I am sorry to hear that all of you Bluehost.com / Hostmonster.com / Fastdomain.com clients are still getting the run around with CEO (Matt Heaton) and President (Dan Handy) and the fact they still do not get it. I was the 38th employee hired, both I am my wife worked for them. I as a level 2 technician and my wife worked in billing, until I tired of their excuses and lies they would force us to push to the customer. For those of you who want the honesty back from your hosting provider. please feel free to move your site to our hosting service http://www.bullfroghost.net.

I would love to have all of you as clients. Please also note that you can request a refund of the unused portion of your hosting costs from Bluehost and they will refund it. This will leave you free to move your site. Our cost is only $3.95/mo ($94.80 for the two year plan.)

I would love to go into detail on all of the issues I have read on this blog but I feel I will only waste my time and yours. If you would like more proof of what I have declared, please feel free to contact me scott @ bullfroghost.net.

NOTE: We are a debt free hosting provider protected by the industries best Firewalls and Intrusion Detection Prevention. We do not play games with your important personal data.

Yours Truely,
CEO Scott Dennis.

After reading the comments above, I felt very compelled to voice my opinions about Bluehost.

I’m totally with Frank with his views. I signed up with Bluehost in March 2008 upon the very obvious recommendation (read: paid ad) from the WordPress.com main site.

I installed many plugins and widgets and experienced no issues whatsoever, with the original Statpress plugin. When StatPress’ development was discontinued, someone else took over its upgrades and StatPress Reloaded was the result.

And I installed StatPress Reloaded, thinking that it was an improvement over the original version.

Never once did I think StatPress Reloaded (SP-R) would one day cause my site to be offline twice. The first incident happened in mid Dec 2008 and luckily I caught the notification by email. Since I live in Asia, I opted for the online chat instead of international phone call.

The tech guy told me that my blog’s MySQL was causing performance. True, it was then at 108 MB and rising. He said that my blog was drawing too many queries in an hour and suggested that SP-R was the culprit.

I got my Control Panel access back and my WordPress (then version 2.5.2) online. I emptied the SP-R tables and true enough, my SQL shrunk to a tenth of its original size.

The tech guy said that 100 MB was “too large” for a WP blog database. Following his advice, I re-configured SP-R to clear its history after 30 days (previously 50 days) and turned off logging of bots and crawlers.

I also noticed that Bluehost’s servers were often under heavy load starting from 3rd Qtr 2008.

Today on Jan 13th, I woke up to find that my site had been suspended again. OK, this time I was pretty sure SP-R was the problematic plugin. The tech guy whom I contacted via chat was unfriendly and told me that Bluehost “admin wanted me to contact them for reinstatement through a support ticket”.

Ticket was posted…several hours passed by with nobody attending to the support ticket. In the meantime, I had already made up my mind to change my web hosts, after finding so many references to “Bluehost.com sucks” on Google.

I found another web hosting provider – Fastdomain.com, which is actually a sister company of Bluehost.com, except that they don’t share servers or static IP addresses. The location of Fastdomain’s servers is the same as Bluehost’s.

The salesperson, “Ann A.” whom I chatted with turned out to be more knowledgeable than the support guys at Bluehost.com (oh, the irony of things!). She said that while Fastdomain and Bluehost are related to one another, they do not share their clientele list, therefore privacy of my new account is assured.

Ann also told me that lots of their clients have websites with SQLs over 100MB in size and with 10,000 visitors a day – no problems. But she did caution me that certain plug-ins are known to cause overload on their shared servers due to excessive queries caused by those plugins. (Ah, now I see the root of the problem – StatPress Reloaded). :-)

After one hour on the chat line, I actually learned MORE about MySQL and plug-in issues from someone from the sales dept than a chat with a so-called tech support person! Needless to say, I was sold and immediately opened an account with Fastdomain.com.

At $4.95/mth for a 24-hour hosting plan (thanks to a discount coupon), Fastdomain.com is much cheaper than Bluehost’s in the long term.

Some good news though – later I managed to persuade Bluehost’s tech dept person (a different guy) to reinstate my site. I convinced him that I had fixed the problem (deleting the SP-R plugin via FTP). Fortunately he sympathized with my predicament and at got my site back up within minutes. :-)

Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise. I was about to extend my hosting with Bluehost.com for the next 12 months (my account will expire in early March 2009) and after the two embarrassing downtime incidents, I’ve made up my mind to take my business elsewhere.

Looks like I’ll have to spend the next two or three days migrating my data to the new server (with a different domain). My beef is with Bluehost.com not notifying me via email (I check my emails daily) about my site issues.

I’m sure Bluehost had been monitoring my server box for at least a week, so why can’t they have the courtesy to notify me first? I could’ve fixed the problem ASAP. Server performance degradation doesn’t occur overnight – it takes time to develop.

Bluehost preferred to pull the plug instead and let me sort things out later. Grrr….

One thing I’m sure of now:

- Goodbye Bluehost.com.
- Farewell StatPress Reloaded.

And just to be on the safe side, I will not use StatPress Reloaded again with my new web host. I found out that the little-known AWStats applet provided in the CPanel does the same job too.

thanks for reading,

Stratman II.

http://www.quartzimodo.info

Since months, the box where my websites were hosted was having constant CPU Quota error and very high server load. I was told by them that my account was the cause of this as I was using too much ressources.. Still, I was having about 10 000 pageviews a day, with WP-Cache activated, so I don’t believe I was exceeding anything.

Anyway, having my account cancelled by them was the best thing I could have, finally. I paid for two year in advance but in fact they should refund me the remaining month. I’m now using two webhost: if something goes wrong, at least all my websites will not be affected at the same time. I’m with HostPapa and WPWebHost and so far I have no complaint. WpWebHost is always having a low server load…

By mean, the server load of BlueHost is still 5 or 6 time higher than my new webhosts, and I can see that I wasn’t the cause for they high server load as when I’m looking at the server status, I can see sometimes very high server load, about 30 or 35 seconds.

The best advice I can give you is to change webhost before they desactivate your account without any warning. I searched on google and I can see there are a lot of other similar case of desactivated account..