We’ve all heard the horror stories; cancelled accounts without any warning, leaving your websites in a state of Purgatory. Most hosting companies will give you the opportunity to correct what’s wrong with your account, whether it be excessive CPU cycles or causing a heavy load on their oversold servers. Bluehost, on the other hand, is known for their arbitrary and capricious applications of their Terms and Services.
If you’ve ever had your websites taken down without a warning or a notice, or had your sites disappear, leaving you struggling to find a new host – this is the place to post your story. Let everyone know the risks they take when entrusting their valuable sites to Bluehost’s whims.
{ 60 comments… read them below or add one }
My experience with Bluehost has been absolutely ridiculous. I pre-paid for hosting for an entire three years on several sites. Two months later, my account was cancelled. Trying to get an answer as to why this happened was pretty much impossible. To this day, the only reason I have received for this was “Violation of TOS.” Well, let me say I have been a webmaster for a long time and have poured over the Bluehost TOS, and am 100% sure I was not breaking it in any way.
The Live Chat was equally as unhelpful. I waited a half an hour just to talk to someone, and that someone had to be the most ignorant “assistant” I have ever encountered. Listen guys, there is more to a live chat than just answering frequently asked questions. As soon as I got to the tough questions it was like a brick wall went up. I got stonewalled and started waiting several minutes between responses. Eventually the person on the phone decided I wasn’t going to give up, and took it upon himself to abort the connection.
It’s been several months now and I still haven’t received a refund. I have begun the necessary avenues to getting my money back but honestly it’s not looking good. Talk about being strangled with red tape. I’ve contacted my lawyer, but he said that since the burden of proof is on me and a lawsuit wouldn’t be worth what I originally spent, it is very unlikely I will ever see that money again.
So after coming to terms with my loss, I left a very stern message with the Better Business Bureau and just decided to be vocal as possible on the net about avoiding Bluehost at all costs. I can’t believe a business poorly run has gotten so big. Or maybe the bigness is the source of the problem. Either way, congratulations, Bluehost! Don’t spend it all in one place!
Call billing. They will refund you. It is very easy. Put some effort into it.
James´s last blog ..New House Videos
James, your nuts, these people charge your credit card and then refuse to return your money! Class Action time, all in favor?
This company is a scam! Customer satisfaction there motto, not hardly,
Bluehost was a really big name for a few years but now they have degenerated into one of the most unethical operations I have ever seen on the web. The product they sell is useless by all accounts and I suspect that most of their money comes from naïve new customers who are just going off the big name. I say this because once they have your money you are a nuisance to them, and your tech support call is just getting between them and their solitaire game.
Why do I say the product is useless? Because no website can be expected to operate with the amount of server crashes and downtime that Bluehost’s servers experience. Even if you run a tiny little non-demanding website, you’re still at the mercy of the thousands of other sites who may, at any time, crash the server.
And if you happen to be that site that happened to be pulling a little too much traffic with the wrong PHP script, don’t be surprised if they just decide to delete your website. Of course, if they delete your website you’re probably going to want to call them. I would suggest yelling at a brick wall for a couple hours before attempting this task, just to get used to the feeling. You’ll have to tell them your password, which is okay because let’s face it: you’re not getting your website back. I am surprised the people on the phone actually are getting paid to do whatever it is that they do.
Once you come to terms with the fact that your website is gone (you were backing everything up every night, right?), you’re not getting anything else out of the deal, and they’re going to go ahead and keep your money, then you can look around Google, find a website like this, and leave your sad story like mine. Or you can be slightly more intelligent and just stay away from Bluehost in the first place.
Trust me, if you think people are just exaggerating because they are angry and no company could be that incompetent, think again. There is absolutely no point in paying a cheaper price for hosting for a website that will just get deleted if the server outages don’t kill it first. I understand the need to market something cheap, but you wouldn’t buy a chair with three legs and that is essentially what Bluehost is selling.
I had been with Bluehost for 2 years before they decided to pull my site out from under me with absolutely no warning. I have a fairly successful site, but had a massive (huge) spike in traffic one day. After only two hours of my traffic being crazy they just pulled my site.
I was told that the “CEO” himself had ordered my site banned and unable to be reinstated. Insane. So much for succeeding!
This cost me not only my regular income, but a $600 ad that was pending.
Thanks BlueHost. I hope it was worth it!
CLASS ACTION TIME, you have my vote!
I cannot tell you what a nightmare it has been with bluhost shutting me down without out a phone call of notice!! Here is some info that I would like shared!
my email to Bluehost on 5.12.09:
Please pass this along to Matt the owner of your company. I think he would be VERY interested in hearing this. I want Matt or someone at bluehost to get a feel of just what I am going through just because someone
typed a simple command on a keyboard.
I truly believe that you are a good company and that you do intend to provide the very best customer service to your valued clients. Please tell me that someone just lacked better judgement when this decision was made…..
I have spent the last 10 hours repairing damage that has occurred since I was shut down by your company today. We have hundreds of people wondering why our site is offline and I am doing my best to take care of my valuable clients.
I have no BLOG, no email or presence on the web! I understand that I was sent an email warning about this about 2 weeks ago? I did not receive this email!!!!!!!! I check my mail ALL day!
If you are going to shut down a companies website that has used your service for years a simple phone call would be more appropriate and professional. Come on, an automated email…………….that’s cold man!
The email below was email to over 10,000 past and present clients! It was also posted on Facebook for 1000’s of colleagues to read. Not to mention several international photography forums.
An email to my clients to let them know I just got screwd by bluehost:
Hello All,
Thank you for all the phone calls We had dozens and dozens of phone calls today…. “What happened to your website?”
It is down temporarily…..
YES, we are still very much in Business! Just a small technical glitch!
We are currently in the process of upgrading our host server to a more professional, reliable and faster service. This shutdown was very unplanned and we are unfortunately offline at this time. We also do not have access to our email accounts. We we forced to make this move today as of 3pm. We were shut down by bluehost.com for using too much file space. We have outgrown this company and they no longer will host our site. Bluehost.com will not even put out site live during this changeover. I was on the phone for almost an hour with Heather in customer service today and was appalled by her attitude and the unprofessional manner in which this situation was handled. They were totally unwilling to keep my site live for even 24 hours longer! Now that’s customer service! NOT! And the best part I am paid with them a year in advance. They claim they have changed their terms and conditions in regards to the number of files one can store on their site. WOW! I am blown away………
Please be patient with us as we are working VERY hard to get back”online” ASAP. My webmaster says it should be no more then 48 hours.
Should you have any questions please call us at the studio: 610.388.7808
I appreciate your patients and understanding.
mike, Jana and Angelique.
My webiste was deactivated today by BlueHost for what they claim was vipolation of TOS. The email informing me of this event stated that although my website was deactivated, my data would be available for 15 days. Oh really? Is that why they deactivated my C-Panel. making it impossible for me to retrieve any data?
I did not violate any TOS. This is a travesty. I wish I had checked for complaints about BlueHost before paying for a full years’ hosting. The time involved in constructing the website amounts into thousands of $$$, and now they will not allow me to retrieve my data.
This site is right.. BLUEHOST SUCKS… and I intend to spread the word about their sucking $$$ out of unsuspecting victims all over the Internet.
We had the same experience. They told us our files would be available for 15 days, but we had to talk to customer support for 30 minutes to get them to give us access to C-panel and our own files!
You might want to try talking to one of their “customer service reps” and see if you can at least get access to your files so you can back them up and move them to a better webhost. Good luck
PS:
What sold me on BlueHost to begin with was the recommendation of WordPress.. Is WordPress going to take the underhanded path as well? Why are they recommending BlueHost?
Bluehost cancelled my site with no notice. They claimed it was politically incorrect, and they never gave me my files, and there was no refund.
Take me to your site Tom – if you have a new one – I want to see what they think is politically incorrect. hmmmm
I’d been with Bluehost since 2003.
Last month they nuked my account. I had a dozen domains hosted with them.
I host my own server in Sydney for local sites but the Bluehost ones were for international sites that we built.
They nuked the account, nuked all of the data and after ringing and emailing for a week basically begging them to recover the account all I got was an “It’s gone”.
Worst part: They can’t tell me why.
Matt Heaton’s blog ( http://www.mattheaton.com/ ) was one of the reasons I chose to go with them in the first place.
I’ve written him an email giving feedback.
I’m not actually that bitter as all my sites were backed up but it was a hell of a few days getting all those sites working on new hosting arrangements and keeping my clients happy.
So yeah. Frak you Bluehost.
- Gareth
gyaresu’s last blog post..Delete whole line in Irssi (^u).
Bluehost suspended my account yesterday because of a joomla script that was using up to many resources (apparently). I called and had to convince them to let me have access to my site again so i could fix the issue. I did so and this morning, they suspended my account AGAIN claimed they were “flooded” with web requests. I run a small community site that has about 20 members on it at once MAX. If that is considered to be too much for there servers to handle, I’m leaving. They already threatened me that if it happens one more time they are going to cancel my account. I know it will happen again so I’m backing up everything and finding something new before they have a chance to totally screw me.
I really hate bluehost! They suspended my account 2 days ago saying that I had too many files as their limit was only 50K and told me that I had no choice but to reduce my files to under 50K to ever get my account enabled again.
I was forced to delete 3 of my blogs form my account to get enabled and I don’t even have that many blogs. A word of advice, NEVER EVER host your WORDPRESS sites on blue host, their Slow, Weak and Worn servers can’t handle it. It was a hurtful and difficult lesson for me and I still can’t get over how they treated me! Screw them, I’m getting out of bluehost now and looking for a new host now.
Nice blog admin, any vps/shared hosting recommendations?
I joined Bluehost in 2006 when it was the #1 ranked web host. They shut my site down about a month ago without notice and told me I had a couple of days to backup all of my data. I had 33GB of data with no FTP access, what the hell? I was able to save some of the important files, but I had 3.5 years of my web life on there as well as 15 addon domains. Any time I ever called for tech support to enable FTP access, their lines were always busy and I had to wait 20+ minutes. I finally got ahold of them and I was told all of my data was deleted and there was no way to recover it.
Stay away if you can.
I am short on time but want to echo the sentiments of the comments here I just scanned through. They shut down my account in January right after I sent payment for the year, ostensibly because I “stored files”. Then they did it a second time in May for the “50K file” thing. It is unbelievable, but true. This is one to avoid at any cost, better in the beginning than having them shut you down whenever for whatever.
I received an email from Bluehost support two weeks ago requesting that I reduce my file size count to under 50,000 in one week. Email follows:
Dear Tommy:
“It has come to our attention that your site is using an excessive number of files stored on your BlueHost.Com account. This is causing performance problems on your website as well as for other customers that are on this server. It can cause our servers to crash and cause additional downtime.
Our research shows that server performance degrades when accounts have over 50,000 files. In order to ensure optimal performance for your account and the others in your shared hosting environment, we request that you reduce the number of files on your account to under 50,000 by 07/28/2009.”
I spent three hours weeding out some places they reccommended might be some places I wasn’t aware of like old logs and spam email boxes etc. I went from around 300,000 files to around 200,000 files which I thought would show good faith on my part as this was a request and not a warning etc, just a request. So a week goes by….. nothing. Afternoon of August 4, 2009 I return from lunch and check my email which oddly was my last email received which read…….
“Dear Tommy:
Your web hosting account for clubt.com has been deactivated (reason: excessive file count).
Although your web site has been disabled, your data may still be available for up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted.
If you feel this deactivation is in error, please contact customer support as soon as possible.
Thank you,
BlueHost.Com Support
http://www.bluehost.com
For support go to http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/
Toll-Free: (888) 401-4678?
Sure enough I check my 4 web sites we have at Bluehost, all have a account suspended notice on a white background, making all 4 businesses appear that they had gone out of business and all email accounts down as well. I called Bluehost support and asked what was going on, they told me I had been suspended and the only way to get my web sited back up was to get my total file count to below 50,000. My current file count was 214,000. They were asking me to delete 75% of my website to get back online! For those that do not understand file counts and inode counts, every email, page, picture etc takes up one inode on linux servers. One of our companies is a DJ company. We take photos at our events and use a program to put them into thumbnail catalogs. If we start with 100 photos we might end up with close to 1,000 inodes when the program is done with it’s thumbnail views etc. 50,000 for us is a very small number of files.
Anyways, here’s my argument. When I signed on with Bluehost, they were happy to take my business advertising unlimited transfer, unlimited storage space etc. I thought, this is fantastic, we can keep our photo sets online for students to enjoy for a long time. I even made sure to mention this to the support rep when I signed up to be certain that unlimited storage was unlimited storage. When I signed up we had well over 50,000 files and simply grew. There was never any mention of this limitation whatsoever until I received the email on 7-21-09, otherwise I would have went elsewhere in 2006. Our site is so big it takes days to move via ftp (site is about 15 gigs). What i’m asking here is that shared hosting companies be a little more honest with people. If they’re advertising unlimited storage it should not be restricted by file count or inode counts. They shoudl have an asteric next to the unlimited with a link taking you to the legal section where it clearly explains their file count, then I’d have no argument. I think you’ll find it interesting reading that in their terms and conditions page http://www.bluehost.com/cgi/info/terms.html
there is absolutely no mention of file count or inode count restrictions. These people are just really bad business people that just kicked a good paying customer with a legitimate business to the curb. We do not reccommend Bluehost to anyone anymore as they falsely advertise their product!! We have moved to Media Temple where their customer service has been fantastic over the past week of moving files in desperation to get our businesses back online after Bluehost turned a “request” into something entirely different. Read the fine print before you sign on the dotted line. If the fine print doesn’t answer your questions then get customer reviews on products before you commit, you’ll often be surprised to what you find.
My account was deactivated yesterday because some other website complained about spamvertise from a person who was linking to our website. I called them and told them I had no control over everyone on the net who decides to spread the word about our website maliciously. They said it’s our responsibility if someone else decides to spam another forum with links to our website. I swear, why didn’t the complainer just ban the person who spammed their website? What does taking down my website do for them? Can’t the person still spam them?
I told them so if I started to spam all of bluehost’s websites onto that forum and they decided to complain about it, would bluehost take all their hosted websites down? His reply was yes they would.
So if anyone wants to run Bluehost out of business, just get a list of all their websites and spam it on some forum that you know will complain. They will have to deactivate all their hosted websites.
Good thing I’ve decided to switch webhost in the next few days.
Hi Jeremy,
The exact same thing happened to me this morning! We don;t spam but apparently we do! does this mean that if a competitor of ours is on bluehost i can just accuse them of spamverts and they will be taken down – like we were – apparent so! Anyway i called thier support dept and they said speak to Abuse – when i called them they were kind enough to let me leave a message on an answering machine and that someone would get back to me in about 8 hours!! 8 hours in internet time – do they even know what that means?!!! I cannot believe a company which is providing an internet driven offering can expect people to wait 8 hours to speak to someone to get info on what happened. All our emails , all our domains – our ftp accounts – everything has been taken offline -and without any call or email – totally unbelieveable!!
Regardless, when this happened to you – was it resolved? were you able to get your site /data/emails back up? how long did it take? did you have to do anything in particular?
would be great if you could let me know your experience….
thanks!
Hassan
My story is 100% true even though it may sound very ridiculous and beyond crap.
I talked to a bluehost staff and asked if bluehost has all the requirements to set up IPB 3.0.x and was told that I would be able to get refund if bluehost wasnt capable of providing the features I need. So I went on and purchased a shared plan for a year.
I set up an IPB board and some accounts to test. I registered 2 accounts and my friend registered 1. 5 hours later, my bluehost account got suspended. Their reason was that all the users have agreed to the IPB terms and this looks suspicious to them. Those are the accounts I and my friend set up, the site is in the testing phrase, of course we would agree to the forum’s default terms. No members can register if they do not agree to the terms anyway.
Now bluehost tells me that I need to fax them my driver license, cpanel password and paypal email if I want my account to be reactivated.
I am going to do that, let’s see what other reasons they come up with. If I can get my account back, I will ask for money back and leave bluehost forever. If not, then I have learned a lesson.
I dont know which host to recommend to people who are looking for 1, but I strongly suggest them to stay away from bluehost.
Just a heads up… it took from February of this year to just about a week ago for us to receive a refund on the remaining amount of our hosting fee at the time that Bluehost cancelled our account.
Maybe part of their business plan is overbooking servers, cancelling accounts for no reason and then sitting on your money for 7 months, earning interest :/
My website was deleted today with no warning. Reason? The people running Bluehost supposedly tried to reach me, and supposedly couldn’t. NO OTHER REASON! WTF????
Funny…my customers don’t seem to have any problem reaching me. My family doesn’t have any trouble reaching me. My friends don’t have any trouble reaching me. The only people who can’t reach me? The only ones who have no reason to. They never even tried. There’s no voicemail from them. BLUEHOST SUCKS, and from now on, the hundreds of people I talk to every month about hosting are going to hear nothing but negative about Bluehost.
We are gathered here today, to pay our respects to my canceled Blue host account. It had a short life, but it contained so many memories. It will surely be missed. It came into this cyber world on 10/7/09; with lots of dreams of what it would become as it grew into maturity.
That life was cut short on 10/8/09; just a little over 24 hours later. Blue host knew of the impending situation and tried to warn me with a phone call prior to me going to bed. Sadly, I thought they were just people trying to sell me something, so I told them I wasn’t interested and hung up on them.
They sent me an email telling me the account had passed on into the deactivation phase. They went on to say that the reasons were: they were unable to contact the customer and that I had seriously violated their legally binding terms of service. It saddens me to know that my reckless behavior caused this account to have its life cut short.
The worst part of it all is that I don’t even know what I did that violated their precious and vulnerable terms. After reading other people’s stories of their beloved accounts, I started to look into the reasons why my account is no longer with us. It could be possible I exceeded the file limit, since I just got the account and was just working on getting a site put up on it. There’s not much there, but maybe their servers couldn’t handle the amounts I did have.
Could it be that my site contained offensive images or that the purpose of the site was a serious criminal activity? I was going to use the site to sell my writing services (Gasp!) and the design of the bare boned site contained a light wood background with a leaf image. I guess that lone leaf could be offensive to them, if you think back to the days of Adam and Eve.
Could it also be that there was too much traffic going in and out of this site’s skeleton? That could be possible, considering the enormous traffic amounts boiled down to one. And that one person would be me, since I was going in to help dress up my account with a site. I guess the traffic of one ultimately burned out their servers. Oops! I am so sorry.
Blue host’s email also said that I had 10 days access to my site, but after that the account would no longer be with us. Wow, 10 days goes by really fast. Faster than about 12 hours, considering I have no access to the account.
Since there’s not much set up with this account; it doesn’t phase me much to let it go, except that I do want my money back. So, Blue host account, I bid you farewell and may you rest in peace.
I stumbled on this site and was pleased to see that I’m not the only one “grieving” over a lost account for no real good reason. I had to share my story and I wanted to put a little humor into it as I’m still laughing over my deactivated and soon to be gone account. Hopefully others will see the other side to Blue host and move on to someone else before falling into the same trap as the rest of us.
It’s really time for a “CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT”. All those in favor, report them on Ripoff Report. Then My3Cents. Put these people out of business!
Thanks to everyone for sharing. This site is very helpful. I have one question to all of you: can anyone recommend a site that does NOT treat their customers the way that bluehost? Is there a hosting service out there that has decent and fair policies and terms?
ihsystem.com seem pretty good!
Wow, super mixed feelings about finding this site.
But first, my story; I started a Bluehost account about three years ago because it was one of the few companies I could find that offered an easy way to install Wordpress. Using Bluehost, I kept a blog for about two years (in conjunction with a book I was writing). But the book has since come out and so I’ve stopped blogging. About six months ago I posted my last post to the blog, and have just left it out there since the URL was on the book, but I haven’t been updating it. The site receives a dozen or so hits a day; nothing to write home about and nothing that could be crashing anyone else’s site. Well, about a week ago I got a notice from Bluehost saying that my account was being deactivated and that I had two weeks to remove my files. I went to the site, to see if it was still up, but it was already down (along with two other sites, which are tiny and don’t receive much traffic if any). I wrote to Bluehost saying there must be some mistake. They refused over and over to send any documentation; instead they most recently wrote: “I am sorry but your site was using up the entire servers memory and CPU cycles, it was causing hundreds of other accounts/site to be non-functioning, this is completely unacceptable and we had to shut your site down so that those other sites could run. You will need to find a new host, your files may be available for up to 15 days.” But this makes NO sense. So, either someone hacked my account, and added something weird to it, or…hell, I don’t know; but they certainly weren’t interested in helping me (or keeping me as a customer). I wrote several impassioned emails, and tried copying Matt, their CEO, on them, but so far I’ve only had the most meager of responses, all of them saying the same thing. But what’s really funny is that I threatened to start a website called bluehostsucks.com, on which I’d gather the stories of other disgruntled users. However, I then went to Network Solutions, to see if the URL was availble; it wasn’t. I thought that maybe Bluehost itself had registered it, the way companies register common misspellings in order to forward those to their regular domain. So I then, on a lark, typed in bluehostsucks.com, to see what was there. That’s how I found this site. And while I think this is a really great site, and I’m glad to find it in terms of knowing that I’m not alone, it’s also depressing because this says to me-with so many other similar stories, and people whose sites were nuked just like mine—that I really don’t have much recourse, and my site is now truly dead. So, as I said: mixed feelings that this site is here. It’s like being picked up for speeding in a small town, and thinking that you’re going to be able to be set free by just making the judge see reason, or complaining loud enough, only to be thrown into jail with a whole bunch of other people picked up for the same silly offense. Like, sure, I don’t feel so alone now, but it also shows me that I’m pretty screwed and nothing I’m going to do is going to help. That being said, in addition to the calls for a class action lawsuit, if anyone wants to make a video with the hopes of it going viral (like the video against United Airlines), I’m willing to work on a song called “Bluehost Sucks.” I’m an amateur musician with a recording studio (er, guitars and Garageband) and could whip something up. Let me know.