Well, it would seem 2008 has started out as a rough year for my webhost — all domains I own have been down more than they’ve been up for January. Apologies to everyone who has been trying to access the site in that period of time — I’ve spent many, many hours on the phone with BlueHost trying to get this fixed.
While I appreciate that Matt Heaton (CEO of Bluehost) has admitted that things have gone off the rails, I don’t feel terribly confident about BlueHost as a hosting company these days. After about 10 phone calls (and as I said, many wasted hours), I’ve only managed to get the site up about half the time — and problems keep returning.
What bothers me the most however, is that aside from Matt’s blog post, there has been no communication from BlueHost at all about the problems. No list of problems, no potential solutions, and no timetable for fixes.
Matt Heaton mentions that the company has grown at an unusually fast rate over the past month or two. Great — but sacrificing the satisfaction of your existing customers for new business hardly seems like a good move. If you don’t have the capacity for all that business, you need to be honest with yourself and not bite off more than you can chew as a company.
All companies run into problems now and then, some minor and some major. But not keeping your customers informed about what’s going on is a big mistake. I’ve just over a year with BlueHost, and until this month, I was a happy customer, and would’ve likely recommended BlueHost to friends and colleagues.
Despite all of the great work that tech support folks have done for me at BlueHost (I can’t fault them for poor management decisions at their company), I now wouldn’t recommend BlueHost to anyone — they’ve completely turned my opinion of their company around in the past two weeks.
So again, apologies to anyone who has trouble accessing the site in the month of January — after many hours of support calls, I think everything is now straightened out. So if anyone’s having a rough start to 2008, don’t worry, you’re not alone. 
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January 18th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
My experience has been less than stellar with Bluehost.
Read more about my horror with Bluehost: http://inetintegrity.com/weblog/?p=1
January 19th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Interesting post, Crazy Penguin. Based on the experience I’ve just had with BlueHost, I’m not at all surprised (although it does seem to be remarkably difficult to find a webhost that is not actually involved in some kind of shady business practices.
The more I dig around, the more dissatisfied BlueHost customers I find. I’ll definitely be looking to switch when I have the opportunity.
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:00 pm
You are probably on a bad hosting block with bluehost. These guys are helpful about 85% of the time because some of their new techs are morons, but for the ones who have been there for a while, they are great at helping me solve any issues that I most likely created. You might feel negative about their performance because you haven’t used many other hosts, I don’t know. I have, like netfirms and they SUCK. Try asking a tech for help and he will direct you to the support ticket or tell you he will have to contact level 2 support EVERYTIME YOU CALL. Not to mention that the support number was NOT toll free when I used netfirms, so on and so on. Anyhow, bluehost is better than most and that should be the defining factor here.
July 2nd, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Thanks for your comment, Brand. I made sure to cite the good job that BlueHost support has done with my site — I have dealt with some dedicated folks who were a ton of help getting things up and running again.
That’s not really my issue with their hosting. You’re right about me not really having much experience with other web hosts, my comments are more directed at running a business in general. I think you do have a good point however, and I’m sure there are much worse hosts out there.
My complaint with BlueHost is that they have already established a communication medium with their customers (Matt Heaton’s blog) that they could also be using to communicate upgrades/changes/potential downtime to their customers. I totally understand that things sometimes go haywire — my problem is more that I never really find out until all my sites are down and I have to call. At least with a bit of upfront communication they could avoid a great deal of customer frustration (I’m sure that would make their support folks happier as well).
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