Bluehost: From Basic WordPress To Dedicated Servers – Blue Host Got Your Back!

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  • Sts. Peter And Paul Orthodox Church Mar 23, 2012, 10:30 am

    We needed a simple yet flexible solution for our church website. Bluehost was an easy choice. We decided to go with their “Pro” account because down the road we would like to also have an online shop. Bluehost allows us to stay within our budget and to have a robust website. Thank you Bluehost – 10 stars!

  • Randy Aug 3, 2011, 11:13 am

    If uptime is important to you for site design and maintenance, or if you are running a site for which there are paid subscribers, YOU SHOULD NOT USE BLUEHOST.

    This hosting platform is frequently offline during prime time – for the weeks of July 24th, 2011 through August 3rd, 2011 BlueHost was down a total of 6 times, ranging from 7 – 23 minutes, without warning.

    YOU ABSOLUTELY CANNOT RUN A PROFESSIONAL WEBSITE FROM BLUEHOST – let me save you the eventual grief of moving all your stuff to another platform. Don’t sign up at all.

    The entertaining part of this is watching tech support say things like “your site is being throttled” and it’s “inaccessible from certain ISPs”, etc. — until they find out that you actually know what you’re talking about. Then they silently close the support ticket. No tickey, no problem, apparently.

    All kidding aside, I am in the process right now of moving everything I have off BlueHost – please let me contribute to your day by having you avoid this train wreck before you even purchase the ticket.

  • Monmouth Rehab Professionals Apr 13, 2011, 8:32 am

    We have just recently moved our website to Bluehost. So far so good. There have been noticeable improvement to our website’s performance, as compared to our former web hosting provider.

  • SP Jun 1, 2010, 11:43 am

    Once again BlueHost has failed miserably.

    They insist that you upgrade to the latest releases through their SimpleScripts Program, which has a constant nag screen each time you login.

    Each upgrade crashes the installed software regularly -except for WordPress – and there is NO SUPPORT from BlueHost.

    They stated that the upgrades are required or “3,000 other people on the server could be affected if the site gets hacked.”

    In the same breath they also state that they do not support Third-Party software.

    Once the upgrades crash your site and all is lost, you might feel the same way – time to find another host that has a customer service oriented philosophy.

    And just try to get any support beyond Level 1 – been disconnected each time they transfer and then left on hold for hours.

    This is one of the worst for customer service and if service is a value you a re looking for, look elsewhere.

  • Ann (Chocolate Belles) Nov 28, 2009, 1:40 am

    When we started with our website we used LunarPages and were quiet satisfied with their service. However when we decided to start selling more products online we needed to add a dedicated IP along with a decent SSL certificate. Unfortunately with LunarPage we need to “bring” our own SSL otherwise we would end up with what is know as shared SSL certificate.

    Bluehost allowed us to purchase and manage both the Dedicate IP and SSL certificate from one account. Which much better- once your account is up for renewal Dedicate IP and SSL are renewed at the same time. It was also very easy to move our website to Bluehost- it was up and running again 48 hours after we left LunarPages.

    We love blue host. Allows us to run a rather robust online store at about $18 per month.

    We realize that sometime in the future we might need a dedicated host as our website grows. I only wish Bluehost would start offering dedicated hosting solutions.

    Based on our experience, I gave the Bluehost all 10s.

  • Tommy Walsh Aug 7, 2009, 8:41 am

    I received an email from Bluehost support two weeks ago requesting that I reduce my file size count to under 50,000 in one week. Email follows:

    Dear Tommy:

    “It has come to our attention that your site is using an excessive number of files stored on your BlueHost.Com account. This is causing performance problems on your website as well as for other customers that are on this server. It can cause our servers to crash and cause additional downtime.

    Our research shows that server performance degrades when accounts have over 50,000 files. In order to ensure optimal performance for your account and the others in your shared hosting environment, we request that you reduce the number of files on your account to under 50,000 by 07/28/2009.”

    I spent three hours weeding out some places they reccommended might be some places I wasn’t aware of like old logs and spam email boxes etc. I went from around 300,000 files to around 200,000 files which I thought would show good faith on my part as this was a request and not a warning etc, just a request. So a week goes by….. nothing. Afternoon of August 4, 2009 I return from lunch and check my email which oddly was my last email received which read…….

    “Dear Tommy:

    Your web hosting account for clubt.com has been deactivated (reason: excessive file count).
    Although your web site has been disabled, your data may still be available for up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted.

    If you feel this deactivation is in error, please contact customer support as soon as possible.

    Thank you,
    BlueHost.Com Support
    http://www.bluehost.com
    For support go to http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/
    Toll-Free: (888) 401-4678″

    Sure enough I check my 4 web sites we have at Bluehost, all have a account suspended notice on a white background, making all 4 businesses appear that they had gone out of business and all email accounts down as well. I called Bluehost support and asked what was going on, they told me I had been suspended and the only way to get my web sited back up was to get my total file count to below 50,000. My current file count was 214,000. They were asking me to delete 75% of my website to get back online! For those that do not understand file counts and inode counts, every email, page, picture etc takes up one inode on linux servers. One of our companies is a DJ company. We take photos at our events and use a program to put them into thumbnail catalogs. If we start with 100 photos we might end up with close to 1,000 inodes when the program is done with it’s thumbnail views etc. 50,000 for us is a very small number of files.

    Anyways, here’s my argument. When I signed on with Bluehost, they were happy to take my business advertising unlimited transfer, unlimited storage space etc. I thought, this is fantastic, we can keep our photo sets online for students to enjoy for a long time. I even made sure to mention this to the support rep when I signed up to be certain that unlimited storage was unlimited storage. When I signed up we had well over 50,000 files and simply grew. There was never any mention of this limitation whatsoever until I received the email on 7-21-09, otherwise I would have went elsewhere in 2006. Our site is so big it takes days to move via ftp (site is about 15 gigs). What i’m asking here is that shared hosting companies be a little more honest with people. If they’re advertising unlimited storage it should not be restricted by file count or inode counts. They shoudl have an asteric next to the unlimited with a link taking you to the legal section where it clearly explains their file count, then I’d have no argument. I think you’ll find it interesting reading that in their terms and conditions page http://www.bluehost.com/cgi/info/terms.html
    there is absolutely no mention of file count or inode count restrictions. These people are just really bad business people that just kicked a good paying customer with a legitimate business to the curb. We do not reccommend Bluehost to anyone anymore as they falsely advertise their product!! We have moved to Media Temple where their customer service has been fantastic over the past week of moving files in desperation to get our businesses back online after Bluehost turned a “request” into something entirely different. Read the fine print before you sign on the dotted line. If the fine print doesn’t answer your questions then get customer reviews on products before you commit, you’ll often be surprised to what you find.

  • Chief Oddball Jul 10, 2009, 12:40 pm

    I only recently (read: less than a week ago) signed up with Bluehost, but so far it’s been an unexpectedly smooth hosting experience. I’ve been with a lot of hosts, some good, some fair, and some terrible. Nearly all of them start out great and only go downhill from there — usually it’s just a question of how much time will elapse before I move on.

    With that said, doing a review this early into my Bluehost account lifespan may be fatuous. However, I thought it worthwhile to post my experience, particularly with the transition and setup, as they were a cut above what I was expecting.

    First of all, the price couldn’t be beat. I had already put Bluehost on my list, but the July 4th weekend promotion of $3.95/month (prepaid for 12 months) was too good to pass up. Account setup was, to my surprise, instantaneous and automated. I got right into the control panel and set up all of my databases and email accounts within moments of creating my account.

    (Later, Bluehost personally called me at my billing phone number to verify that I had indeed submitted the order. This was unexpected, but a nice touch.)

    Compared to the other cPanel-based hosts I’ve been with, I find that Bluehost has perhaps the most attractive and easy-to-navigate cPanel skin. They also offer little features within the usual cPanel tools that I wasn’t expecting. For example, Bluehost lets you specify multiple conditions on an email filter (with the option to set “OR” or “AND” operators). I also like how the knowledge base, account controls, etc. are all integrated into the cPanel with a single unified login and tab-based navigation. Makes it easy to see everything in one place.

    As for performance, it’s been excellent so far. Page loads are faster than my previous host, and WordPress’ integrated self-upgrade features are blazing fast and work without incident. suPHP is used to bolster security and makes it unnecessary to go around CHMODding everything.

    I also run a private MediaWiki system, which not only works flawlessly on Bluehost, but also performs much better than it did on my last host.

    As a disclaimer, I should mention that I have very low-traffic sites which I mainly use either for personal testing, work projects or as informational resources for my group of friends. I have three domains pointing to different sites on one Bluehost account, and each averages less than 1 GB of bandwidth per month.

    The only thing I read about Bluehost, features-wise, that gave me pause was the 50,000 file limit that’s currently imposed. I’d not heard of a host actually limiting the number of physical files on your web space. This is made somewhat more concerning by the fact that there’s no easy way, through your cPanel for example, to see how many files you have. Based on my backups, I have about 12,000, so I should be safe. But on principle I dislike having limits set on things that are inconvenient to measure.

    Overall, I’m very pleased with Bluehost — with the caveat that this is a very preliminary review, based on only a few days of experience.

  • smdtime Jun 9, 2009, 11:48 am

    I was new to web design and wasn’t sure about which hosts to use for freelance clients. A co worker recommended bluehost, and after eventually having too many problems with my previous hosting provider which was routhost, I switched to bluehost. Bluehost has been very reliable and has good support, so now I always recommend them for new clients.

  • Buy Steelers Jerseys Feb 25, 2009, 12:08 am

    My sites started to hang with a lot of 500 errors. I switched to the the fastcgi option, and all is working. However xml-sitemaps is not working (in browser mode). It’ll only work if I remove the fastcgi option.
    Otherwise, it seems to be working OK.