Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

bluehost.com ignores customer complaints on database downtime

Posted 30 April 2008 @ 8am | Tagged bluehost, customer service, fail, thoughts

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I gave bluehost more than two months to fix their issues, or even simply notify their customers of ongoing problems and make some sort of gesture to make up for the downtime. They have done neither, while the server that hosts this blog (box 12 at bluehost) continues to have constant database downtime.

I’ve included a one liner history of my interaction with them. My responses are paraphrased, while theirs are direct quotes from their emails. Note that they usually respond hours later when the site has restored itself due to their reaper scripts constantly restarting the database.

• February 13 Yan: Database problem.
• February 13 Bluehost: The processes on your server have been shut down. The site is showing up and running.
• At this point I call them, have a chat, they say they have had ongoing problems and they will be fixed. I ask them to notify customers. They do not.
• Mar 9 Bluehost: Currently MySQL on your server (box12) is overloaded.
• Mar 10 Bluehost: It looks like you are exceeding your own mysql active connection limit which is 30
• Mar 10 Yan: How can I exceed 30 connections with a blog that gets low traffic and runs 5 php processes? Database is down again.
• Mar 10 Bluehost: At this time there are no connections to terminate.
• Mar 17 Yan: Down again.
• Mar 17 Bluehost: Checking the sites both show up an running. At this time there is no issue at this time.
• Database goes down 10+ times between March and April. I just wait, hoping they will fix it.
• Apr 17 Yan: Down again.
• Apr 17 Bluehost: I have checked your databases, and do not see the connections maxed out.
• After several angry emails, my ticket is escalated to the next level of support. The person seems more intelligent than the previous support staff who clearly have no ability to investigate past events.
• Apr 18 Yan: Why do I see scripts that constantly restart mysql?
• Apr 18 Bluehost: When there are problems with mysql the server will try to restart it.
• Apr 18 Yan: Brilliant answer.
• Apr 25 Bluehost: I can see that Mysql has been having some problems on your server. (Ya think!?)
• Apr 25 Yan: Who is eating my connections? I asked before and no one answered how 5 php processes are eating 30 connections.
• Apr 25 Bluehost: [...]Not necessarily from your account[...] To be honest some boxes seem to have more problems then others and box 12 happens to be one of those boxes.
• Apr 25 Yan: How about telling your customers that box 12 has some capacity issues and moving them off?
• Apr 28 Bluehost: I have been keeping a close eye on box12 it hasn’t been having any issues the last few days. There is no capacity problems.
• Apr 28 Yan: Down again.
• Apr 30 Bluehost: no response….
• I call them up. The support person verifies that there have been ongoing issues on box 12. I ask why the customers have not been notified. She says because they prefer to spend their energy on fixing the problem and probably most customers don’t use the database. I say, fine, but it’s been 2 months. She says she doesn’t have a good answer. I inform her that their failure to be proactive is resulting in this blogpost.

Well, that’s the story. Draw your own conclusions. Either there are some serious miscommunication issues inside this company, or the support staff have been lying to me outright. In either case, it’s not a company I wish to continue to do business with. I’m looking for a new hosting provider to move away from Bluehost.

They’ve moved me to a different server now in hopes that this new home will have less downtime…however as of today they have still to my knowledge not contacted anyone else on box 12 to tell them about ongoing problems.

[...] to users of bluehost.com hosting. They store your account password in plain text. During my long drawn out battle where they refused to own up to database problems, one of the support calls resulted in the support woman asking me for my password. When I refused [...]

it’s not a good host server. don’t use this.

I work as a freelance computer programmer doing web applications and database programming. So I have several years experience dealing with a variety of different hosting companies. One of my biggest clients, who sub-contracts alot of work to me, was setting up all of their clients’ websites to be hosted at BlueHost. Mainly because they were cheap and promissed alot.

At first it seemed like a decent hosting company. But after a while I started to notice all of the sites we had hosted there slowing down greatly and then started to notice alot of down time. When this first started to occur I called their tech support and found out they were under what is called a denial of services attack from some hackers in China. This is actually very common. What is not common though is a hosting company that has no clue how to deal with it.

The first time it happened I gave them the benefit of the doubt and was very patient while they took almost a month to get the sites back up and running half way decent. But in the months to come it was happening all of the time. I could never get any development work done on the sites we were building and the sites that were live were down more often then they were up. And the ones that would still come up were extremely slow and produced tons of errors on the pages.

I again called their tech support when they again told me they were under a denial of services attack and as a result they had to disable many basic and common services on the server which is what was causes the errors. They did this without informing or warning any of their customers and then told me that it would be at least 2-3 weeks before they could turn them back on.

As I said before I have several years dealing with a variety of hosting companies and BlueHost is by far and without a doubt the worst option available anywhere on the internet!

Several months ago I began testing several other hosting companies to find a replacement for the accounts I had hosted at BlueHost. The one that I am the most happy with is HostGator. I have had no performance issues whatsoever with them. They have a 99.999% uptime garauntee and they take that very seriously. They have 24/7 tech support by phone and live chat. Their cPanel is the same as with BlueHost. And they have hosting plans as low as $4.95 per month.

If you are currently hosted at BlueHost and have noticed the same problems that I did I highly recommend you take a look at HostGator. And if you are thinking about hosting a site at BlueHost…Don’t waist your time and money.

THE WORST COMPANY I HAVE EVER DONE BUSINESS WITH, BLUEHOST.COM ARE THIEVES, I SEND 0VER $1500 TO OBTAIN THEIR SERVICES AND DOMAIN AND WITHIN A MONTH THEY CANCELLED MY ACCOUNT CLAIMING I VIOLATED THEIR TOS.
BUT THERE WAS NO VIOLATION, I ASK WHICH CLAUSE, THEY REFUSE TO ANSWER.
TO ALL VICTIMS OF THIS BLUEHOST.COM COMPANY FILE YOUR COMPLAINTS WITH BETTER BUSSINESS BUREAU AT: http://www.saltlakecity.bbb.org/

STAY AWAY FROM BLUEHOST. Make sure you have a CANN company which regulates. They continued to charge my credit card until I cancelled it. Now I must pay their chargebacks or they won’t release my site, $50.00.