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The blog of Australian Front End / Aurelia Javascript Developer & brewing aficionado Dwayne Charrington // Aurelia.io Core Team member.

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Do Not. I Repeat, Do Not Host Your Site With Bluehost

General · January 25, 2013

The saying you get what you pay for rings true. Recently while working with a really nice client (just one lady running her own unique business) I came across Bluehost.

She had a hosting account with Bluehost, the “Platinum Pak” when a hosting company deliberately misspells the word pack like a teenage girl texting her friends, it does ring some alarm bells. But having had nothing but a great experience with their rival Hostgator (I used them for years before my needs went beyond it) I reserved my judgement until I tried to get support.

It was 10pm here in Brisbane, Australia and so I used Bluehost’s online chat feature to speak with their support staff. A guy by the name of Blade (seriously, they hired a guy called Blade?) after waiting 30 minutes behind 14 other people answers my chat window. He asks for the main domain and last 4 characters of the Cpanel password, then he tells me to wait a few minutes while he tries to find the problem. Wait, what?

I haven’t even explained what the problem is yet and Blade is trying to fix it. Either Blade is a clairvoyant who has seen the future and knows what I am already asking or he’s multitasking between multiple windows and getting confused, not a good start.

Without any further words from Blade, I start describing the problem. I explain to him in a clear and concise manner that a WordPress install for the client is responding really slowly even though the site isn’t that large in terms of page sizes.

The server appeared to be throttling connections and resources and I wanted to know why a 1mb page was taking 40 seconds to load on a cable Internet connection that usually can download a torrent at 2.2mb/s (fast by Australian standards).

Not only was the front-end slow, but the entire site irrespective of whether or not you’re on the front facing part of the admin panel was slow. After explaining that I did a traceroute as well as installed W3 Total Cache and Wp E-commerce, Blade disconnected the chat without saying a word to me. No kind of support was offered at all.

What kind of company hangs up on someone asking for help and being nothing but nice and concise during the whole process? Oh, Bluehost does, that’s who. I should of taken the subtle, indirect advice I got from my friend’s coworker from YEAH! Local but I only picked up on it after the fact, I dislike how often this happens to me.

So I reconnect, I’m waiting behind 19 people now… 50 minutes later after watching my place in the queue go down and sometimes even go up by 2 or 3, I am connected to, “Duke Nickolas” seriously, where do they find these people? it’s 10.50pm and I have work in the morning, so eyes are exhausted from looking at the screen so I begin to explain the problem again.

I give a pretty length explanation to Duke Nickolas, as time passes he doesn’t respond. I ask if he’s there and still no response, after 10 minutes of waiting I close the window and reopen the chat a third time, I am now number 20 in a queue again. It’s 11:01pm and my patience is really growing thin.

Third time lucky, a guy with a normal name Aaron answers the chat pretty quickly. Finally someone who doesn’t hang up on me listens to what I have to say, he then asks me to wait a minute while he runs tests on the server. He is at first unsure what is going on, he does a few more tests and realises their server is spawning too many instances of the PHP process and every time a process runs it seems to be taking a while for it to end, thus causing the server to slow down and wait.

Unfortunately Aaron couldn’t help me and so I advised my client to move over to Mediatemple (I used to use Mediatemple before moving to Linode). Instantly setup and to this day no problems with slowdowns or issues with running a simple WordPress website and store.

The moral of the story here is: don’t host with Bluehost because their support is shit and their hosting is obviously oversold and horrible.

Dwayne

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Blade
Blade
7 years ago

Bluehost will charge you x4 the amount when renewing. Hate companies like that. Getting your site from an expired account? Forget that! Pay for 3 months first. Fuck Bluehost. My new $17 hosting does a much better job at everything.

0
Yanick Gosselin
Yanick Gosselin
7 years ago

After 2 years + of using their Reseller program. When I had a problem this month, they told me they deprecated the reseller program and that I should find another host.

lol!

0
David Jin
David Jin
6 years ago

“2:03:53 PM Peter P thanks
2:03:57 PM Peter P checking account
2:22:25 PM Peter P thanks for taking care of this issue, I have turned your account back on
2:22:27 PM Peter P Is there anything else I can help you with today?
2:24:03 PM David Jin thanks..but why is my site not working? projectorhiremelbourne.com which is under this acc
2:24:32 PM Peter P let me get you over to support
2:24:52 PM David Jin ok
2:38:06 PM David Jin who am I waiting for?”

Pay attention to the timing…rediculous support…not as good as before…don’t want to use bluehost anymore

0
Dwayne
Dwayne
Author
6 years ago

@David Jin

Haha, wow. I see three years on from this post and Bluehost are still horrendous. How do companies like this even survive?

0
David Jin
David Jin
Reply to  Dwayne
6 years ago

marketing, marketing, marketing..part of the channel is affiliates from all over the world promoting this hosting company for earning the commission from it…

I just restored my site…not as the same as before..lost all footers (4 columns)..

0
fuckbluehost
fuckbluehost
5 years ago

its 2017 and they still suck, “horrible support” is an understatement!

0
Anna
Anna
5 years ago

It so bad. For my college web design class, my professor FORCED us to use bluehost. Almost everyone in the class, myself included, is receiving hundreds of calls weekly. (not even exaggerating) it’s only noon and I’ve already gotten 7 calls today. Blocking the callers isn’t helping- they’re all different numbers.

0
John
John
4 years ago

I fucking hate bluehost with a passion. unhelpful customer support. Leaves you high and dry. my site was down and they refused to help me get it back up. Tried to get me to buy security services. I’d stay away from bluehost at all costs.

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