On the Wordpress.org hosting page, they list Bluehost at the top of recommended hosting providers. In fact, I’m 100% sure that’s a major reason why many WP users chose to bring their sites to that hosting company. Why would Matt Mullenweg and Wordpress, who have been nothing but upstanding web figures, tarnish their names by recommending a bad service, right?
Unfortunately for us who believed such a fantasy, we had to find out how crappy Bluehost actually is the hard way. Take a gander at Bluehost’s listing (the only one highlighted with a yellow background, by the way) over at the Wordpress hosting page:
“WordPress Auto-Install — new WordPress updates are made available within 24 hours! Unlimited disk storage, Unlimited monthly data transfer, host unlimited domains on 1 account, 1 free domain name for as long as you host with BlueHost, 2500 POP / WebMail addresses, 50 MySQL databases, free control panel, free Fantastico, free SimpleScripts, 24/7 network monitoring, 99% uptime guarantee, mirrored storage backups, no hidden fees, voted best support in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008!”
I’ll lead you through my three favorite idiotic portions of that pitch.
First, they do allow you to create up to 2500 POP/Webmail addresses on one account. However, you can only send 50 outgoing emails per hour for that the whole account. That means if you’re using the hosting account to create an email each for 100 members of your forum, only 50 of them can send an email every hour. The rest will have to wait for 60 minutes before sending out their communication.
Next, I take serious issue with the 99% uptime. My site, for one, was deactivated 17 times last month alone due to “CPU quota” problems even though I was running Wordpress with NO plugins, with traffic averaging at around 400 uniques per day. Worse, though, I’ve had two extended downtimes the five months I hosted with them – one lasted close to 72 hours while another lasted around 36 hours.
Lastly, they were “voted best support in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008″???? Who the hell voted them, their employees? Bluehost support staff are among the rudest and laziest CSRs I’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with. Bluehost, you should be ashamed. Same with Wordpress who are probably banking serious cash with their “relationship!”
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Ha Ha! I just followed your track back link which is hosted on Bluehost. The following is what I saw:
“Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@justbluehost-info.eaglescholarship.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”
I just don’t like their customer service! It’s no good.
allexaU´s last blog ..How to start woodworking
My experience with Bluehost wasn’t great either. The biggest issue was server downtime, and their support couldn’t care less. Avoid them at all costs. Can’t imagine what the folks at WordPress are thinking, pushing these clowns.
Mark@Getting Started With WordPress´s last blog ..Flexibility WordPress Theme
Bluehost nightmare
On August 30th it began. I lost connection to my email box from outlook. I was not able to access my mailboxes or my websites at all!
Initially I thought it was some server reboot or other maintenance task Bluehost tends to do in the middle of the day, and did not think much of it. Later I noticed it was still down but was busy and could not contact support.
The next morning my email is available but nothing was there before 10pm on August 30th. Everything was gone! All my email from 10 years were gone!!! Additionally my websites were gone as well!! What is going on?
So I called support, and the agent said that my data was lost yesterday, OK I said, can you restore it? Soon after he told me my account was on a “backup” server and was not backed up, and ALL the data was lost! Lost I said? As my mind is now racing on the impact of this, and how FREE email services such as Gmail or msn will back up your email, but my PAID provider Bluehost does not? I really could not believe what I was hearing!
When I tried to access my local email cache file from outlook I found it already to be empty as it was deleted from the server since it was setup as an imap account. Now am in utter surprise and panic.
When I called Bluehost support back and waited another 25+ minutes for support I pleaded with them to try and at least get my email back. They told me calmly there was no way to retrieve my email, and I should have backed it up under section 11 sub section 2. They proceeded to tell me Bluehost is not obligated to do backups, and I can read the terms under of your hosting service at any time by going to http://wwww.bluehost.com/terms and it’s a DEAD LINK!
When I demanded to talk to a manager, I was put on hold for another 20+ minutes until a manager (Michael) came online. The first thing he said is this server has seen better days.
Now highly irritated and said well, what about my email? He confirmed my email was gone and there is nothing he can do. Asked why I was my account on a “backup” server? He told me it was because I had too much data and I had to me move to a “Big mac” server and Bluehost does NOT BACKUP big mac servers.
I then told him the Bluehost made me delete my private backups years ago because you they said it infringed on copyright laws. Yes for PRIVATE backup, Bluehost said, it still did not matter and insisted on deleting everything. This means there was not much data on there at all!!
Now furious I say then TELL ME THE CUSTOMER YOU DO NOT BACKUP THEIR DATA!!!! I would have setup a pop3 account, and not an imap if I had known you are not backing up my email !!!
Bluehost sucks! Stay away!
I’ve been watching this series of posts with great interest. To date, this is the only time you seem to have mentioned WordPress and by the looks of it, you’ve never tried it.
Chloe ´s last blog ..Grand Bornand Accommodation
They should attend customer service seminar.
Berna´s last blog ..Quickest Way To Get Pregnant
Bluehost blows. My sites have been down just about 24 hours now… nothing but canned responses from CSRs. Not even and ETA. My 12 year old nephew could have had the sites back online by now…
WHY DO YOU THINK? CAUSE THEIR PAYING THEM AROUND $15K/MO. I USE TO WORK THERE… I SAW THE CHECKS.
Why would you ask such stupid questions?
What is the best hosting service then. Please advice from your experiences. Thanks.
I am having issue with Bluehost right now. They are telling me that Time Warner has placed a block on their servers, thus blocking anyone who uses TW from accessing any Bluehost-hosted websites, which to me sounds like utter bullshit.
On calling Time Warner (my ISP) and informing them of said “issue”, they in turn denied any block (that is after they spent 20 minutes laughing their asses off) and offered some sound advice: Go with another less retarded webhost.
This, in turn, means I cannot access my own freaking website nor can I get to my database to back up the entire site/ 5 year-archive to move to a new webhosting company.
Bunch of freaking muppets.
Are you kidding me? This site is a total hit job. Probably funded by competitive hosts.
I’ve been using bluehost for 8 years now for MANY websites and only have good things to say. The tech support is friendly, available 24/7 and actually quite knowledgeable for a shared hosting environment tech support.
Get a grip. Have fun going down the wrong path SUCKERS. What are ya gonna do, go to GoDaddy? hahahahah ahahahahahaa
Just fyi, email outbound limits for BH are automatically set to 150, but can be raised to 500 an hour upon request, with 750 being the top max.
Thanks Todd Vitello,
I was considering moving my site to BlueHost but on the off chance I decided to check for hosting server problems on Google eg “BlueHost problems” and found this site. I had exactly the same problems when my site was hosted by Yahoo!. It was a nightmare, my debit card could not make payment to Yahoo! to renew the hosting (Yahoo! payment gateway problem) then they deleted all my emails which contained legal documents and police report evidence and all my files on the website. Just imagine their free service was running ok but their hosting service was deplorable.
So I moved to another hosting service and then learned about Wordpress. I have since rewritten by old website into a WP blog http://bachutha.com.
I am looking for a faster and more reliable service. I think many of the reviews are written by the hosting service providers and are fakes.
Thanks,
Peter
I am still using BH for many sites. Both standard and pro hosting plans. I do not work for any competitor. They (and the entire shared hosting industry) has been consolidating and is going downhill really fast. Their support is very poor, with some exceptions. I cannot recommend them. On the other hand I tried Hostgator shared hosting recently and that was even worse.
I’m in the process of pulling ten sites off of Bluehost because of further performance degradation since the first of this month. Even the simplest Wordpress installs now have a page init time of about 5 seconds due to a slow MySQL link. We’re talking .25sec per KB in my tests.
Perhaps that isn’t clear enough.
I am pushing all images, scripts, and css files over to the Rackspace CDN, using a JQuery lazy loader, and still getting 5+ second wait times on client pages.
It’s ridiculous. Bluehost has, in the last month, sunk to the level of GoDaddy hosting.
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