Is BlueHost Going Down on Quality?

Posted by Saad Hamid on March 20, 2008

Since I started blogging, I tried many different hosts but finally I settled down with BlueHost as I found it the best and the most reliable. I have even tried other big hosting companies like DreamHost and HostGator but at some point they all fail to provide customer and user satisfaction.

Yesterday night, as most of you would have noticed, Sizlopedia went down for nearly 2 hours and later my shared hosting account on BlueHost was permanently suspended. This was a shocking and terrorizing moment for me as never before has BlueHost ever permanently suspended my hosting account (Though there have been some periodic temporary account suspensions due to high traffic overload but thats normal)

After struggling for over 20-30 minutes with Live BlueHost Chat (which is not that live anymore) I got in contact with a BlueHost support manager and the reason he gave me for my account being suspended was "site causing performance problems"

Later on it was discovered that the actual reason for my account suspension was due to a problem at BlueHost's backend and my site had no relation to it (That makes sense! how can a site cause performance problems over night when it has a stable performance record for past 1 year)

Take this as a caution or as a serious note but you really need to consider deeply if you are planning to move to BlueHost. They are still the best (no doubt about that) but they have started overselling. Plus they are now hosting over 500+ websites on the same shared hosting box and remember that their Live-chat is not that active and responsive anymore.

Are you on BlueHost? Have you had any problems with them so far? Please share in the comments.

Posted in: Blogging

  • Bluehost was much recommended by Nirmal, Arpit Jacob etc., but I don't see the point.

    They have been overselling for quite some time, and now aren't much different from Dreamhost in terms of quality (or lack thereof).

    Arpit's account was suspended recently, looks like they're out to suspend accounts with blogs larger than normal :( Good thing I'm moving from Dreamhost to elsewhere and not Bluehost, though.

    "They are still the best (no doubt about that) but they have started overselling" is a dubious statement.

    I can point to 1, 2, 3, nah forget it, 5 hosts who are more cost-effective than Bluehost, or 2-3 hosts who have less downtime, better server performance and be Digg-proof (I'm moving next week to one such host).
  • lol
    BlueHost has always been overselling, if you want a good host similar to bluehost which oversells, the best would be Servage.com


    Other then that you should get a real host, if your traffic is so high then why don't you buy some real hosting?
  • DJ! same thing happens to my blog as well few weeks back and it went down for more than 4 hours. I think that was the worst time for my blog because Google was crawling my site at that time and next day my site was out from the search index.

    I know you have overwhelming traffic on your blog and you are earning well ;) you should get your own dedicated server to avoid such downtimes.
  • All these shared hosting big guns like Dreamhost, bluehost etc have their off days ;)

    All of them over-sell from very start, strange you realized it now!

    Anyway, if you are getting loads of traffic (which seems to be the case) get on dedicated machine, what say?
  • Just forgot to mention...the new design is cool and clean.

    But, it looks very similar to quickonlinetips.com blog ;)
  • I know guys that BlueHost has been overselling from the start but the fact is that you only come to realize it when it starts affecting your shared hosting account.

    Thanks to the people who suggested me to move to dedicated hosting. I think that is the need of the time and I will soon be putting some consideration towards it.

    @Davinder

    Thanks for appreciating the new design. It indeed is inspired by quickonlinetips.com

    You wouldn't have missed that if you were following me on Twitter :P
  • lol
    A dedicated server? Nah thats too much, a VPS would be enough for now lol.
  • So the search for World's best managed VPS hosting is on :D
  • All these bluehost, dreamhost and all others which are in the same category are all relaible only upto certain level I guess...Has anyone tried Yahoo hosting? Its a bit expensive but it'll be worth it if its reliable.
  • lol
    For a site like your's, you would most likely need a minimum of 512 MB RAM.
    You could check out http://www.vpslink.com they seem to be quite good.
  • @lol

    Thanks. I will try looking at their packages. Keshav recommended me http://www.slicehost.com which seems to be quite good as well.
  • bluehost is really going down on quality. I wrote about it when I moved to bluehost.

    Actually I was in a impression that you are already on Dedicated hosting.

    http://www.tecfre.com/dreamhost-i-miss-you-is-b...
  • I currently host with a company called dotyou.com. I sincerely do not recommend them. Their customer service is pitiful, and they are constantly having issues that take a long time to solve. The only reason I haven't left yet is because of the problem I would have moving tens of thousands of pages from my two sites. On the good side, though, they offer great free script on their hosting package, which a lot of companies do not offer.
  • Bruce
    BlueHost, Hostmonster and DreamHost are all overselling.

    If you want better quality without the overselling go with WebFaction
  • Using Bluehost and quality in the same sentence is an oxymoron.

    I had so many problems with Bluehost it would take a short novel to describe them.

    Read about my nightmare with Bluehost.
  • I've used bluehost nearly for 5 years and just recently, I've been getting this error as well. Now I am a web programmer so I know how to optimize my website to use less CPU and still this is happening, so it's definitely an issue on Bluehost.com's site.

    My company uses bluehost to host all its websites and this is my only source of income so I cannot have my sites down 10-20 mins through out the day!!

    They better fix the issue before people start looking else where, specifically for dedicated severs
  • I am only here to say I signed up to be an affiliate for BlueHost and before spending any time creating any promotions on them I signed up for their hosting just to see what my future leads were going to get.

    Well...BlueHost killed my hosting account within 24 hours accusing me to giving them inaccurate contact info. They won't reply to any emails now?

    Their affiliate manager sound like those fascists that John Belushi almost ran over in "Blues Brothers". I don't understand what's happening with BlueHost nor why they treated me like this, nor do I care. I am just here to warn anyone who might be thinking of joining them. These are proper cowboys, they'll shoot first then they'll ask "who is there". I still don't have a clue what their problem with me was and life's too short to even bother.

    I just hope my paypal dispute will help get my $95 back. Oh and while I was in there, it isn't true that you get adwords and Yahoo credits! You only get them if you join adwords and Yahoo via BlueHost's affiliates link!
  • Gerry Russo
    I've got web hosting on pretty much all the top hosting companies. The best I have found are ones with clustered hosting. Netfirms is good. I also heard that Vistapages has come out with some cPanel clustered hosting, which bluehost uses as their control panel too. Might be worth looking into!
  • Brian
    BLuehost performance has gotten a lot worse over the last couple of months. Seems they have "server under heavy load" problems at least twice a week now. Can't the morons fix it by now? Are they really that stupid??? Time to move to another hosting company.
  • Tyson
    This post is really late, and I never make comments, but I had to on this one.

    I use to love Bluehost. I've been with them for 5 years now, but in the last 8 months or so their service has continually gotten worse. I kept hoping that it would get better, as they would tell me every time I spoke with someone that their techs have found the issue and it would be resolved. That of course has never happened.

    The service has now become terrible and I just can't take it anymore, and today I have finally decided that I need to find a new place to host my sites.

    If you have any recommendations on any good hosting companies, please let me know.
  • Bluehost is gradually becoming slower and slower...For example, my websites are all down right now. And I'm getting downtime more and more frequently.

    I agree...they were so great just last year - now we are getting such a decrease in quality.
  • Ron
    Bluehost just suspended my account without notice and when I called did not give me explanation in detail. My customers are noe mad at me since their site are down. Their quality of services has consistently gone down.
  • micek
    Bluehost sucks, but they give high amounts for affiliate service, so they are all over with their adds on so called webhost rating sites, which are affiliate sites claiming objectivity and real independent information. Bluehost have no real long term business plan, and their customers will get taste of that soon. If you are on bluehost, it is a matter of time when and over what they will screw you.
  • Just this morning my business site and e-commerce site went down again with BlueHost. Their customer service told me "99.99% uptime gurantees we will be connected to the ISP. We are still connected to the ISP but our servers are down."

    That tells me their real uptime is less than 99.99% and it also tells me I am going to continually have trouble running my e-commerce site with bluehost.

    Are Dreamhost, GoDaddy or anyone else better? Can't make a living if my sites are down.
  • I am not here to advice anyone to join this or that webhost I am here to advice people to stay away from Bluehost. It isn't about their speed, it's about their attitude!

    I signed up with them, moved my sites over and then suddenly all my sites just displayed the message: "This Account Has Been Suspended" .

    Imagine how nice it is for your users to see that message instead of your websites!. Obviously they'll think you did something wrong, but the only problem is: you signed up with Bluehost!
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