BlueHost reviews – Page 3

Account Suspended Without Warning

As far as I recall the package was cheap - but if your site is important to you, I'd avoid using Bluehost.com for the following reason.

My sites were suspended without warning.
I was sent an email *after wards* to notify me that a forum was causing spam which as against the T&C. While it may have been a burden on the servers, I think they could have given me a few hours notice at the very minimum, so I could have addressed the issue.

Seriously bad practice imo, which is why I've given low score for "reliability"

Biggest Pro: cheap
Biggest Con: Suspend site without giving warning

Good for beginners with one website which has little traffic

I signed up with bluehost after seeing it ranked number 1 on the wordpress site.

Prior to them, I had used 1&1, and compared to that host, bluehost is like night and day.

It was really easy to setup the site, and they have plenty of tutorials to help you along the way. Also, if you have problems, customer support is really fast to get a hold of, specially if you got a basic problem.

When I first started, I was getting barely any visitors to my site, and thus, never had any problems with bluehost. As the months went by and the number of visitors increased, I realized that my website was not loading as fast, and come to find out, bluehost had throttled my website.

They give you a generic page on how to troubleshoot what might be causing the problem , and after following all the recommended guidelines, I figured problem wouldn't happen anymore.

Unfortunately, that was not the case. I continued to have my website throttled, and that means that my site went from loading in 3-4 seconds, to loading up in 15 seconds up to 35 seconds. Obviously that caused my bounce rate to go up, and I had not done anything additional to my site. In other words, I didn't add any new plugins, or change my wordpress theme, and only change I did was add 3 more posts for a total of 16 total pages on the site.

Bluehost gave me the same generic link and I told them I had already adjusted the site to follow their guidelines, and their response was, then it must be a plugin on your site, or your wordpress theme. I have minimum plugin sites, but I thought, maybe is the theme, so i changed it to a basic wordpress theme.

I let that theme run for 8 days, and in that time frame i got throttled twice.

Bottom line is this: If you have one website with a traffic of 50-100 visitors a day, bluehost might be a great host; however, as your traffic starts to go up, and mine doesn't even reach 500 a day, then troubles might start.

Also, my site was down 2 times and they said it was because of server upgrades, but I never got any advanced notice about it. Then the 2nd time they said it was a server problem they were trying to fix. Fortunately that happened at a time when I have the least visitors, but not good if your website caters also to other continents.

Overall, I'm highly dissapointed with Bluehost. I get throttled at least once a week, and my website is down to bare minimals.

I'm looking to change host, and in all fairness, bluehost is easy to setup, and it might be great if yo u're starting out with a website, but if you have more than one site, and it gets at least 200 visitors a day, good luck with them. Find another host.

The biggest problem I see is that they throttle your account and you don't get to find out the exact reason as to why that is happening; if they were to say, we throttled your account because of xyz reason, and here is how to fix it, then the continuing throttling would stop, and then i would be a happy customer. Obviously, you can get the dedicated server, but if you're starting out on a website, that's not really the best option.

Biggest Pro: If you're a beginner in setting up a website, bluehost has plenty of video tutorials and their cpanel is easy to use.
Biggest Con: They throttle your accounts and you can never really find out the exact reason as to why the throttling happens.

Excellent value

I have been using bluehost for about 3 years, and here are some things to think about:

1) It's $3.95/mo. for their unlimited package! Competitors charge $5.95 for a limited package, and unlimited is closer to $15/mo. With this, you get unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, and unlimited domains. I have about 15 domains hosted with them under one account. For $3.95/MO!!

2) Reliability: I monitor my websites with mon.itor.us, and they're up 99% of the time or better. This is good enough for me. Not five nines, but I've never had any problems getting in.

3) Technical support: They have a weird thing where you have to call in to "verify" your account before you can get shell access. No big deal, but it seems unnecessary.

4) Value: I challenge you to find another hosting account for $3.95/mo. Let alone one that's unlimited!

Biggest Pro: Unlimited Domains
Biggest Con: They put branded favicon.ico and default.html in your home folders.

Do Not Use BlueHost for Business Sites

If you're hosting a hobby site or personal homepage, BlueHost is OK. If you need hosting for your business site, look elsewhere.

We suffered a DDoS attack on our main site. BlueHost promptly closed the account. I went to live support wanting to know what a "DDoS" attack was and what I could do. The chat operator said he'd give me 60 seconds. In my 60 seconds he told me that it was basically my fault, that I violated their terms of service (huh?) and that they had every right to terminate the service. With that, my 60 seconds were up. Chat operator closed the chat. Web site gone.

I still use BlueHost to host some of my "throwaway" sites, but the sites I depend on for an income are all with professional hosts now.

By the way, if you have trouble with a sustained DDoS attack, Black Lotus Hosting helped me with mine. They are xpensive, but excellent.

Biggest Pro: Low prices
Biggest Con: Dishonest, mean, pathetic support.

Poor reliability and very slow

I was a customer for several years and rarely used the account. I hosted approximately 6 domains through them.

Over the years, I did have several random reliability issues. At one point, they disabled my account for "excessive CPU usage". At the time, I barely had anything running and very little site activity. I received no warning ahead of time.

What finally made me leave was the mysteriously deletion of my files. First all of my email accounts were removed. Then, the content in my home directory vanished (the only content that existed were the files that you would expect to see the first time you logged in).

I've been doing web development and systems administration for almost 10 years, professionally. I've never had any problem like they've described. I suspect they did a system upgrade, lost off all my stuff, and blamed user error.

In any event, I'm going to be looking for a new hosting service. If you're looking for hosting service, I suggest you avoid bluehost.

Biggest Pro: SSH Access
Biggest Con: Too many to list.

Terrible, clueless, money grubbers!

Here's the short:
Customer service is horrible, they rarely (if ever) answer their own help desk tickets.
Customer service on the phone - rude and clueless.
Downtime of the time I know about equates to a 81% uptime, not 99.97.
Early auto renewed my account by 3 months, it took 5 months to get everything straightened out.

Here's the long:
I conduct seminar's that are video taped, and I then release them online. Because of the file sizes, they claimed I was storing copyrighted material. MY OWN SEMINARS?!??!?! I haven't even copyrighted them, where's the violation? I argued with for 3 weeks about this and what it came down too as I was "using too much space" and using "too much bandwidth" which is a bit confusing since they offer UNLIMITED STORAGE and UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH!!!

Terrible. Just Terrible. Save yourself the trouble, go ANYWHERE else!!!

DO NOT USE BLUEHOST.COM. IT IS LOUSY

Blue Host Sucks.... lousy support, lousy uptime, lousy connection. Dont use bluehost if you need a business running. They are the worst i every come across after using so many hosting. I am getting out of this stupid hosting company

Biggest Pro: No + Points, everything they have all others have, they only sell it slighly cheaper
Biggest Con: not reliable. unprofessional support

If you are thinking of BlueHost choose Hostgator instead!

Below is the email I got after more than a day of outage on my brand new account with BlueHost. It is still not functioning correctly, in fact they disabled core functions and left me with broken pages and told me I have to just wait for an undermined amount of time. I have had both dedicated and shared plans with Hostgator, trust me, don't use BlueHost. DONT.

"Unfortunately your server is still under a DDoS attack and will respond extremely slowly (if at all). As soon as the attack discontinues or is otherwise resolved the server will function normally again.

A DDoS attack is essentially a highly distributed attack on the server. It's usually done by a hacker getting viruses in thousands of computers and having them send as many connections as possible, as quickly as possible, to the box.

We are working to reduce the effect of the attack and find out which account is being targeted. Unfortunately, we can't know which account is being attacked without extensive steps, as the IP Address on the server is shared.

DDoS attacks can last anywhere from hours to days.

Your data is safe. Just currently inaccessible."

Biggest Pro: cheap
Biggest Con: server non-responsive for more than a day within my first month.

No security. They don't care if your site is hacked

Our web site got hacked through a flaw in a PHP script I wrote. Like any complex system, the hack would not have been possible if other common security measures had been in place. I couldn't imagine that a commercial web host would:
keep error logs and .ini files in the public root directory and not deny access by default
write PHP errors to the browser
not write PHP error logs
allow all PHP functions such as shell access and low level file operations
allow URLs to be treated as files (allow_url_fopen = On and allow_url_include = On). Setting these to off would have prevented the hack.
access and error logs were turned off

Default security should be strong. Anybody who needs less security will know how to configure it.

As soon as I discovered the hack, I opened a support ticket and was told that I was responsible for security. They e-mailed me some links to decent articles on security after I bugged them for several days. They really did not act concerned at all. The security articles on their site were rather general and did not tell the user what specifically needed to be done on their site for security.

Biggest Pro: None. They are a little more expensive than other sites.
Biggest Con: Lack of security and lack of concern about it.

Meh.

I've used Bluehost for a few years. Uptime has been pretty decent, but there have been some random outages that nobody at BlueHost seemed to know anything about. It can be difficult to get through to support, and even when I do, they aren't particularly knowledgeable. The cPanel interface is pretty good, and I love that they use SimpleScripts, which makes installing and updating WordPress and PHPbb quick and easy.

The #1 reason I am moving from Bluehost is that they changed their Acceptable Use Policy, and now any type of "profanity or profane subject matter in the site content" is cause for immediate termination. Come on now, people - have we suddenly time-traveled back to the Victorian era? I run six blog sites and a forum, and don't have the time nor the inclination to moderate all posts and comments for the f-word. Customer support claims they don't enforce this policy often, but it's a lame way to do business, so I'm moving on to a less restrictive host.

Biggest Pro: SimpleScripts rocks!
Biggest Con: Ridiculously restrictive Acceptable Use Policy