Bye Bye Bluehost.

Shit List / By

“You have no idea how bad it gets… I wish I knew how to quit you.”
– Me, twice a month, from July 2007 until January 2014… regarding Bluehost


(Brokeback Mountain is a really great movie, btw)

I’ve been a Bluehost customer for a pretty long time. They were my first. In fact, I bought this very domain via their service over 6 years ago. But over the years, I’ve had so many problems that I realized I had outgrown their services (I’ll spare myself the pain of re-living a call I got from a client in 2011 telling me that my own site was down…).

So I’ve finally found out how to quit Bluehost. I’d already moved over 100% of my services to other providers – a process that took me months.

Today was the day I decided to pull the trigger and actually cancel my account. Should be easy right?

Not so much.

(Start here to cancel your Bluehost service: https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/cancel)

But after 7 emails, several forms, and more identity checking than is required to run for public office, I’ve been successful.. I think.

The second – and apparently final – form I had to fill out to cancel my Bluehost account:Cancel Bluehost

 

Done and done.

Wait. NOT.

Screenshot 2014-01-02 14.22.30

They only want 500 characters of my feedback?

OHHHHHhhh, I get it….. they don’t want to slow down their servers with useless customer feedback. I see… great way to take feedback, to show you really care.

Fine. I didn’t want to be a dick about our parting ways – it was 6 years. But now I must formally welcome you to the club, Bluehost. You’re officially on my shit list.

Here is my final feedback for Bluehost. After several requests on their part they actually had me convinced that they really wanted my feedback…until I saw this 500 character bullshit (Fool me once, shame on you…).

I’ve filed several tickets over the past 6.5 years and have had many, many phone calls with your techs over my #1 & #2 issues with Bluehost’s service: uptime & speed. After years of going through crisis after crisis, I’ve finally searched for, found, and am now paying for working alternatives. I simply have no need for Bluehost’s services anymore.

Re uptime: I pinged my main website every minute for a month and recorded an uptime of only ~90% – an entirely unacceptable uptime that has actually caused me personal and professional embarrassment more than once (for example, when a client called me one weekend morning to tell me my own site was down).

Re speed: My simple wordpress site took 14-16 seconds on average to load – again 100% unacceptable. This was not only an incredibly frustrating user experience, but often the requests took so long that my sites had the appearance of being down.

My new registrant & domain privacy provider: GoDaddy.com (& affiliates)
My new wordpress host: WP-Engine (wpengine.com)
My new backend & database hosts: heroku.com & parse.com

I’m sorry – I’ve been complaining and offering feedback/suggestions for years now. I’ve finally made the time to migrate to other services that meet my (quite minimal) needs. Bottom line: Improve your service or lose customers.

Two final points regarding this cancellation process:
1) It’s entirely too long and complicated. 7 emails. 2 Forms. Password, email, credit card verification. This isn’t for customer security – it’s to lock customers in and it’s thinly veiled too.
2) I find it unfortunate that my many complaints have gone unnoticed until now – AFTER I’ve made my decision to leave Bluehost.

Best, Andrew

Anyway, some lessons.

1) Actions speak WAY louder than words. I cannot tell you how many hours I’ve spent on the phone with these guys trying to get my service working again or make it faster. The individuals often cared, but the company clearly doesn’t.

2) To a company, money speaks louder than actions. That’s a shame since we’re telling companies what I want ALL the time… but they can only hear 500 characters at a time…

3) It’s 2014 & we have a voice. We’re talking about you more than you can cram your message down our throats. Forget about your Don Draper marketing and focus on adding value to your customers. The marketing will take care of itself.

Bottom Line: After being a Bluehost customer for over 6 years, spending several thousand dollars, and wasting countless hours debugging someone else’s broken services, I cannot recommend any Bluehost services. But I’ll let my actions & money do the real talking.

PS: Check out the services I mentioned above (GoDaddy, Heroku, Parse…and I forgot to mention Google Apps for email) that don’t make me want to gouge my eyes out…. but seriously, check out WP-Engine – they specialize on WordPress hosting, can help you migrate your blog from other hosting, are in AustinTX, and they freaking rock.