BlueHost Reviews

I have plenty of clients who can't afford dedicated hosting and, for years, I recommended BlueHost to each of them. Those days are over. BlueHost is becoming a nightmare.

I managed my clients' sites and e-mail for years with BH and had only the standard issues (someone would upload a copyrighted file and be shut down -- though never with any warning first, or someone would flood a forum and a client would be shut down). Lately, though, everything is changing at BH. Their promises of unlimited space have become an outright lie. Some months back I began receiving e-mails for my clients saying I had to take their e-mail files down to below 50,000 files (regardless of size). Given that there was never any file limit before (and given their marketing claims that they offered unlimited space), I felt deceived. I sold one client that lobbies on Capitol Hill on the BH service SPECIFICALLY because they had a need for e-mail to be available via the Web at all times. Suddenly, BH is no longer offering that. I was given ONE WEEK to take 250,000 files down to 50,000(for one customer, alone -- never mind the same time limit for four other clients as well). Well, I went looking for a new host provider for this specific client and found that GatorHost allows for 250,000 mail files. So I bought an account. When I went back to BH and told them I'd be taking the site elsewhere they upped my mail file limit for that client, alone, to 200,000. All seemed to be going well enough. Then we met HEATHER.

HEATHER is this super-officious person in the "ABUSE" department (and, with her there, the department is aptly named). When she learned that someone else in abuse had upped our limit to 200,000, she was personally angry about it. She LOWERED the limit to 100,000, now, and I'm sure she will also soon tell us it has to be the 50,000 to which everyone else is limited.

When BH went to this mail file limit we were told they were developing an archiving system that would solve the issue caused by a large number of mail files. I've never heard anything about the archiving system again, though, and it's been many months. AND BH has recently begun to cut back on other services -- get this one: I had to TAR even more mail files to get down to the new, lowered mail file size and when I went to access the SSH client they offered, they were NO LONGER offering use of it. I had to download my own client. Okay, so it's not so hard to DL and use my own client but, get this, they didn't even educate their own support staff on the loss of the SSH client. I have this tech telling me to just go to the CPanel and click on SSH. But I finally convinced him to go look, himself, and he would see it wasn't there. So, he did and then muttered under his breath, "What the hell? Why would they take that away?"

It's clear that BH (like GoDaddy before them) has grown beyond their ability to offer what they initially promised. And, being in marketing and PR (and with a background in compliance and legal), I understand their TOS may be written (and revised) carefully enough to cover them from lawsuits. But from a PR standpoint, the deceptive practices in which they're engaging are just BAD FOR BUSINESS.

When I recently mentioned to HEATHER in ABUSE at BH that we'd purchased a HostGator account (I have yet to move an actual site there) she told me there were numerous complaints against HostGator and that I should read those first. Well, I did. I see that they also have their 'bad for business' practices. It seems they try 'upsell' their clients to VPS and dedicated servers (neither of which this particular client can afford). So, I may not move this client to HostGator (though the 250,000 file mail limit seems much more reasonable AND HostGator allows for 25 concurrent MySQL connections whereas BH allows only 20 -- so from that standpoint HostGator is a better deal). However, given that Heather is so freely talking about HostGator's complaints, it occurred to me there ought to be similar complaints about BlueHost. So, I'm officially filing one.

What I would like to see is a movement here and on similar sites to take steps to FORCE ALL of these Web hosting providers to openly communicate their limits of service WITHIN their marketing materials (like on the front page of their site). As a former marketing manager for a medical device company (and having worked with various heavily-regulated corporations) I know there is NO way the FDA would give us a break on using misleading claims about our products within our marketing materials just because we admitted to limitations elsewhere in a separate document that we called TOS.

Can anyone advise me on how I might start such a movement or if one already exists?

Thanks!

Laurie

I have used them before. Actually, I still have an active account with them. It hosts mostly wordpress websites. The customer service has been good from what I can remember, but the servers are not the fastest. It is a pretty decent host for the money. If you decide to go with BlueHost, do a Google search for "BlueHost coupon code." You shouldn't pay more than 4.99 per month.

They're good for hosting basic HTML sites, but not so good when it comes to running dynamic sites e.g forums/content management systems/blogs etc. as they use too much CPU.

I would recommend BlueHost (or any other host offering so-called unlimited diskspace & bandwidth) to some one wanting to run hundreds of basic HTML sites, but not to someone who wanted to run a couple of php scripts that needed to use MySQL databases.

I've had great luck with bluehost. You do get what you pay for in some respects, but I've been able to run a 3000+ visitors/month website using drupal. Drupal is pretty heavyweight, and performance is decent. I'm just about at the point where I'll need to move to a VPS, but it would have been wasted money in the beginning.

Works perfectly well, and enough activity in their forums that you can usually find out how someone else solved a problem.

Bluehost has been pretty solid for me. The loading time is fast and the cpanel is definitely way more sophisticated than most hosts. The only question is, when will they hit that point where it is tough to be profitable and the server loading times magically begin to slow. I have had this happen to many of the cheap hosting packages before.

When I signed up for Bluehost last year I had not built any website since about '96 when my local dial-up BBS gave us a place online to store our HTML files. I love how simple Bluehost has made it to set up CMS, it is just enough of a hand up to where I could have something I could tweak and learn more about PHP and CSS.

I had to disable some sluggish addons when my site went to the front page of Digg, but even if Bluehost shuts down your site from overuse they'll give you five minute windows to re-optimize before trying to bring it back up. I managed to find the offending file from the logs, turn off the mod, and the site ran the rest of the day minus the five minute warning period.

Kind of awesome for a few bucks a month, but I'm usually not using too much traffic and definitely not anything that's too resource-intensive.

In 2 yrs. I have had 2 problems with add on domains not propagating properly. A simple phone call to support and within minutes the sites were up and running.

I have a couple of sites which load faster on other servers, but they cost well over 10 times the price in hosting fees per month. .. you typically get what you pay for.

Short story. For the price, I would recommend Bluehost without any hesitation.