section. The rep said there was nothing he can do and that I should take it up with the Abuse Department. In the meantime, he told me they can give me temporary access so I can clean up the profanity and bring the site up to the requirements of the TOS if I wanted it recommissioned.
Obviously, there’s no way I’m cleaning everything up. Shit, make me rewrite two years worth of content, will you? I’ve talked with Abuse and it seems like an impossible situation. I’m still thinking about my next step but I’m leaning towards getting a refund and moving elsewhere. Any good Wordpress host recommendations?
I love hostgator!
I’ll keep my Bluehost horror story short. Here’s the blow-by-blow, in brief:
* All three WP sites I was hosting with Bluehost were suddenly inaccessible one morning
* I tried opening my hosting control panel to check what’s wrong. It was down too.
* I called up support, explained the problem and was informed that my WP installations were compromised (file injection) due to a security flaw
* Support blamed the WP release, saying there were vulnerabilities that allowed the infiltration
* I asked why other WP installs on the same server (and other servers for that matter) weren’t compromised
* He rambled on how it isn’t Bluehost’s problem but a WP issue (obviously not sure what the real problem is)
* I used to do tech support and I recognized the futility of discussing the problem with someone who doesn’t know so I asked for a manager
* Support refused to give me the manager
* He started blaming me for running an insecure setup (yep, that’s what you get trying to reason with idiots) and not taking care of my installations (even though securing a managed server is their job)
Eventually, they agreed (yep, they initially refused) to allow me to backup all my files and databases, so I can move the hosting to my backup server. About three days after that, I received an email from Bluehost essentially acknowledging that the vulnerability was an issue on their end, beaming about how they swiftly found the problem and came up with a permanent solution. Way to go Bluehost, you’re the best!
Bluehost never promised much in the way of backups, claiming to only provide “customary backups for our clients,” so I guess I can’t blame them all that much. However, lumping my account in a shitty box that destroyed all MySQL database installs three times in two weeks is absolutely unforgivable.
It happened a few months ago. One day, without warning, my Wordpress installation just couldn’t connect to its database. I went on the live chat (I live in Asia) to report my problem and was informed that the database server they had me on went down. All files, according to the helpdesk, were erased so they will need some time to restore everything from backup.
I received an email once the restore completed. To my consternation, the copy they reinstated was two weeks old. That meant all content I added from the last two weeks, along with any changes I made to the Wordpress backend (via plugins and such) were gone.
Hoping I can get something more current, I went on live chat once more. Helpdesk informed me that regular backups weren’t a part of Bluehost’s service and this was the best they can give me. I dug up my file repository and found a backup (from the Databases section of the control panel) I downloaded which was around a week old. Went back on live chat to ask for help in using that instead, to which I got an apathetic, “Your data is your responsibility. We can’t help you with that.”
I was aghast. I didn’t ask them to do it for me – just asking for instructions on how to go about putting it in (as you can tell, I’m not a very technical guy). I eventually found out how to do it via PHPMyAdmin (no thanks to customer service) and restored my Wordpress database to the newer version.
Next came the task of trying to piece together the content from the past week that I lost. Before I could get that done, though, the database server crashed again! Even better, about five days after this last failure, the thing conked out for a third time, at which point Bluehost admitted that the server has been retired (it obviously was on its last breath) and that the databases were being moved somewhere else!
When Bluehost cancelled my account the customer service was a real pain to deal with. They just kept saying “the order came from up above, there’s nothing I can do”. I eventually told them to take the elevator upstairs and slap their bosses for me, but they unfortunately declined. Whoever’s making the decisions at Bluehost could really use one upside their head.
Bob’s last blog post..Toto Washlet S400 Bidet
On the beggining they seemed to be fine but they started make a problems with time.
They say everything is unlimited but they limited EVERYTHING.
They suspended my web site and actually never expleined WHY?
Only what they did was offering other plans of course more expensive!
They never give me a chance to received all my files back so I lost everything i kept there, all my files.
They in very rude way told me THERE IS NO BACKUP on your file! Overall BLUEHOST is sucks!
KEEP AWAY!
Hello everyone,
My site is not up and running right now. That is due to Siteground’s poor customer support.
Thought that I would look up recommendations from ‘experts’. You got to look out for these people, they are nothing but sales people.
I wanted to give justhost.com a try. Even that was a challenge and a good thing to, my credit card did not go through… something about duplicate transaction. I immediately attempted to get off the site. Then got one of those pop-up chats. I explained my situation, only to find that I was chatting with an automated chat session. GRRRR! Now I am on the phone to “SALES” been on hold now for 20 minutes to be exact. You would not like the music, it is annoying. Think they would lose business on that alone. If I was calling sales to set up an account, think that 4 minutes wait and then look elsewhere. I just want to make sure that I was not charge.
I have a bit longer to hold. Stay away from this site. Justhost.com = not good.
2 websites hacked in less than one month. They say it is my fault for using their scripts. Did not tell me that they stopped doing full backups regularily because I now exceed 2GB in storage.
Crap customer service now. I am leaving them after being with them since 1999.
After using them for over three years I thought they are a reliable company, boy was I wrong. Server harddrive failed, it took them about one day to bring the server back up and when they did my websites were GONE!. They said their daily back up file is corrupted so they cannot recover my websites. They screwed up so bad and their customer support attitude was “TOUGH, WE DO NOT CARE, YOU ALREADY PAID FOR TWO MORE YEARS HOSTING SUCKER”
STAY AWAY FROM BLUEHOST