Account deactivated with no prior warning for 'performance problems'

[xinaesthetic]

I've used bluehost for a couple of years. I've never exactly tried to build up a massive web presence, I was using my account primarily to host some very low traffic sites: one for a friend who's an artist, one for a local bed and breakfast, a menalto gallery of a few event photos to share with friends (hardly used now thanks to facebook) and a wordpress site for a charity I'm involved with. I also had odd other scripts I'd put there to test things.

On top of that, I also had several gigs of photos and so on stored, with links occasionally sent to friends and family in emails, but not part of any site structure. I was using nowhere near the amount of data that is supposed to be allowed.

According to the terms,

Bluehost Web Hosting intends to offer services to host web sites, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space for archiving electronic files is prohibited.

Well, it may appear to some person looking at stats on their servers that the main thing I was using the account for was storing data, but this was very far the real case. Had they sent some kind of warning, I would fully understand, but the first I heard about it was an email telling me that my account had been deactivated and I "may be able to access my data for another 30 days". I've now got FTP access back following a conversation with someone from support, and I've been referred to the abuse department - need to wait 'till office hours MST to talk to them.

What a lovely way to treat your customers, eh?

[Early Out]

Kinda makes you wonder why they keep increasing the offered storage limit. After all, what kind of web site needs 1.5TB of storage space for its files?!

[xinaesthetic]

After all, what kind of web site needs 1.5TB of storage space for its files?!

Not one that a bluehost account on a shared server would be able to serve, one assumes!

I might add that in the email there was no clarification of what kind of 'performance problems' were responsible. Even when I spoke to support, they had to be prodded a little to tell me what their actual problem was.

[digimuzik]

That's interesting... because I actually asked in live chat about a year ago (when other people were talking about using BH space for backups) if it was okay to store anything we wanted on our space. I was told, "as long as it's not copyrighted material, we don't care."

I should've hung on to that one. This seems like bad news. You'd think they'd prefer people using the space to store data... since that won't cause any performance overhead... no one's regularly accessing that data...

Update:

This is interesting. As of last August, that line wasn't even in the TOS.

http://web.archive.org/web/200708062...f_service.html

[calydon]

The same thing has happened to me! I haven't talked to Bluehost support yet.

This policy is absurd, and it is definitely false advertising to offer infinite or 1000 MB of data storage only to be told that you can't host files because of performance problems!

Bad form Bluehost! If you rely on your website for business this is definitely actionable.

I will let you know what Support has to say about this.

[Early Out]

This is a totally unacceptable policy. I've posted on Matt Heaton's blog about it, and have sent him an email about it (matt AT bluehost DOT com). I encourage others to do the same.

(My comment on the blog is "awaiting moderation," so there's no telling whether it will actually appear.)

[calydon]

Update:

I spoke to a CSR who put me through to Heather, in the abuse department. She explained that my acccount was suspended because their automatic sweeper checks for accounts that are being used for storing large files and supsends them. Sometimes this causes problems that a person has to fix.

She confirmed that the TOS has changed to disallow using BH for storage purposes. The reason for this, she said, was that too many people were using this to dump their whole computer on their storage space, and with too many 'nodes' the servers would crash.

I pointed out some of the points that have been made here - offering so much storage space is deceptive, since no website would ever need that much. Also, I didn't agree to the new TOS and wasn't made aware of its changing.

She was polite and understanding, and after checking my files (all zipped and no files over 1 GB) she restored my account. However, she cautioned that I should not upload any more storage files.

When I first signed up for BH I was excited becaue their offering was superior to any of the online storage services out there. Now, that is really not the case. Unless BH find an acceptable way to work around this (how about requiring that uploaded files be zipped -only allow .zip, .tar, .rar file types? and put a file size limit on uploads) then I will look elsewhere, and I will recommend to my clients who have signed up with BH, that they move on.

[tinypilot]

Quite interesting post as I was about to backup a lot of photos and artwork - several gb's...

It seems that this was discussed a little earlier as well:
http://forum.bluehost.com/showthread.php?t=4675

In there some system administrator or something in that direction does not mention anything questionable about back-up of non web related files as long as it is not copyrighted - but I am not sure if the guy is BH staff though.

But I don't see any official BH response either?

Hhmmm... any BH people that would like to comment in this thread?

Does not make sense that you can have unlimited domains and so much harddisk space, but not use if for personal backups.

Would it be better to have like 500 different domains with various galleries, forums and so on and fill my space up that way?

In case we really do get that amount of space I would love to hear how one could ever use that if it wasn't for huge back-ups?

[Early Out]

My post to Matt Heaton's blog never saw the light of day. Why am I not surprised?

[tinypilot]

I am a little confused about this to be honest...

What is actually possible with that huge amount of space?

Clearly it is advertised so it seems to be great deal to have have all that space for the end user.

But if it cannot be used as a personal backup as stated in this current post. And if it is a problem with too many files as stated in this post - http://forum.bluehost.com/showthread.php?t=12824 then BH should def. write a manual on how we can use that amount of space.

I would hate to use hours storing files if they went under some secret "that's a no go" rule and my account would be suspended or similar.

Can someone show me where all this is written or does such information not exist?