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Bad experiences. Written by nonphixion, on 09-03-2007 16:42 I started out with Bluehost about 1.5 years ago moving my site at the time rather rapidly as our host sponsors were taken over by another company. Before I proceed it would help to explain what I run. I have 2 sites (and 2 bluehost accounts respectively), they have minimalistic websites and are really built around the forum package vBulletin (again, for both sites). Below I will list all the challenges and experiences I've had with Bluehost.    E-Mail Limit    No where on their website will it tell you that there is a limit of 100 emails per hour, no where. For a good 3 months I was sending monthly emails via both sites to c. 7000-8000 members, only a 100 of each batch ever made it (if even that, pm notification emails, registration emails etc can all be deducted, so say 90). vBulletin doesn't tell you that it's encountering issues as it also thinks all is ok, their email system doesn't start bouncing emails after a 100, they just disappear making you think they are sent.    At that point I was rather upset and contacted Customer Service, they were able to up it to 500 per hour based on a valid reason. If you want to send a 1000 per hour, the monthly costs change to $19.95. Ouch.    Customer Service (or lack thereof)    Let me start out by saying there are a wide array of ways to contact them, live chat being one of those cool things recently added. Although this is nice, the people behind are either lazy or badly trained. Sample of bad experiences:    * Change E-Mail to 500/hour - As you read above, emails are capped. I asked for both my sites to be upped to 500 with valid reasons, and they confirmed the action had been done. Come to find out, on one site it was still at a 100. So me going through the hassle of setting up cron jobs for dispatching emails was useless on one site. There is no field in cpanel where you can observe this value, so once again, I had wasted my time. One rep was rude enough to point out that I'd be hurting everyone else's performance, this as a reply to why the email cap is not listed on the website. Rather weak.  * Changing some cnames - You can't perform cnames but bluehost can for you, fair enough. I asked for two to be changed and the first propogated after a day but for the second I had to go back to them four times to tell them it hadn't been done yet, each time they had confirmed it was ok. The last guy who finally was able to get it right (this is nothing complex) didn't apologize on behalf of other users.  * Simple Question - Not being the greatest webmaster wiz around I once had to ask how to access SSH. I was told to google putty and the rep then just ended the session. Great.    Server Load    If you sign up to Bluehost, pray to god you get a good box (i.e. box00.bluehost.com, where 00 is the number of the box). My larger site thankfully is running on a good box where server load is rather low, however my other is crapping it's pants with not even 15% of traffic the first has. I've checked with other vbulletin admins and they agree, bad server, not bad setup. So you just have to be lucky!    Downtime    It's unexpected, it's frequent and even the reps won't have a clue about it when it's happening. You'll however get this lengthy apology a few days later. I don't live off my website, but if you do, say you're a wedding photographer, look somewhere else. It ranges from minutes to 5-10 hour blocks over the course of a few days (i.e. summer '06)    --------    This concludes my experience, I am still there because my contract is rather lengthy (one year) so I'm just waiting it out before going somewhere else. My initial mistakes were not to ask enough pre-sales questions and trusting some online reviews too much. Don't follow in my footsteps , do your homework on hosts and just hope you get a good one.