One of the most vital requirements for a successful, profitable and high-traffic website is to have the least amount of downtime possible. For websites that deal in goods, depend on AdSense revenue, or simply want their website to be available as much as possible, having your page down for hours or days at a time can cost you a lot of money and frustration.
You’ll notice that Bluehost makes no uptime claims on their website; this can be either a good sign or a bad sign. It’s a good sign if you don’t like seeing companies lie about their 99.9999999% uptime, but it’s a bad sign because they don’t even have enough faith in themselves to give a number.
While no hosting company can provide 100% uptime, most have ways of minimizing your downtime to a very small percent. In our experience, Bluehost sucks in this regard. They cost us more money than any other hosting provider we’ve ever dealt with and our research has shown that we’re not the only ones tired of unexplained downtime.
Post your experiences with Bluehost’s downtime here. While it may be too late for us, there are others out there who might find it helpful.
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May 25, 5:00pm EST.
Bluehost is down right now.
Bluehost crashed in slow motion. The first indication of trouble was noticed on Monday, 25th of May at 22:00 CEST when a login to the Bluehost Control Panel triggered an error message: “Your password is not installed correctly on box…bluehost.com Please wait while it is updated.
A few minutes later – after another login attempt – the message read: “Your username xyz is installed correctly, but your account cannot be repaired”
When I opened the e-mail received from Bluehost concerning the password change, Firofox could not display the graphics that comes with the mail – another sign that Bluehost was in serious troubles.
A test accessing three more sites hosted with Bluehost failed as well and a final test to call up http://www.bluehost.com failed.
Two hours later the problems seemed to have been resolved. The websites could be reached and – surprise, surprise – the control panel at Bluehost worked again. A quick review of the CPU throttle statistics revealed the potential problem: The statics message said that in the past 24 hours there were no incidents of CPU throttling on the website – even though five hours ago some minor CPU peaks had occured.
I am still waiting to read on Matt Heaton’s CEO blog about the cause of the crash – but I will not hold my breath.
Anybode else with similar experiences?
Regards, Richard
Bluehost is the worst.
All my sites (about 6 of them) are down for at least 15 minutes a day. Live chat doesn’t help at all, all they tell me is to wait. Or that the “site is working but just not on your computer!” How stupid.
So in search of a better solution or “what’s wrong with bluehost”, i’ve stumbled across this site. Glad I found it!
Just a question…
Is it easy to transfer all my stuff from bluehost to a new server? What kind of skills do i need?
Thanks heaps for the site!
Dave´s last blog ..The no.1 Reason Why Long-Term Relationships & Marriages Fail
Great website. Bluehost is the biggest piece of crap I’ve ever used and I will never ever even think about using them again. Because of their crap hosting my site has been unavailable for 5+ hours and it has affected ranking and indexing of my site. Freaking ridiculous. On top of all that, the service their tech support guys give is horrible. I get talked down to by some outsourced indian who can’t speak english about how downtime happens with every host. Damn bluehost to hell!
Took the wordpress recommendation to host my sites with bluehost.com and am very dissapoointed.
Was told my shared server was attacked this week so sites are down.
Then today the server is down due to ‘admin’ reasons…
Their server is very poor…..
Can anyone recommend an alternative???
HELP!!
As I run an internet based business I cant have the sites alwasy down as is with Bluehost.com
This piece of shit company has its servers down right now. assholes. really costing me $$./
Seriously this place sucks. I used to think highly of bluehost because 1) I’d call and get an American and 2) I came from another crappy dump website by the name of GoDaddy (they are worse than bluehost…much worse). Bluehost does have a fast way to download wordpress and I really do like their FTP and other features. This is actually my biggest and only complaint about Bluehost….the downtime. I run a review blog, a shop on a subdomain, and another blog all hosted on bluehost and I ping it to see how much time its down. It is often that it is down for at least an hour a day. I need an alternative, but I signed up for 2 years. This sucks. I’m not as concerned about my blog…its not high traffic. But I do care about my shop because its been down 2 or 3 times already today and its pissing me off. Bluehost you suck
I call Blushost customer support everyday because my site down everyday. When I ask why my site is down every, Answered by helpdesk people., “Each time I called, there is a different porlbem issue. ” How many problem does bluehost.com have? I think too much problem. customer support asnwer telephone is very quick but just can not sovle the problems. I will not recommend you with bluehost hosting your domain. I should say: ” blueHost sucks”.
My (very simple) website is down at the moment, and worse I cannot read my corperate email all day already. I already emailed bluehost and got an answer to give them some more information. But after this silence….
Hello,
I have hosted many sites atBluehost and recommended it to many friends and customers.
Lately I have noticed lots of downtimes.
I have set up monitoring tools at pingdom.com because I started seeing my sites to be down often, really often.
With pingdom uptime tools I see in the last 3 days the average uptime has been as low as 94%!
One of these server my sites is hosted unto is being attacked each 3-4 months with a DDoS, and they change the IP number without giving me any notice. Problem is, I have a .it domain pointing there, and when the IP number changes, I discover it is unreachable after days of total unreachability! Go imagine.
A hell for Google indexing, pages getting dropped, money lost, a nightmare.
I am not angry with them, but the quality level has dropped.
Next time, I’ll go looking somewhere else.
Chris Lyons´s last blog ..DimensioneX 648 New!
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