Hi all,
Not sure how the verification process here works but I welcome any admin to PM me.
I started out with Bluehost about 1.5 years ago moving my site at the time rather rapidly as our host sponsors were taken over by another company. Before I proceed it would help to explain what I run. I have 2 sites (and 2 bluehost accounts respectively), they have minimalistic websites and are really built around the forum package vBulletin (again, for both sites). Below I will list all the challenges and experiences I’ve had with Bluehost.
E-Mail Limit
No where on their website will it tell you that there is a limit of 100 emails per hour, no where. For a good 3 months I was sending monthly emails via both sites to c. 7000-8000 members, only a 100 of each batch ever made it (if even that, pm notification emails, registration emails etc can all be deducted, so say 90). vBulletin doesn’t tell you that it’s encountering issues as it also thinks all is ok, their email system doesn’t start bouncing emails after a 100, they just disappear making you think they are sent.
At that point I was rather upset and contacted Customer Service, they were able to up it to 500 per hour based on a valid reason. If you want to send a 1000 per hour, the monthly costs change to $19.95. Ouch.
Customer Service (or lack thereof)
Let me start out by saying there are a wide array of ways to contact them, live chat being one of those cool things recently added. Although this is nice, the people behind are either lazy or badly trained. Sample of bad experiences:
- Change E-Mail to 500/hour - As you read above, emails are capped. I asked for both my sites to be upped to 500 with valid reasons, and they confirmed the action had been done. Come to find out, on one site it was still at a 100. So me going through the hassle of setting up cron jobs for dispatching emails was useless on one site. There is no field in cpanel where you can observe this value, so once again, I had wasted my time. One rep was rude enough to point out that I’d be hurting everyone else’s performance, this as a reply to why the email cap is not listed on the website. Rather weak.
- Changing some cnames - You can’t perform cnames but bluehost can for you, fair enough. I asked for two to be changed and the first propogated after a day but for the second I had to go back to them four times to tell them it hadn’t been done yet, each time they had confirmed it was ok. The last guy who finally was able to get it right (this is nothing complex) didn’t apologize on behalf of other users.
- Simple Question - Not being the greatest webmaster wiz around I once had to ask how to access SSH. I was told to google putty and the rep then just ended the session. Great.
Server Load
If you sign up to Bluehost, pray to god you get a good box (i.e. box00.bluehost.com, where 00 is the number of the box). My larger site thankfully is running on a good box where server load is rather low, however my other is crapping it’s pants with not even 15% of traffic the first has. I’ve checked with other vbulletin admins and they agree, bad server, not bad setup. So you just have to be lucky!
Downtime
It’s unexpected, it’s frequent and even the reps won’t have a clue about it when it’s happening. You’ll however get this lengthy apology a few days later. I don’t live off my website, but if you do, say you’re a wedding photographer, look somewhere else. It ranges from minutes to 5-10 hour blocks over the course of a few days (i.e. summer ‘06)
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This concludes my experience, I am still there because my contract is rather lengthy (one year) so I’m just waiting it out before going somewhere else. My initial mistakes were not to ask enough pre-sales questions and trusting some online reviews too much. Don’t follow in my footsteps , do your homework on hosts and just hope you get a good one.
Maybe you’ve had only good experiences with Bluehost which in turn you can feel free to post here. Maybe I just got the wrong end of the stick and was really unlucky?i dont know anything about BLUEHOST.com but i do know bigbluehost.com has good prices and is extremely reliable >_> except the webbased email/pop3 i could never get that to work then again i cant get many things to work <_ I would suggest you read http://ultracheaphosts.comNot complaining, I’ve admitted to my mistakes. Just warning other users, think that’s fair?As a host, Bluehost is OK for reliability and speed for the most part. Their lack of support, which included rude, short answers forced me to leave them. I often waited 5 or more days for trouble ticket replies. They remind me of those nightmarish local ISPs that start out great, then get greedy by overselling their capacity and everything tanks eventually. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when they indicated that if I did not re-new with them, my domain would be placed in limbo and I would have to either buy it at auction or pay $80 to retrieve it. I now use lunarpages. Lunarpages is maybe a tad slower server (hardly an issue), but their entire company and attitude just reeks of positiveness and courtesy. They are a true pleasure to work with. It is an especially good host for novices like me. Bluehost treated you like you were a network administer with how they communicated with you. With lunarpages, they have gobs of great easy-to-follow tutorials and if you call for help, they are enthusiastic and can break things down to easily understood language. Bluehost has had it’s glory days and I don’t believe they are serious at returning to them. Money talks now and service is an expense they have obvious cut.There are many providers for hosting services and everyone offers some special package to attract customers. As a customer we need to read the fine prints and then take decisions. Thanks for sharing your experiences.I don’t think the main problem is overselling, I think it is having limits that is not shown to the customer before hitting them and bad support. imo.Bluehost themselves certainly wouldn’t do this. Their domain provider would. The ‘80 dollar fee’ is about what it costs to get it out of limbo — again, industry standard. I’ve seen fees as high as 150 as well. These aren’t fees instituted by Bluehost but rather their registrar. The more you know.David - what bluehost did was treat me like a rube. They answerd a direct question from me in writing implying as long as I renewed through them I was fine. Otherwise, I would be forced to go the 80 dollar route through their “sub”, Wild West Domains if I hosted somewhere else. I made one phone call to godaddy and had my domain away from them within an hour. It was classic strong-arm sales.The same day I wrote the review above, Bluehost did it again. Something very unprofessional, *shock*. They moved my account from one server to another. As they did this incorrectly, my site was down 12 hours because of an SQL error it had caused (I was sleeping and didn’t realize till the next morning). Then, I noticed all cnames we had put in place are gone. Do you think they had bothered to contact me? No chance. I’ve had it, I’m moving this stuff before the contract ends and they can keep the cash.Not sure what’s going on with bluehost but have had inordinate amount of problems recently. They claim to be making server improvements which will pay off in better/faster speeds, but I’ve yet to see any improvement. Databases have routinely gone down without notice. I’ve written positive reviews for this company at this site but I will seriously consider moving my sites at renewal time (which is 4 mths away)And again, the grand finale ! I’m not even using a QUARTER of the listed SPECS: 7 days to move. Thank god I’ve already set everything up….I too am an owner of a decent sized automotive forum (1800 members). Due to the pricing of the VPS on my current host, I’ve been looking at alternatives. Bluehost was one company I was really considering moving to. Thanks to this thread, I won’t. My current host, who is also is friend of mine, has excellent service and speed. He mentioned that i’d probably want to review this site and check the reviews and pricing of other companies prior to moving. After looking around, I think I may stick it out with him untill its completely necessary for me to move. Thanks!Looks like they started to kick people who uses too much resources from their servers. I used 100-230 gigs of bandwidth per month and too received an email saying I have used too many resources. No php or script running on my site just static html and images. If you do live chat with one of their operators, they will tell you there’s no problem hitting 1000gigs of bandwidth per month which is totally a lie. Now they’re offering 2500 gigs of bandwidths per month, do not dream about it.
It’s industry standard for domains to be auctioned off (whether by enom, etc.) prior to being available again to the public.