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…
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