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!”
{ 33 comments… read them below or add one }
You realize with what you are trying to do you don’t belong on shared hosting right? Shared hosting is shared resources and meant for the 90% of sites that don’t use many resources.
If you are pushing that many mail accounts and such a busy php/mysql forum that is using loads of CPU/Memory you need a VPS or dedicated server. I would only fault bluehost with not telling you this and that you need to upgrade.
Thanks, Ben
In defence of the Author, YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT BEN!!
Bluehost are the crappest hosting provider that I have ever used.
The only reason I used them was because of the easy install features for such PhP applications as Wordpress (which is why Wordpress recommends them!)
If Bluehost (with Fantastico installed) are offering to provide a forum for you, along with wordpress, a mass-mailing list application, an intranet, a live chat facility, Joomla content management system, etc … then they should be able to power what they are selling to their customers right?? – (I can hear a million people shouting yes right now!!!)
And I’ll get to the point – Bluehost don’t offer dedicated servers – if you asked for one you wouldn’t get it, because it’s not part of their service!
So, it’s fair to say Ben that you have just highlighted that Bluehost are really pushing something they can’t actually provide a customer with.
On top of this, the downtime (by my estimation) is about 10%
And for me they haven’t blamed it on CPU, just general maitenance issues (at least they can be honest about some things!)
Think your contact form is rock solid cause it has a Captcha??
- think again!
After moving 4 clients that had not recieved spam in 2 years to Bluehost – spam went up by about 300%, averaging at about 3 spam emails a day (even through a validated contact form with a captcha) – They will not offer any help with this.
Also, if you use Microsoft Outlook as your email client – be warned!!! Twice something happend on their server, out of the blue, and I had to change the @ symbol to a + in all my email accounts in Microsoft Outlook.
(info+website.com)
What people don’t realize is, is that BlueHost has a Terms of Service that they agree to upon sign up. So they can clearly say that BlueHost sucks, yet they blatantly agreed to all terms when they sign up, yet still the complain.
Few words of advice:
1. Keep your own back-ups.
2. Assume responsibility for the scripts you install, even if they’re 3rd party and provided via Fantastico or SimpleScripts.
3. Educate yourself in resolving performance issues and/or security issues.
Simple as that. Web developer over over 4 years now and have yet to have a problem with BlueHost that was not disclosed and covered in their Terms of Service Agreement.
LOL…10% downtime, huh? You are saying that that your site is down more that a month each year. You should start your own service with 10,000% uptime. Yeah! And you can personally create insecure form with captcha that don’t do anything. Yeah! Yeah! And then maybe get some training so you can use Outlook. Alright!
I must be in a bad mood tonight cuz I really don’t like Bluehost either.
The author is right. Bluehost sucks as well as Hostmonster they are the same company with different name and they limit CPU, DISK, BANDWIDTH usage but they tell you it is unlimited.
400unique visitors for a webpage should not require a VPS or Dedicated hosting.
Tuba’s last blog post..Bluehostsucks.com
agreed. i’ve had nothing but trouble with screwhost, i mean bluehost. if anyone wants any advice about hosting, stay away from them. they also cancel your domain registrations when you leave their hosting services. sanity check, please.
BlueHost is an unmitigated disaster – they are, with PowWeb, the most unreliable webhosts. I know several people who have been kicked off BlueHost’s servers for “terms of service” violations, but in fact they had done no such thing and BlueHost refused to give a reason, or their money back.
If you have a site that might offend ANYONE, do not host it with BlueHost – they WILL shut you down without warning or remedy.
I have had my sites hosted with Bluehost and have had my site deactivated, when calling Bluehost why, they indicated my site had been hacked and how to fix the issue, I’m not sure what you guys are talking about not being told what your violations were. They also offer 100% money back so I know you guys are full of it.
Ahh…a cool head finally prevails!
Which one than you recomended, I’m reading only the bad user reviews for days and not even one web hosting is ok at this moment, eventually its ok if they have price of 10$ for 10gb of transfer and 500mb of space, but if you look in Europe I can buy for 30$ the whole dedicated server.
Thanks for raising curiosity and helping out such companies.
For me Bluehost is another unlimited web hosting provider with outsourced technical support which targets newbie webmasters mainly for its low fee and not for the quality of its service. I had 2 sites hosted with them and I was facing constantly problems, the most important off those was the fact that their uptime wasn’t even reaching 90%. I was doing patience for 2 months, and a signed with another web hosting company. I lost 10 months that I had prepaid but my mind was free once more from constantly sending emails which support requests which didn’t lead anywhere. I will soon publish my personal horror story at web hosting art, my personal website about web hosting service providers. I am glad that the community concentrates users experiences so other webmasters will benefit and not fall into the trap of their successful marketing.
This is ironic, because the organization I’m working with — a national 12 Step organization — just had their website shut down by BH because their website utilizes Wordpress and the plugins were taking up too much of the CPU cycle. I do not begrudge BH being a ‘cheap’ host, but that should be their disclaimer: “If you have a low traffic website, we’re an economic alternative”. My wife is a therapist and I have no trouble loading her up on BH because I know the situation. I think the thing that annoys many people about BH is the “surprise! you’re too big for us, find a new place — oh, and we’re not going to refund any of your money” ploy.
You are true…..
It is very poor service.
Some staff are good but when it is ticket suport they sucks to the core. I am still waiting for an issue to be resolved and it has been 10 days.
Not one individual looks at your email. there are bunch of staff who will look at your email one by one with no relationship and they will reply you with the stupid answer that will never work.
If they fix this email support issue, I will like them. one staff has to handle one customer email, so they will be taken care. They can understand the complete issue not every one who is careless.
We have a horror story! We totally do!
http://www.autostraddle.com/bluehost-sucks-or-how-mormon-owned-bluehost-tried-to-shut-down-autostraddle/
natalie´s last blog ..Listen Up World: Music is Our Hot Hot Fix #1
Okay listen up everyone, this is what’s wrong with Bluehost. I currently have an account with them, and I am going to share with you all the experiences I have had before so that maybe they can do something about this.
Numero uno: CPU quota errors happened twice to me so far within a week. I call up Bluehost, the first guy told me there was nothing he could do, and that you need to hire a coder, delaying the problem. I starting freaking out because it’s all me and I didn’t know what to do. I researched the problem, called back, got a nice lady and she undid it for me because I told her I was going to monitor the problem. The same exact thing happens a week later.
Numero dos: Some of the reps are very helpful and then some of them just waste your time. I feel sometimes like, when you open up a ticket, they purposely try to not answer the question just to not do any work, especially when it comes to restoring backups. They respond too slowly for a 24/7 hosting service. I guess this is the result when you cram too many customers on one server.
Numero tres: Automatic billing. I don’t know what is going on with the automatic billing, but no matter what I do or button(s) I press, somehow they are always automatically billing me for something. It is frustrating, especially when they start charging you for like a 6 month package which makes you call up and try to actually get them to credit your account. They need to fix that.
Numero cuatro: Now, Bluehost privacy isn’t free anymore. Not only do you pay $10 a domain, but now they are adding $5 bucks a year for privacy. $10 is still expense on the Internet for a domain, so protecting your information is now a price?
Numero cinco: I am fearful that they are going to do something to screw up my account. One time, when php scripting chats were available, there was a time when all my sites were messing up for no apparent reason, and I remember chatting with a rep who was trying to fix my forum, and instead, messed up, deleted all the files, and told me that there were no files to begin with. I guess there are good eggs and bad eggs in any corporation though.
Numero seis: Backups. Most hosting companies do automatic backups and Bluehost doesn’t apparently. One time, all my files on the server were deleted and there went all of my backups. They only do system backups like every 2 weeks, which is pretty much a joke all by itself.
Overall, after all of this, I say the two worst is the representatives who try to delay the problem and put it off to someone else and the CPU quota errors.
Bluehost truely sucks! Someone broke into their system and changed some of my files, files that were not even accessible on the internet without ftp access (no links to them at all). Bluehost said they would close me down if there were 2 more problems. I cleaned up all of the problems and changed the main and ftp password. They did not report any other problems but shut off my 5 websites the next day without warning and without explanation. Even on appeal no explanation. No more ftp access either. I had been a customer quite a while with no prior breakin or payment problems.
I came here to vent. I too signed up for Bluehost a few years ago because I wanted a Wordpress blog and they were recommended by Wordpress.
I just lost my website and email accounts last week. I don’t know exactly what happened, although I noticed in my control panel that the server load was too high. I don’t have that much activity on my website, but I had no notice of anything amiss until I couldn’t see my website anymore.
I contacted support; 1st email said that “the server is undergoing a file system rebuild”. The 2nd email said “Data is currently being restored to this server from a recent snapshot. Duration of the restore process may take approximately 4 to 5 hours.”
I waited for my website to magically reappear, but no luck. Stupid me for thinking they were a decent web host that made regular backups. I have pieces of the website at home, but lost some photos. I think my mysql databases are still intact, although I’m not that tech-savvy and don’t know how to check them. Granted I should have made better backups, but I only have so much space at my home computer, and there’s no clear automated way to make regular backups of everything.
So yeah, things were great until something went wrong. Bluehost sucks. I’m shopping for a new web host now.
I keep getting this error; “The download cannot be provided. Please check, if your browser supports Javascript.” I have javascript installed, I even uninstalled and reinstalled it and I’m STILL getting this message. wtf, it’s making me angry. Any suggestions?
Not fond of Bluehost either. As a moderately experienced web-builder I’ve had many frustrating experiences with bluehost. Right now my site as well as a client’s site is not displaying the navigation bar. At first I thought it was my fault, after reloading different websites several times with no navigation bars and looking at another site hosted by bluehost I realize it’s Bluehost once again. Will be switching hosts soon.
Wow, the people here sure do have a different view of Bluehost than I. I’ve used them solely for over 5 years now and hosted 100’s of sites with very minimal issues. In fact I can count on 1 hand the times my sites have been offline. I’ve also always had great luck with tech support on issues I have had. Sorry to hear everyone here has had such a bad taste from them. I have had similar experiences with other hosts such as kazix.
Hope everyone finds a host that fits their needs and what appears to be varying levels of technical skills.
Mike´s last blog ..My favorite web host!
I thought we should point out that Mike’s link points to his website where he gives a glowing review of Bluehost’s hosting. He’s also an affiliate of Bluehost, which means he receives $65 if someone signs up after clicking on his links to Bluehost. This is a big reason why you see a lot of people recommending Bluehost… they pay well
Yes I am an affiliate…but only because of my great success with this company. I typically become an affiliate with any organization I promote. I’ve used several companies prior to bluehost and can say not a single one was in the ballpark for me. I have over 100 clients that use them and have had 0 issues over the past 2 years. Prior to switching many clients they were having near weekly issues at times with other host. So say what you want, but remember for under $100/yr this is a solid company. If you want 5 9’s go and pay for it!
Mike´s last blog ..My favorite web host!
I must say BlueHost sucks!
They don’t bother whether our problem 100% resolved or not, close chat session. I was having problem with FTP connection for a client domain. I created a new FTP, as per cPanel info used same user/pass/ftp url. But did not work. Chat with them, one operator informed will take 30-60 minutes to resolved it, after 10 hours nothing happens, when I again asked they said they can connect. I am using wrong password!!! How many times I can use wrong password, just to let you inform I provided them password. Anyway, again they said to check http://bluehost.com/cgi-bin/firewall and said to check whether can see Green icon for 20/21 port, I could see. Then they said whether can use Unlimited FTP which is something like GoDaddy’s control panel’s FTP with Java applet. I said yes, can see and see local drives, now they said “problem resolved” and closed chat!!!
Sucks!!! How irresponsible a hosing company may be! I have to use only their FTP client! I will never never never go with them or recommend any of my client!
I think you’re all high. I’ve been with Bluehost for 3 1/2 years and have had minimal downtime and excellent tech support. They’ve even helped me with script issues which is outside of their obligation.
I even left Yahoo to move to B.H., if you want a shitty provider, use Yahoo.
YOU ARE SO WRONG…
I’ve used Blue Host for years and found them very helpful and provided great support. I’ve put many of my web customers on their site.
Yes, they are a shared host and while all the complaints I read, nobody had a better host to recommend.
So, read the TOS and if you have problems, you’ve out grown the BlueHost world and move to Rack Space or something similar. You won’t find the $3 to $6 a month fee at that level of performance.
Does anyone feel that sites like this one have no value, because people only complain about things they shouldn’t complain about!!!
Sign up with BlueHost, you won’t regret it.