What made you leave your last web host [Archive]

WebJDC

09-20-2006, 09:36 PM

i could not renew my account....seriously they made things so hard, and emailed me wrong info on several occasions and support tickets lied to be and gave me wrong directions.
I went to customer support on a live chat thing and they tryd telling me they were only tech support, but i showed them the link from where i got to the support and it said customer support....and they wounld not really help me and when i asked to talk to a superior they sayd they wont help you in the way you want them to....
it was an all around horrible experiance that become worse when i tryd to call them. One time i waited on the phone about 40 minutes....and instead of getting a person i got an answering machine....
and when i called back i finaly got someobody and they hung up on me....
absolute horrible....and all this came because on their website to renew my account, their page didnt work...
oh my past host was Globat.com so i urge anyone to never use them.

Melissa

09-21-2006, 05:16 AM

Not being able to install and use the scripts I wanted even when they said they were supported on the server.

Downtime

was hacked 3 times due to changes made on their servers (meaning I had no faulty scripts installed, etc.)

and in the end they switched owners and support became.. well non-existant.

aceofspades

09-21-2006, 05:25 AM

this is my first webhost. I have never had a webhost before.

Hercules

09-21-2006, 08:03 AM

Mine was ok but only had 100MB of webspace, they gave me a free upgrade to 500MB, but I needed more.

techgy

09-21-2006, 08:50 AM

My previous host was Earthlink. I was getting DSL and Web Hosting from them. The hosting never gave me a problem, although they only provided 200 meg (I think) - I never used anywhere near that so I didn't keep track of the offering.

The primary reason for leaving was the DSL. Over a 2-3 month period I lost the DSL signal several times, sometimes several times a night from anywhere from a few seconds to an hour or more. When I called their support group they ran me through the hoops checking things that I'd already checked before calling them. When I finally got someone who could help, they told me that the problem was with the phone company providing the line and they would have to check with them.

Given the higher cost of this service AND the fact that had to deal with a third party, I decided to part company. I'm now getting the DSL from my local phone company and it hasn't burped yet. The hosting is from BH primarily because I couldn't beat the deal.

Techgy;)

Frusis

09-23-2006, 05:17 AM

I left my first host because I outgrew their 100mb of storage and upgrading was too expensive. I left my second host because it took 15 days to get a reply to a support ticket marked 'urgent'. That's when I found BlueHost. BlueHost's far from perfect... but it's the best I've experienced so far.

Simkin

09-23-2006, 09:52 AM

I used Netfirms before I switched to Bluehost. Their SQL server was always very slow. In this respect Bluehost is much better. Also my site got slow when it had a lot of traffic. Not much better with Bluehost. I don't worry much about outages at random moments, but the traffic to my website is extremely inhomogenuous in time, so if it goes slow during the period of high activity I am loosing most of potential viewers.

magpie2419

09-23-2006, 11:02 AM

I used several hosts before and none of them are as good as Bluehost, I just hope the last couple of weeks are not going to become a regular occurrence. Seems like support has gone missing again.

siguie

09-24-2006, 03:58 AM

I like having 2 different hosts. My other server is more robust, speedy and chok full of security features BUT ya can't beat the Blue Host price for storage and bandwidth so I use both to compliment each other. :)

karhu

09-24-2006, 02:10 PM

1. The company was sold and the new people took everything down very quickly:

e-Email just disappeared and never came back. I figure that over 1/2 of my email never got through to me.

No such thing as "support". sometimes trouble tickets weren't answered for over a week. If you called support you were connected to some foreign country where the person on the other end of the phone could not speak English well enough to be understood.

Down time was way too much ... sometimes hiours at a time.

They just didn't care!

intrigue

09-27-2006, 08:19 AM

Our old host was not competitive in either features or price. We used them for about 3 years and they were great. very few problems and whatever did go wrong, they fixed pretty quick. but, time passed, and we needed more than they were offering. Now everybody is offering tremendous packages for very little $/mo. We paid our old host a fortune every month! I did a lot of research on hosts and decided to go with Bluehost. They offer a great package and at a very competitive price.

Overall, we've been happy here at Bluehost. HOWEVER, we've been having "slow speed FTP" problems for a while. I'm trying to find out what they can do about it. Not happy about it since it's affecting how we interact with our clients. Going to be patient and see if they can resolve it. I really DO NOT want to switch hosts again. we'll see what happens...

RustyTheWonderdog

09-28-2006, 10:31 AM

my first web host was gobbled up by a larger company, and the customer service went downhill quickly. tickets weren't answered as fast, and the original staff that used to hang around in the forums helping customers never came around after the sell. i stayed around for a while because i really wasn't updating my site at the time, and the uptime was still acceptable. when i starting updating the site again, i switched over to goDaddy and immediately regretted it. my site's load times were extremely slow, and their interface was clumsy. they're good for domains, but i wouldn't recommend them for much else. after goDaddy, i came here after being won over by the multiple domain hosting feature and have enjoyed it so far.

redsox9

09-28-2006, 10:53 AM

My only reason for leaving my old host was that cost did not justify what was available. I was with them for several years (eight) and only once in a blue moon did I ever encounter a problem. I left when I realized that there were other hosting options out there, especially given that I wanted to start using PHP but was expected to pay another $15/month for SQL database privileges.

BlueHost offers way more than I'll ever need (or so I think) and it's all for about a third of the price that I paid with my old host. Do the math... ;)

free2001

10-16-2006, 04:01 AM

I left Lunar pages because they wanted a dollar here a dollar there for everything. For what Bluehost offered compared to them I would have paid a lot more if I stuck with Lunar pages. They just seamed to want to nickel and dime you than just give you everything for one low price. Like they only offer 1 add on domain.

Bluehost Rocks!

aceofspades

10-17-2006, 02:37 AM

Actually I used to have web.com. They charge you 50 bucks a month and you get less features. It is just a total rip!

fedor

10-17-2006, 04:11 PM

My old webhosting provider was okay, but I left because...

*Bad html compiler thingy or whatever:mad:

* Offered to much to upgrade for more space( I had 5gb's on their)

*Too noobish(too begging like:rolleyes: )

*No MySQL or PHP support:(

I just want bluehost to support freaking javascript HTML!!!:mad:
But IM staying with bluehost foreva!!! Lol :P

Ron Chalice

11-01-2006, 09:53 PM

I have a complex network of interconnected sites. I moved my core business site to Blue Host for the features and cost. The Open Source tools through Fantastico give me incredible flexibility. My original host, more expensive in just the monthly base services, wanted to nickle and dime me even more... $$ for php, $$ for a database, $$ for this and $$$ for that.:eek:

I moved two other site clusters to BlueHost within the past few months for basically the same reasons. There was another important reason... the sites have a lot of original creative material, and the TOS for the old host put my copyrights at risk. I certainly don't want to spend thousands of hours on creative content and have my hosting company claim the copyrights.:mad:

ttfn, rlc

Fitzy

11-20-2006, 05:16 AM

Two reasons. I used eDatarack and they had an unreasonable amount of downtime which I admit wasn't always their fault (but often that of neighboring external links).

However the eDatarack support is sloooooooowwww.
You get a reply a few days later and it shows they haven't read past the first line of your submission because they'll ask you (in the reply) something you mentioned or clarified in the next sentence!

Oftentimes too they'd incorrectly decide that your submission was answered by a general messge about a recent problem. Then you'd have to start again. I also got tired of explaining the outtages to many friends to whom I'd recommended eDatarack. Bluehost is fantastic in comparison. Enquiries are answered promptly.

Although I'm not as excited about the C-Panel used here.
Another thing in Bluehost's favor is the ability to host additional domains in the same space.
While eDatarack is slightly cheaper for one domain - you can't add other domains to your main site there so my three or four sites were charged individually..
:(

rusty_angel

11-20-2006, 09:41 AM

This is my first webhost I've bought myself for myself. There'll be my personal blog and a couple of small projects I'm thinking about now. If i'd stay satisfied with this host, I'm gonna move my primary project here, which is now hosted for free by my partner's friend's company. That host is awful, slow, with lots of limitations and almost no support, but it was enought for the site for a few years. Now we've definitely grown out of it.

blueridg

11-22-2006, 05:26 AM

I'm not sure...it was either the fact that they never once responded to a support request email or that I actually had to tell them how to fix a problem that I couldn't even see (it was on their side of the cloud) or that when I did talk them through the fix the owner of the company tried to say that the problem was somehow my fault (I must've had admin access to their server without knowing it???).

Lonectzn

11-23-2006, 09:22 PM

Pretty simple really...

Most providers in australia are just terrible in terms of price.
Take the highest capacity plan available on australias largest ISP -

Premium Hosting 3000: 3gig space, 40gig transfer for a cheap AU$329.95 (US$247)/month + $105 ($78) setup fee.

Includes 1 SQL database linked (not the actual database, as in allowing your account to control one dbase off their sql server). Extra connections $66 setup.

Each database $30/month $121 setup, 150mb size 35 user limit
Forum script only $11/month!
Password protecting directories $5/month after the first 11.

Including some beautiful limits on actually getting SQL access, like: "At least one member of the development team responsible for development of the SQL database possesses at least two years experience in SQL Server development and/or has a Microsoft certification (MCSD or MCDBA).". As well as strict limitations on the kind of requests you can make of it.

$85 domain name registration 2 years + $12.5/month MANAGEMENT FEE (wtf is that!).

Man am happy I let that out... just insane... I can't believe anyone pays for that.

On top of that they have terrible service - I know because until very recently I worked for them. Unlike BH their policy is designed to put up walls wherever available, and are completely passive when there are problems.

dougkc

11-25-2006, 05:58 PM

One day my email and website just quit working. I had received a new credit card, so they could not automatically renew my subscription. They had sent me emails, but I did not receive them. My email was like doug@smiths.org and I had entered doug@smith.org. I said I was surprised they did not notice the mistake and add the s. They said you were not allowed to use an email on a domain they hosted, so they assumed what I entered was correct. Is that stupid or what? That was one of the main reasons for getting my own domain. I wanted an email address that would never change and I wanted my email from a single source.

That got me looking at other providers. My old host provider had 500 MB and unlimit email for $99. No database without paying extra and then only SQL. No addon domains, subdomains, additional FTP accounts, Fantastico or many other features. Once I found what I could get for less money, the old provider was toast. I have been very happy with BH. Very few problems. Always a quick response to trouble tickets, but I have not had to enter one for over six months.

felgall

11-25-2006, 11:14 PM

Three years ago I found the perfect Australian based web hosting company that offered both Australian and US based hosting. The price was quite reasonable too and the owners guaranteed that it would always stay at the same price you bought at (not that I believed that it would).

18 months ag the company was sold to a second company that supposedly had a similar reputation. The service stayed the same but six months later the price went up by 60% and just recently I was advised of yet another 60% increase.

This plus my getting fed up with the responsed from their managing director led me to start looking for alternate hosting and a knowledgable friend recommended BlueHost. The price here is about the same as what my old hosting was about to start charging but the features offered for the price are much greater than the old hosting provided. I am sure that had I stayed where I was I would have been paying extra for bandwidth and seen a further price increase next year. This way I get 200 times the bandwidth and so it will be a long time before I need to pay for extra.

I must have asked about half a dozen questions in the support centre to sales and billing before signing up with responses within a few hours in each case. Similarly I have asked several questions of tech support since signing up and most of those have been similarly dealt with very quickly. The one that wasn't answered within a couple of hours is a lot less urgent in any case.

aceofspades

11-26-2006, 04:43 AM

that is how web.com is. My friend has web.com and all he has a html site....nothing special. Just a few pages and webmail. Well anyways they charge him 50 bucks a month and the price just went up!

Btw cool thing in about .com I totally rated it good on SU

nullibicity

12-05-2006, 08:11 AM

I left MySiteSpace over two years ago because they stopped providing ssh access, even though they provided it when I signed up. That's unacceptable (why is it so hard to find a low-cost provider with shell access?). Support seemed to have trouble with basic technical questions as well.

aceofspades

12-05-2006, 09:20 AM

All low-cost providers do not probide SSH access by default and most do not provide it at all. The shell i quite powerful and gives them full control to the server. It is ok if you screw up ur little space but it is another thing if you screw up other peoples place. Also they have almost no control of it.

Danny

12-05-2006, 10:09 AM

Actually my last host provider gave me excellent services. My problem came from using my control panel behind company firewalls. I work a 14/14 shift away from home in the Gulf of Mexico and I need to be able to use my Cpanel. Bluehost was able to allow me to get around that for me by backend login, although I still can not use the email offshore because the port is block. I have been with Bluehost for over 3 years and extremely satisfied now. There are many providers out there and after researching many of them, you can’t beat Bluehost price and service. We not all going to be satisfied with any one hosting service and of course some customers will always complain, but that’s what makes us unique.

BlueHost-Reviews

12-06-2006, 10:30 AM

Greetings Guys ,

That's really great to hear that you are satisfied with Bluehost . I would say "Customer support" is very vital point while selecting a Web Host . Of course Prizes too matter ;) .

boomtastic

12-10-2006, 06:17 AM

My last host was HostRocket (which I had for YEARS), but now I wouldn't recommend them as an internet host to my worst enemy. Before I left I had 2 domains registered and hosted with them. One of the domain names was expiring and since I hadn't done anything with it I decided to just get rid of it. I sent in a trouble ticket to delete the domain (mind you, the domain names were *completely* different from each other and could not be confused) and they deleted the wrong domain. All of my emails and email addresses, forwarders, lists - gone. All of my web pages and files - gone. When I sent back the trouble ticket asking what happened to my other domain, I was sent back new site info (login, pwd, connection stuff) as if I had just opened the account. All I was told was "Whoops" so I insisted that they restore the account. At that point I was told that they did not do backups of the user data. Sure they backed up the servers but only the "important stuff like operating system, etc" but in order to keep the pricing low they do not normally back up user's sites. My site was custom built for me and cost thousands when I paid for it, and it was all gone in an instant. The senior tech support agent that I finally reached said that I should have been given a chance to do a manual backup on my site before it was deleted, but that never happened. In order to make it right, they then deleted the correct account and left me with a default "Welcome" page on my other site. I complained some more and "the best they could do for me was give me a year of free hosting". I started my search for a better hosting service and was pointed to a few others, but BlueHost stood out among them all. Personally I like getting the emails from Matt that tell me in simple terms (no BS either) when things went wrong and why. Another thing about HostRocket was that someone started forging my domain as return addresses for SPAM mail, and a lot of mail was getting bounced back. Obviously this was not my problem but HostRocket decided to stop my email service on multiple times without any warning due to this. Only after I complained would they turn it back on.

There are things that I don't like with BlueHost, such as the $100 payout for affiliates. Checks should be sent immediately. There's too much SPAM in email and their default SPAM protection is lacking. But, the good FAR outweighs the bad when you look at the overall picture.

If you really want a shocker, sign up with GoDaddy. I administrate a friend's site and he is with GoDaddy. Their control panel, once you find it through the BS, has about 7 things that you can do. He'll be moving to BlueHost when his current hosting expires.

npwa

12-10-2006, 10:16 PM

I moved from olm.net, because of sloppy customer service, antiquated control interface and high price. When I asked to be moved to a new lower price as advertised on the main page, they said "I have to move to the new server". Great, this is just like moving to a new ISP.

Other technical irritations: the shared hosts' e-mail login needed to be unique across all customers, then once they moved me, I had to change my login name. They were unable to help me with a mysql database installation.

Also they would not take online payments, hence they asked me to fax my CC information. So I did. After a while they complained that they hadn't received it, so I faxed again. (no response)

I also checked out hostdepartment.com, but for some reason, I could not connect to my site through Window's Explorer window (worked for bluehost). They could not resolve it. (I also ranted about the 'live' chat that takes 45min to answer a simple question).

Anyway. I moved to bluehost, because of the low price and good interface.
NIck

tlarbo

12-18-2006, 06:57 PM

I was with Godaddy. They had good support - every time I called, I got someone on the phone in a reasonable amount of time, and they always helped me with what I needed.

However, there were two things that made me switch:

- Their UI is horribly, horribly confusing. It's very difficult to make simple changes or see the status of things. I never really figured their UI out.

- They nickel and dime you to death. You want database access? OK, it's an extra fee. You want SSH access? OK, you need the premium account, which will cost more. etc. Bluehost gives all the features for the basic, cheap monthly fee.

Tim

BlueHost-Reviews

12-19-2006, 11:21 AM

It's very hard to get cheap hosting with all features and Quality Support .

cybergata

12-22-2006, 07:04 PM

they had a much lower limit on bandwidth. I have a couple of popular graphic sites on my website which use loads of bandwidth. I found myself putting part of these sites on other servers without my domain name. When renewal came around, I thought I'd search for a new server. The price tag here is less for two years than I was paying for one. I didn't mind the higher price tag because the service was fantastic and they didn't have a cap on number of files that will show in a ftp program, but the bandwidth was the killer for me. It is nice to have all my site on one server again.

Schelly

12-28-2006, 12:26 PM

I've had clients on MidPhase, OnSmart, StartLogic, GoDaddy and, most recently, BlueMonkey throughout the course of the past eight years. In all instances, I've had to deal with either a horrible UI in the control panel, inept tech support if there was a hosting problem, a lack of the features I would consider even to be basic, or in one case -- it looked like they were trying to hold ownership of the domain name hostage.

I have had decent experiences with DreamHost and am tempted to put a test domain on SiteGround, just to see what they're like. But if you compare apples to apples and put each feature side by side -- BlueHost gives you a tremendous amount of goodies for the money.

Other things I prefer about BlueHost is that the owner of the company keeps a blog and just outright tells you when things are going crappy. He doesn't do any finger-pointing or try to escape responsibility. He steps up. I'd much rather support somebody like that in a business, personally. Not only does he step up, he identifies the problem(s) and fixes them - and has the technical savvy to stay ahead of the game so that his mistakes aren't repeated.

I'm a loyalty-oriented person. Once I form a loyalty, it practically takes an act of God to break it. I'm a BH fan for life.

:)

bobdog

12-30-2006, 08:07 PM

I'm with Schelly on this. I've had many clients on other hosts and the service was terrible.

I have lost only one client while using Bluehost. It was an upper management decision that had no idea what I was doing for them.

I almost rolled over dead when I heard the numbers. A new web service came in, claimed that they had "High Tech" web hosting- and offered a whopping 25 meg of storage, 2 gig of transfer per month, for the incredible price of $49.99 per month!

And, if they acted now, this company would copy over the existing files to their web host for only $2,500.

My secure ecommerce that I set up was resold to the new company. Now that's really High Tech. They promised to set it up for an additional fee of $2,700. Pfft...all they did was copy my php and plop it on their server.

***I will not name the company, but it is based in Fresno, CA.***

Oh, the stupid, blind desisions that upper management makes in their high rise buildings.

webvideo

12-30-2006, 08:28 PM

Reason #1: Consistent Downtime (!)

Reason #2: When called why the server is down, the only answer was "Maintenance" or "Software Updates"

Reason #3: Extremely sloppy low qualified tech support.

Reason #4: Big talks about their hosting when it was nothing to be talked about at all.

It was hilarious when I did not renew my plan with them and the guy called up and said, whats up, won't you renew (I had a reseller account actually), so I said nope, I will like to go with Bluehost. He was like WT... what does Bluehost give that we dont, I said you give NOTHING that BH gives, except those texts on your website. Dont bother!

rocknation

01-01-2007, 02:31 AM

When I realized that there were a lot of advantages to running my music web site as a blog, I tried to install Moveable Type and Greymatter. Unfortunately, my ISP Radiant Communications/Inetwave didn't have the right version of Perl 5. I then tried to install Word Press, but they didn't have the right version of MySQL, either. That's when I realized that I no longer had the right version of an ISP!

GTOOOOOH

01-03-2007, 11:24 AM

I was with aletiahosting.com, then they were bought out by jaguarllc, and moved tech support to India. Support became a big problem because of language barrier, to the point when I had enough. They didn't understand my request in a written email, and DELETED my website WITHOUT taking a final backup of any kind. That was all I needed to move.

joseph

01-04-2007, 09:23 PM

I think most of the people leave a host due to poor service/support and max downtime.

yourcribsite.com

01-04-2007, 10:20 PM

hostgator sucks i hated it support took like 2 hours love blue host

Harrison

01-09-2007, 04:29 AM

Most of my sites are hosted with 1and1. They offer a great service and a lot of features, but they have one very big drawback. They only allow a MySQL database size of 100MB maximum, and this is on all of their hosting packages including their premium business packages I use. And they do not offer any ability (even through additional fees) to increase this size.

For a normal site 100MB isn't a problem for a database size, but when running a Forum it is a very large limitation as any active forum will easily out grow this limitation within months, if not weeks.

I had to move one of my forums from another host (not 1and1) as they had caused a lot of problems, and ruling out 1and1 as a possible host for the forum due to the database limitations, I looked into other hosting for the forum. All of the hosting review sites I looked at recommended Bluehost in their top ten best hosts and a friend also recently started using Bluehost and only had good things to say about it. So after reading the positive reviews online and the friend's recommendation, the package price and especially the nice bandwidth and database quotas from Bluehost easy convinced me it would be a good solution for the forum.

The forum can be found at http://forum.classicamiga.com

BlueHost-Reviews

01-09-2007, 09:24 AM

Basically , Support Quality with cheap hosting is best one to use .

happy2007

01-10-2007, 09:07 PM

My site is ecommerce based, and thus requires speedy use of mysql. my last host was lightning quick for serving html and php pages, but their mysql was slower than anything i've seen. after going back and forth with their support, they blamed the ecommerce package that was installed from their OWN CONTROL PANEL (fantastico or something).
So i left. I came here, and its so lightning quick, its awesome. love it!

Joshua F.

01-30-2007, 07:43 AM

You said I couldn't mention my last host? Darn...

I was paying around $6.95 a month for about 300MB of space and given only 1, I repeat 1, mysql database, not multiples like here. The space for the DB was very small. Remember your first allowance? Yeah, that small... The worse part was that they had constant downtimes. I'm not just talking about being slow, I mean down. Sometimes for 2 or 3 days. It was just undependable. The other sad thing was the CP. There were some features that were listed on the menu but just plain didn't work. You couldn't access them or utilize them. I had asked about this and they said it was in the works. I eventually left and came back some 6 months later to see if things had changed, not one bit... Still constant down time and the CP had not changed... When I finally gve up on the server I went to a second host. It was free hosting, I wasn't ready to go back and pay, I wanted to see how they measured up. For a while I was pleased. Then they cancelled my account when they switched over the paid hosting only, NO WARNING! They didn't even email me and let me know! Needless to say, that didn't go over well with me so I have taken my business elsewhere. Now here I am, amazed that Blue Host meets my standards when it comes to paid hosting with a very hand CP and what seems to be very dependable. Not only that they upgraded mysql and php for me at NO CHARGE! How cool is that! Even better they offer multiple databases, a massive number of email accounts, and some incredible storage space for both mysql AND web space. I am impressed so far but it will take at least 6 months for me to see how dependable they are...

nevf

01-30-2007, 04:11 PM

Was never happy, only about 94% uptime, too expensive for what I was really getting...support was good tho, but it was the only outstanding thing i could find...

DPBradley

02-09-2007, 12:47 AM

It cost $249 yr. for an ad free site with only 300 Mb storage and 6 Gb transfer mo. Only 2 SQL databases.

www.impactforgospel.com

Amman-DJ

02-13-2007, 07:58 AM

i was using yahoo , and they'r sucks , support need 1 week to reply ur ticket,
their server is FreeBSD which's good for nothing , i was having alot of SQL problems .

CK_80s

02-25-2007, 10:58 AM

Hostmerit seemed good at first - I was allowed 30gig of transfer per month, and for the first month (just past the trial period....) everything went smoothly. Great up-time, slow-ish ticket response, but good responsive servers.

Then I noticed that my bandwidth allowance started to be exceeded quicker than usual. I was reaching my allowance on day 25 of a month, then day 23..... and I didn't know why.

I looked through the cpanel awstats stats, and it was saying that I only had around 15gig used, whereas the cpanel front screen said much higher.

I got a bit paranoid that they were able to fiddle with the cpanel stats, to make it look as though I had used far more than I actually had done.

So I looked through my OWN stats, the ones build into the CMS that I was using and not the cpanel ones that they could affect quite so directly, and it told me that I had received hundreds of thousands of hits direct from hostmerit. Every time I refreshed my stats page, I had 2 or 3 more hits. They seemed to be running a process that was racking up my bandwidth.

So I argued with them for a while, got a bit grumpy, told them that I'd put how bad they were as my front page, got no help over 3 weeks of tickets, when finally, they "lost" my site while they were moving servers.

thebeard

03-25-2007, 05:35 AM

Left Powweb a year ago. They were bought out, and migrated my 9 domains to new servers, changed directory names, user names, passwords and isolated the domains into separate accounts. When I asked them to restore names to originals they became obstinate.

I found BH within the powweb forum, many PW users were leaving over the same issues. Powweb use to have great service, easy to use CP. But after a month with BH I moved all of my domains over to BH. The CP in BH took some time getting use to, but service has been stellar!

I'm working with a client whose site is hosted by sbcglobal.net as well, yikes! that's all I have to say about that.

euridisae

03-27-2007, 08:43 AM

Falcon4

04-21-2007, 04:03 PM

I'll name 'em because they deserve the shame. For about 1 day or so, I tried out 1&1. I couldn't stand them. I couldn't stand them one single bit. I could hardly understand their outsourced tech support, they had an excruciatingly dumbed-down "control panel" (not cPanel), gave me no control over anything on my service, it was just a freakin' nightmare. Then, issues with the domain caused further trouble, getting it transferred out of 1&1's clumsy hands was impossible, being referred to as a "number" in all my logins and correspondence... UGH!!!

It was a nightmare. Never, ever, go with 1&1. Ever.

Before that, I was hosted out of my own house from my DSL connection. I started wanting to be able to "untie" my internet connection from the server, that plus all sorts of recent connection issues made my uptime really start sucking. I also didn't like maintaining my own server... I always put up junk PCs without cases as my server, and I needed something more stable. Bluehost is just that, and so much more. :D

bkd

04-30-2007, 12:05 PM

CIHost was my last hosting provider.

brettdix

05-05-2007, 07:42 PM

There was nothing really wrong with my other host who by the way is one of the most popular around. Ever heard of go daddy? :p I simply like bluehost better. Great look & feel from their main page to the cpanel, email - everything. Better fit for me... :)

Jaems

05-22-2007, 12:45 AM

I left my old host because they charged an absurd amount of money for 4 Gigs of space. It worked out to about the same or slightly less than I pay for bluehost, but with 1/75th of the space. In addition, their control panel was using some outdated software (the control panel software itself was basically a student project that was discontinued and unsupported). They had several "features" that you couldn't run on a Macintosh (website builder). I find that to be highly annoying.

whiteknite

05-22-2007, 05:35 PM

My last one charged about $20 a month. Bluehost charges less than $7 a month. So here I am:)

Falcon4

05-23-2007, 10:49 PM

There are several things you can do to fix your email and CP issues. First of all you can go to yoursite.com/cpanel (yoursite.com of course, being your website, even though that file doesn't exist) and bookmark that address, the one it redirects you to. In order to bypass the login dialog every time, you can hard-code your username and password into the bookmark by appending "username:password@" to the beginning of the URL, e.g. http://something:whatever123@hostfile.org:2082. You won't get far with that link though :P

The webmail thing, you can go to mail.yourdomain.com for email. From there you can use your other-address logins to get into the mail program, e.g. "falcon+falconfour.com" for my mail.falconfour.com username. You can use any email address like this - I do the same for giving other people email addresses on my sites. You don't need cPanel logins for that! :P

Hope this helps :)

Jaems

05-29-2007, 03:17 PM

Hope this helps :)
Excellent! Thank you mr Falcon!

jbladeus

06-01-2007, 04:09 PM

There was nothing wrong with my old host, it was just that they charged me $32 a month for only 200mb webspace. An extra add-on domain cost me another $4 a month and last but not least any sub domains cost me 2 bucks. I forgot to mention the that each additional domain pointer had allowed me only 5 email accounts and additional packs of five emails would cost me another $2.

charlesgan

06-01-2007, 08:15 PM

my old hosting provider simply shut down one day. just completely fell off the face of the internet. my site wouldn't work all day, so i went to check the website's server status i was on, and their main website was gone, their tech site was gone, everything was gone. no email or anything from them saying they were going to be shutting down.

so i had to find a new host fast, signed up with Bluehost and have been happy ever since.

thats the biggest corner when purchase from cheap provider, that might be an individual running a tiny dedicated server. after all the profit, he could just shut off the server and your site is all gone. :rolleyes:

Shonky

06-02-2007, 05:42 PM

I'm here because I'm fed up with the poor performance of my current provider Dreamhost. I've been with them for around 18 months and they have gone from what I considered a good host, to what is now a host that has struggled to keep up with their own growth.

With downtime problems increasing, server loads always increasing, DNS servers that always seem to be having problems handling the enormous amount of domains they now host, to sometimes what seems complete incompetence form their support staff.

There is only so much one can tolerate before looking at other options, Dreamhost reached my tolerance level, and Bluehost scored themselves a new customer.

charlesgan

06-03-2007, 08:59 AM

there was a lot of dreamhost customer complaining in the last month.
guess some of them are moving .. and welcome to bluehost :rolleyes:

eddiem

06-07-2007, 06:03 AM

This LONG post is a summery of what happened.

I was with ipower for five years. For the first three years I was quite happy with them. Then I had problems with web-stats that the level one techs seemed unable to fix. They'd make it work for a while and it would fall over again. After 6 month of this they promised a level-2 tech would contact me but none ever did.

I also think asking a user their password is bad form but BH do this too.

Then I noticed my account had been restored from a backup and new pages were missing. I wouldn't have minded if I'd been told. This happed again at least once that I noticed before the BAD month.
But still it wasn't worth the hassle of moving.

I had other minor gripes.
Their web-site is terrible for finding stuff.
Unlike BH with a member login on the front page it is really hard the work out how to log in, change your details, find help etc etc.
In my feedback I often suggested they need a status page so we don't waste everyones time contacting help with known issues - no response of course.
I guess it would show up how bad their uptime really is.
Also their help system is email based - so I'd put in a ticket blindly saying their pop server is down and of course they'd send me an email in reply.:confused:

Then came the BAD month.:mad:
Early last month (may 2007) my mailing lists went down. I submitted a help ticket and was told it was a known issue and they were upgrading our accounts to new servers. All would be well in 24 hours.

Then email went down so of course I didn't know if they were replying to my new issues.
I open another ticket using a yahoo address. Many more were needed for new issues and I got chipped for it.

My site went down too and came up a day or two later with an slightly older version in place.

Email came back after several days with a old message from them saying they were shutting down the server for a few hours.

Then my site came back up with a six month old version of my account.
Again they said nothing. I asked if they were going to fix it but got nothing back.

Now think about this - they probably didn't.
When you roll back an account six months everything done since that image is gone. Not just the web-pages. All new email accounts, redirections, lists forums etc.
Any new contents of mailboxes, forums etc. Passwords will revert to old ones.
Also accounts and redirections you have deleted are restored!!!

For example - I setup a redirection for a friend to redirect personal email to her work account. She left the job and I deleted it. Now it was restored again without our knowledge and her personal mail was being forwarded to her replacement!

Imagine if someone removed material from their site because of a DCMA take down order and the host restored it again - who goes to gaol?

I was submitting updates as to what was happening because I had no idea if my issues are known or not.
It was like nine days in one case to get a reply - I had no idea what was going on.
I gave up on having my ipower account fixed and focused on trying to move my site.
The ipower help guys were clearly out of their depth, this may not be their fault.
My account was still playing up yesterday - five weeks on.
They lost at least one week's worth of email forever.

If think you have an idea why I left by now but let me finish the saga.

I have an old account so I used cpanel instead of vdeck and eddiem.com was registered with onlineNIC.com not tucows.
There is no domain control panel in cpanel and ipower instructions for access the domain account didn't work (for onlineNIC?).

They did unlock the domain for me. I had no luck getting help in accessing the domain controls. After a week or so I reactivated the email account I used 5 years ago to register so I can receive the EPP (transfer code). I also contacted the registrar and they got back to me in reasonable time. They said to ask ipower for the code (again) and get back to them if they didn't response in 24 hrs.
Ipower sent me the code and I also got a second copy sent to that old account via a button on the BH site. Better to have two copies than none.

So I tried to transfer and got stuck waiting for the old registrar to release the domain. I asked ipower to release it and they didn't know what I was talking about - they had unlocked it and that is all they can do. I gave up and waited the 7 days for the domain to automatically release which it did.

A second domain I'm moving had different problem which I won't get into.
So this morning eddiem.com was pointed at the bluehost DNS and everything started to work again.
Ciao Eddie,
PS the second domain was through tucows and opensrs and this transfer happened much faster.

hofmax

06-07-2007, 02:04 PM

I had a site with Godaddy. What made me leave? Canned support replies and a very restrictive Linux coding environment.

Pilot4Rent

06-07-2007, 09:29 PM

This is my third day with blue host I can't get enough of the amaizing support and features. I came from gisol known as Global Internet Solution, the ABSOLUTE WORST company in the world. NO support, No service, bunch of thives. stole my money and never opened my account. I came to know it was the worst rated website outthere. While reaserching host Bluehost was the only company I found with out any legitimate complaints. I LOVE these guys!!!

Ferdinand

07-01-2007, 04:02 PM

Before I used Blogger and than tried a German hoster for a short time. The company has very high ratings actually. But BH offers more for less. The previous hoster did neither offer Fantastico nor other helpful tools.

Also, Germany has the most restrictive laws in the Western world in regard to required legal information about Blog owners. The rule of law demands the complete address details in blogs or other websites. :mad: I never felt very comfortable revealing my personal data and therefore - besides the price and the all-inclusive hosting package - the BH "privacy" function was the final straw to move to BH (otherwise German lawyers could have used WHOIS to identify me and send me a reprimand combined with very high legal fee of usually several hundred or even a few thousand Euros :eek:. Certain lawyers do this professionally in Germany, searching for faulity websites and asking for high legal fee for the a reprimand)

After one year at BH I have to add as a plus the extraordinary support which was extremely helpful after my blog was hacked.
:o

kurniawan

07-08-2007, 12:22 AM

I leave my old webhosting after 3 years with them. They used to be a great company with top listing in webhosting review websites, but it was 2 years ago. In the last 1 year we had a lot of problems with CGI, MySQL, and finally cronjob. They are so confident to use their own script to run the cronjobs because they wanted to prevent customers to run cronjobs like crazy, but what happen is their own made script run our jobs crazy.
I have a daily scheduled mailer to backup mysql files and notify me via email, and they succesfully run it more than 1920 times in two days :D
I hope BH is willing to learn from others' mistake and grow bigger.

Hwyman

07-18-2007, 07:41 PM

Left old site over the following reasons: 1) Site was in Calif. so this rocky mt hillbilly has to work on it around 3am EST while the fruits and nuts were finally tucked away in their beds due to slow internet response times. 2) Options were removed without even a notice. examples are: anonymous ftp access, and telnet access. Support tickets when answered were in broken english sentence fragments. Here I found what looks like an honest stab of keeping the little folks like me informed of changes. For starters, this forum, the CEO blog, live chat. To sum it up, I found more space, bells and whistles, at a better price.

dbeierle

07-24-2007, 04:00 PM

File Permissions- I went through 3 web hosting companies that wouldn't allow me to set my own permissions. Some wouldn't allow it at all, others made you call them every time you wanted them changed. So, if I was playing around with a script, tweaking it here and there, and re-uploading it to test... I had to call them every single time to change permissions. One even had the nerve to ask why I wanted my permissions changed!

Email scripts - Yahoo, in particular, makes you use their mail script. You can't make any changes to it, you just have to use what they give you. Frustrating!

I started using Bluehost 3 years ago, and I could hear the glorious heavenly music playing when they activated my account. I use them for all my freelance accounts, and the customer service is great! I recommend them to everyone, and I wouldn't use anyone else!

eddiemoth

07-28-2007, 09:25 PM

I left Yahoo for lousy support.

hofmax

07-29-2007, 08:57 AM

I started using Bluehost 3 years ago, and I could hear the glorious heavenly music playing when they activated my account.

You probably mean pomp and circumstance (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU8fK7PV_c0) by Elgar?

g4mby

08-01-2007, 09:33 AM

Seems there are a lot of people moaning about niggles with Blue Host
Without naming and shaming other hosting company's, what was the final straw that made you change host and come here in the first place?

I haven't left my last web host but I am comparing BlueHost with them by paying for both simultaneously. When the time comes I shall make the choice. BlueHost or OtherHost? Both have their weaknesses, both have their strong points. At the moment I do not know which I shall choose as both are performing well (for me). Time will tell. :)

croc

08-01-2007, 09:16 PM

Without naming and shaming other hosting company's, what was the final straw that made you change host and come here in the first place?

1st host: Free server hosting with various free hosting sites. One of them cost me dearly when I went away on holiday, and when I returned found out they had been down for a week which had major impact on site in search engines (lost Google PR) :rolleyes:
2nd host: Being Australian, I had server hosting in Australia. Far to expensive.
3rd host: Really appalling support (One of the big hosting companies ;) ). Average hosting plan features.
4th host: From Australia I had slow latency/ping to this companies hosting servers. They happily gave me a full refund.
5th host: Bluehost, Been 10+ months and haven't looked back. :D

What made me come here was comparing the features bluehost offered compared to another 1/2 dozen potential webhost that I had found after many many hours of searching. I have found the 24/7 support amazing! And in the 10+ months I've been with bluehost, the plans have improved and become better value with more features! I also love the fact that domains cost $10 US (Which is about $11.50 Australian), and that they come free the bluehost privacy.

Bluehost aren't perfect, but I am more than happy with them for my hobby websites :)

rhorses

08-04-2007, 08:38 PM

What started my transfer was that bluehost has what I need to run a new classified ad system. But also the cost, my host has jumped to $32 a month without any notice or anything just auto withdrawls. Bluehost was and so far more appealing. Easy cpanel too!

mshs2

08-16-2007, 08:28 PM

My first hosting company, when I was just trying out websites is one I don't have any problems with -- at least not with their free pkg.

My first real hosting company (when I really started the company) had a free hosting package with pretty good customer service and nice templates. The problem which caused me to leave them was the extremely slow time with the errors. It was frustrating to me.

Next, I tried 1and1. Not good but not the worst.

Finally, I tried HostNine in hopes that they would be able to transfer my site stats, since backing them up individually is a pita. When I requested my account to be closed and to receive a refund, they turned nasty. I ended up having to to my payment company to report them to get my money back. Just not good biz.

Question 1: How can I back up my site Stats (all of them, visitor, referrer, geography, OS system, etc.) at 1and1 hosting company in a simple quick fashion? Please help me in this matter. Feel free to private message me.

Question 2: Have any of y'all had any problems or concerns with your service with BlueHost?

Thanks in Advance.

lowtech

09-19-2007, 12:53 PM

My original host has only Support Tickets, slow response and unsatisfactory replies to inquiries about problems. I needed more than that to properly support my clients. BlueHost's Live CHat and toll-free phone support is excellent and professional. Also, they use a recent version of Control Panel and other improvements over my other host. I am very pleased so far, and will probably move some of my clients to my account on BlueHost.

SWofAZ

10-03-2007, 03:12 PM

I've been doing web design and development for over ten years. I've dealt with a lot of hosting companies, and have to say that I am the most impressed with Blue Host, which I just discovered about a month ago. Their customer service is excellent, live chat is a god send, and what they offer is outstanding for the price.

imchris

10-04-2007, 01:04 PM

I've been with BlueHost for 3 years. They are very reliable, and have very good customer support. I'm very satisfied with 99% with the services that I'm getting from BlueHost.

3 years ago I found BlueHost through either Yahoo or Google search, can't remember. But the account signup (online) process was simple, and they had everything I needed to host a website, so I signed up for an account and never had to look elsewhere.

The only thing I had a problem with was to have BlueHost tech support restoring the account. I opened a ticket, and they restored my account fast, but some of the permission wasn't set correctly (couldn't upload through FTP, couldn't delete my files, lost the email accounts, etc.). But the problem started when my MySQL database was corrupted.

But anyway, overally I'm very happy with BlueHost, and I would not hesitate to recommend BlueHost to anybody, whether they're a web newbie or a professional organization.

Good job, BlueHost.