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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The problem is Wordpress, not Bluehost!
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/behold-wordpress-destroyer-of-cpus.html
I’ve noticed with Wordpress in other things that their focus is on piling on “features” and they leave it up to the users to make their spaghetti code manageable.
Today my sites have been down for more than an hour, I called support they said they are moving to new data centers and have previously notified me, which they haven’t. Absolutely terrible I am thinking of a revenge.
My site has been down numerous times each day for about 2 weeks now.
I’ve been with Bluehost for 3 weeks. And they’ve just shut down our site completely for throttling the CPU, apparently due to bad too many mySQL slow queries. All 5 of our domains are now inaccessible. They also limit the number of emails you can send per hour to 750.
Revenge is in order.
They have downtimes
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.
Every host, yes, every host has trouble. The random nature of the universe would dictate that some people experience a lot while others experience none. That’s just the way it goes sometimes.
It is a good thing that I didn’t use or even had to deal with blue host. But I was using wordpress platform since I am more adapted to it. As for the e-mail, I am using the usual domains for e-mail address so I didn’t have a any problems with it. I just hope the blue host will be able to resolved whatever issues they have with their customers.
Frustrated with their support when WordPress blog was hacked. Just left me alone figuring out everything.
I hate these guys! They suck!!! The customer service is dripping with sarcasm. They don’t care. I can’t access my emails and they won’t attempt a fix. They tell you to go to GoDaddy if you don’t like it here.
I wish we could do a youtube and close these guys down…
Bluehost is such big mistake of life. They don’t have any responsibility. They just deleted all the wordpress files from their server during some crappy update. My site was down for 2 days. and they just emaild some section rules and said they are not responsible. What the fuck. Bluehost Sucks.
Former employee of bluehost, migrated to a better hosting company and since we are not allowed to bad mouth other hosting companies and say we work for this one i will leave the new company out of it.
My training experience with blue host was a two week class that didn’t really focus on fixing problems but rather how to shuffle problems around, Common phrases we where taught was an admin is aware of this, we will get it up asap. A server could be fine no one else having issues and if a customer called in with a site down it was automatically a server issue that we are aware of.
Unlimited bandwidth, space, databases etc BS, unlimited tell you slow down the server ( which is easy to do with BH) site and rather then put only a decent amount of sites on a server they load them up with 10’s of thousands of sites. Blue host also owns hostmonster, froghost.com, and one with file in it(forget exact name) that is targeted at medium size business but uses the same guidelines as all of Matt’s other companies.
If you like being yelled at, slow response time on tickets, issues not being resolved and the worry of waking up and seeing your site down then go with any of the bluehost conglomerates sites.
Oh and my new company pays me to fix there customers problems, and more then bluehost did.
Just off the phone with BlueGhost, have made nine calls, the problem, can’t access my email accounts. Am given an error code from BlueGhost. The tech says, like always, the problem is on my end. My favorite part is when the tech, and all nine have said this, “What do you want us to do about it?” I take the survey as I have nine times stating my problem, no response. These guys were actually good a few years ago, now they not only suck, they just don’t care. I see they’re lowering their prices to host. Maybe a sign of the times. Do not do any business with these people.
just got phone with stoopid tech. he tole me to go to GoDaddy and leave us alone already. these guys suck. i heard that they have guys on this site adding shit saying its not them but someone else. Do not sign up or do bizness with these dooshes…
Another Bluehost complaint:
Recently they took down our site for maintenance, gave us less than 24 hours notice, and the downtime window overlapped our peak usage window. When I called to see if they could reschedule, or at least to complain to them, they were completely unsympathetic. Emails to our contacts and even one to their CEO went unanswered.
Also over the past 2 months our website monitors have been reporting outages of several minutes once or twice a week between 11pm-5am. Luckily that’s not during our peak usage window but it’s a huge blow to their supposed 99% uptime claim.
Whats wrong with this tech people. Are they trying to bring there company down. I hope Bluehost management can do something about these. Its hard to deal business with a company that’s full of crap.
Richard´s last blog ..Win lottery
I was in the middle of registering my new blog on Bluehost when the price jumped from $3.95 to $5.95. Spoke with a tech via chat. Told me to clear out my cookies and cache. Did that, and tried to re-access the site via Wordpress.org, and I still see the monthly price as $5.95. What the hell?
My server is down again today. It took me a looooong time to finally get someone to answer my Live Chat request.
When I asked what happened to the HTTP server, I was told that the cpanel is being upgraded and will be up and running in 15 mins. Now it is way passed that promised 15mins. So I will have to get back to them again.
Definitely going to move away from these guys!
Hi, today I have been suspensed from BlueHost . I lost 3 websites. One of the wordpress plugin I use thumb.php can be used for DDOS. I m suprised by the lack of support from BlueHost. They just suspend your account and end of the story, I moved my sites to another more serious company that I have been using for years. People should not use BlueHost if they have a wordpress.org blog.
bluehost used to be good few years back but now it seems that thy just dont care. Like most victims i started a blog in bluehost but due to numerous times the site went offline and other server issues i had to stop that site and start all over again. I seriously do not recommend bluehost to anyone even if they they want to put up a shitty website.
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