I moved several of my sites to bluehost. Their sales lit glows with phrases like "Guaranteed Max Uptime". But, when you ask what they means, they say only the network is guaranteed, not the server availability. Indeed, this is true because I have had Extensive downtime. They refuse to move you to another server and blame their problems on DOS attacks. Today, they took the server down for 'maintenance' during the work day so that it '500' errored to my customers. When I asked them my options, they replied "be patient or leave".
DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THEIR SALES SPEAK AND SLICK UI. THEY ARE NOT RELIABLE AT ALL AND THEIR SO-CALLED "GUARANTEES" ARE WORTHLESS.
Used about a year. About 25% of the time I access my site, either directly or through CPanel my account is frozen 1 to 5 minutes at a time. Daily situation. After many contacts with support, I'm always told that they see no problem, & it must be either my router or my ISP. I've taken steps to insure this isn't the case,including using different computers with different ISP's, having different people try at the same time from different parts of the country, and using proxy servers. The down time is consistent, at the same times, no matter what access point is used. However bluehost refuses to acknowledge any problems on their end. This amount of downtime is completely unacceptable for any business application. How many times have you gone to a site that froze for 30 seconds plus and just moved on and never returned? This site only montitors 3 sites from bluehost, which for a shared host with hundreds of servers and many sites per server, means nothing.
I contacted them through their live chat service from their website with a pre-sales question. I spoke to JordanH, asked a question and received a dismissive one word answer , 'no', without any follow up offering or information. He acted like he could care less. Asked and answered I guess, but sure not a warm welcoming experience. I'm looking elsewhere.
Very TRICKY pricing options...Buyer BEWARE, August 23, 2008 Reviewer: Dan from USA - See all reviews by Dan
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Bluehost used to offer $6.95 hosting if you prepaid for TWO (2) years. All of a sudden, in order to get the same price, you need to prepay for THREE (3) years.
What's next, gonna start charging for support?
Buyer BEWARE!!!
There uptime is an issue. What is the use of an unreachable website.
I am also looking for another hosting service.
Excellent P/R people but this is a business about real connect time not sweet talk.