Leaving BlueHost (sadly), need some advice

[mitchsurp]

So, after much back-and-forthing about renewing my BlueHost account, I've decided against it. It's not the service, it's not the support, it's not the uptime. It's just the price. I can't justify the purchase for what I rarely use anymore.

My question is this: my hosting account comes up for renewal in 140-ish days. I'm going to transfer the domain(s) to somewhere else for safe keeping (unless I can just keep the domain manager without the hosting here at BH), but how can I be assured that e-mail service to those domains remains uninterrupted?

Is there something I can do or change? If I continue to register the domains with BH (again, just not the hosting), will my forwards and addresses go untouched? Will I still have access to Domain Manager in cPanel if I don't renew the hosting part?

Any advice (except for "just renew, lol") is appreciated.

[Adolfo]

Yes, you still have access to your account if you do not have a hosting plan (atleast thats how it was a couple of years ago when I didn't pay my hosting plan). However, the e-mails / e-mail services are part of the hosting plans, so I'm pretty sure those will go down when your hosting plan is over.

Your username is the name of the first domain you registered (usually) and/or your main directory name (home/your-user/blahblahblah).

You know, I was also hesitating on renewing my plan for that same reason, the problem is, that other web hosting companies are really not as good as BlueHost. I am hating the downtimes they are having recently but I know they're working on fixing it, there's no doubt of it, for example, today they've been updating the servers with more memory, disk space and processors (not limited to this). So I know they're doing what they can to fix it.

Anyway, back to the price, if you're really going to move on to other hosting (unless you're not planning on paying for hosting again), make sure to ask the renewal fees, some Web Hostings (don't know if I can name them, but anyway... some hostings...) that offer real cheap first-time hosting plans are really a trick, most of those "cheap" hostings have one or more of these issues:


They have higher renewal fees / year than what you paid for the first year.
Domains are more expensive most of the time.
Some hostings charge for sub-domain registration.
Some hostings have limited amount of e-mail accounts.
Some hostings do not provide CPanel, Cron Jobs, Forwarders, Simple Scripts, etc.
Some Hostings suck at customer support.

And simply, moving all the files from Bluehost to other host is just a pain, not to mention the T.O.S. related to domain registration that you have to wait 60 days or so to transfer it, thats plain dumb, but it's not bluehost's fault, so that's how it is and gotta accept it.

Think about it twise, you will really see that Bluehost is one of the best if not the best Web hosting out there... even better than GoPapi*

*Yes yes didn't mention the real name but you get it :)