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!”