An Open Letter To Bluehost
July 26, 2010
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Posted by Randydeluxe
To: Matt Heaton, President and CEO of Bluehost
Mr. Heaton,
Today, your company dumped a good customer without warning or just cause. Out of the blue today, you made the decision to unplug all of Scott Johnson’s Frogpants network of podcasts, blogs and social media. It is difficult to estimate how many potential customers you have given error to today, but in iTunes alone, you have refused service to possibly 100,000+ people. Those people need to know who is suddenly preventing them from accessing what they’re looking for.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you – since it’s your job to know such things – but you have just dumped:
- An entire network of podcasts and blogs, comprising a dozen very successful podcasters who have disparate audiences of thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of listeners.
- A massive web of highly effective social media mavens, most of whom have thousands of followers in Twitter.
- Media that has an unusually high international reach, with well above-average numbers of listeners outside of the United States.
- One of the top 100 podcasts in the world, according to listeners in iTunes, The Instance.
A cursory glance at your own Twitter feed makes it clear that you don’t understand or value the power and utility of social media. Today’s bit of bad business by you was clearly the result of cold, hard calculation: you made an agreement with Scott Johnson that appears to be less profitable than breaking the agreement. So much for almost every claim on your website “guaranteeing” “unlimited” “reliable” hosting that is “better” and “professional”. The statement on your site, “we specialize in customer service” can now be considered laughable.
Of course, everyone involved with the Frogpants network will be henceforth opposed to patronizing your apparently fly-by-night operation. The Internet meme you might become aware of is this: Get out of the blue.
I encourage any and all customers of Bluehost.com to get out of the blue, before Bluehost.com suddenly leaves all of your content un-hosted. Get out of the blue as soon as it is feasible for you to stop paying a company that cannot be trusted with your blogs, forums, videos, podcasts and pictures. I am not suggesting that any customer stop payment if you owe Bluehost.com money. Don’t be like them, and break an established agreement. Just take the first, honest opportunity to get out of the blue and take your content to another host.
Mr. Heaton, I sincerely hope that this letter finds you well, and that you take the opportunity to comment below if you have anything to say here. Internet 2.0 is not a bum’s rush. Rather, it is an open and ever-expanding platform upon which those who speak have every opportunity to guide discourse, and those who remain silent increase the value of nothing.
Those who attempt to do any silencing will find such an attempt to be utterly impotent.
Thank you.
Categories: Just Yappin'
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I wonder if they were just overwhelmed by the Beta Key interest across some of the FPS sites? Here’s hoping to seeing you guys back online ASAP. Best wishes.
New page of comments, refreshing memories:
Please, Digg the story and get the word out at http://digg.com/d31Y6gM
Twitter (with #getoutoftheblue) and the above link, put it on facebook, put this everywhere you think traffic will see it.
Keep spreading the word!
It’s interesting that as soon as I put the story up on Digg.com, and people started digging it, there suddenly appeared a bunch of story submissions for BlueHost. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy, but I can no longer find this story just by typing in “Letter BlueHost” in the search engine for the site. Interesting how they decided to flood Digg.com with BlueHost stories.
I smell a little bit of desperation.
Please, Digg the story and Twitter and FaceBook it!!!
Bravo Mr. Deluxe. Very, VERY, well put.
As an EVE online podcaster, you and Scott are a huge inspiration. I’m getting ahold of the EVE community to see if we can help publicize this incident and get the word out to Get Out Of The Blue!
-C
Hey Randy/Scott,
I’m the techo support for my wife which is an up and coming author. All of her writing domains and personal domains are with bluehost.
I’ve had my own issues with bluehost around uptime. Being that their ‘unlimited’ guarantee appears total BS at this point, I’ll be breaking my service with them soon as possible.
Hang in there – other hosting services get what you guys are doing and what value it brings to them.
Is their an official bluehost response to this?
JJ
Scott said on his blog that Blue Host had called him and apologised and offered to rehost his stuff. At this point it seems Blue Host have realised they have alienated alot of people and have backed down.
Sounds like you violated some sort of terms of service agreement. Way to go retard.
Also if you are getting that kind of traffic, why are you using shared hosting and not a dedicated server. Sounds like it is your fault for crap happening to you, and I think you need to add an edit to this page that states your ignorance in this situation.
Weak troll man.
If Scott had broken any terms of service then why have Blue Host called him and apologised? If Scott had broken his terms of service then it is unlikely they would have done this.
How do you break a term of service on unlimited hosting? A term is a limit. The company offers unlimited bandwidth. No term. Just service. Your logic makes no sense, sir.
I hope some dude in a neckerchief pulls off your rubber mask and make you look like a big jerk.
Someone should tell Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon that they are spending way too much on their servers when they could get an unlimited hosting account for 6.95 a month. DON’T be so dense you morons. You get what you pay for. This service is great for millions of users. If you have 100k hits a day, don’t be such a cheapskate, get a server all to yourself. It’s called “dedicated hosting”, Google it.
It may be of some interest to you guys but the above website mattheaton.com has been rated by McAfee as Fraudulent and engaging in the active distribution of malware. Check it out here: http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/mattheaton.com
Other users have also reported that BlueHosts activly allow and distribute phishing/Fradulent websites on their network.
Isn’t this the same host that cancelled rory blyths blog for the same reason?
I put it on reddit too, I hope it will get picked up there…
http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/cuzof/bluehostcom_shuts_down_podcast_network_for_using/
Just out if interest, how much a month were you paying? If it’s anywhere under $50, you were foolish to not expect this to happen.
I was going to set up a bluehost account today. Not now.
Mr. Front Row Joe,
Could you please read the Terms of Service before you go off on your 13 year old rant because you’re not getting things your way?
Internet trolls are so much fun. Thank you for putting a smile on my face.
Bluehost’s CEO Matt Heaton is known for creating false personae for himself in a futile attempt to influence ratings and discussion of his service: http://inetintegrity.com/weblog/?p=3
So I’m going to assume that anonymous trolls here are, indeed, Mr. Heaton. Hi!! Please try to notice that the actual complaint has nothing to do with the terms of service, but rather the way the company personally treated Scott.
This news disgruntles me, but is not really surprising, sadly. Why they couldn’t have contacted you to discuss alternative options is beyond me.
We may be able to provide a place for your content to be hosted whilst you gather your bearings, free of charge, depending on the specifications you require. Feel free to drop me an email or shoot us a message on our contact form if you’re interested.
Hope things work out either way.
If you want reliable hosting that won’t dump ya because you use a little bit of bandwidth hit us up. A VPS would be ideal for your situation.
http://beyondhosting.net/Virtual-Private-Servers
So let me get this straight, you go pay less than $7 a month and expect to serve possibly 100,000+ (per day) and then you wonder why you got shutdown. It’s shared hosting, meaning you “share” the resources with other users. Obviously they will shut you down if you are bogging down the servers and screwing up other users’ sites. Try going for the VPS as Tyler suggested, unless you don’t actually want to pay for the resources you’re using. Otherwise, try to find another company that will allow you to be a detriment to the service they provide their other users. I’m sure it won’t be long before they shut you down too.
I’ve been with Bluehost for 6+ years now, hosting 8 small business websites. Haven’t had a single issue and they’ve always been quick with their customer support. They have had their moments of downtime, but they are very rare and tend to be resolved rather quickly. What do you expect for $7 a month? Don’t go and start bashing a good company simply because they aren’t letting you abuse their services.
I get what you’re saying and somewhat agree with your comments (7 a month) however if i look in my contract, there is NO cap. “unlimited”.
Maybe what bluehost needs to do is either change their contracts to “unlimited” really means “10GB a month” OR if they have popular sites, be smarter about their infrastructure load balancing.
I see both points here – but if the contract says “unlimited” then that’s what it says and what is expected by the customer.
Same kind of issue is brewing regarding the data plans for mobile devices and we’ve seen the direction some of them have taken.
That’s not how unlimited works, if you read there agreement it says: ‘”unlimited” services is not intended to allow the actions of a single or few Subscribers to unfairly or adversely impact the experience of other Subscribers’. If your site is to busy your impacting other customers performance and you’re not longer in compliance with their terms of service.
People seem to think shared hosting is unlimited meaning it don’t cost more than $7 to give them unlimited resources.
Unlimited does not mean unlimited and it never will.
http://beyondhosting.net/Virtual-Private-Servers/
You tell ‘em, Steve Dave.
Any company that uses the words “Unlimited” 4 times on the opening page and 10 times on their features pages then bitches about sites that use a lot of that unlimited resource deserves all the bad press they get.
Even if you look at the ToS they STILL do not define what the limits are, hiding behind weasel words that defy any empirical definition. So to those saying “but… but… its only a $7 a month package”, “but,… but… its a shared service”, “but…but..” my answer is “So?”
Bluehost are advertising a service that they cannot provide and refuses to define. If they said “Hey, we have limits of xyz for our shared service but if you want more then we have to charge more or you will need to leave”, fine at least I can go into the deal knowing EXACTLY what my limits are and what my costs will be. But to say “hey guy, you can use what you want its all good!” and they shaft me if I hit an invisible and arbitrary limit…Screw them.
I agree that they shouldn’t write unlimited if they can’t provide but I still think you get what you pay for. If you seriously have 100,000+ users you need to be serving per day, I would seriously reconsider ANY package costing $7 a month, regardless of whether or not it’s from Bluehost.
Look around at all of Bluehosts competitors. They’re all claiming unlimited this and that.
For example justhost.com says on their front page.
# Unlimited GB’s of Space
# Unlimited GB’s of Transfer
# Unlimited Domain Hosting
# Unlimited E-Mail Accounts
# Unlimited MySQL Databases
as does Bluehost and everyone else. All the shared hosting companies finally quit playing the “I’m offering more space and bandwidth than you’re offering” game years ago because they realized that technology has rendered that point of advertising to be meaningless. The bottleneck isn’t space and bandwidth anymore. Noone will define what the limits really are because they’re still too many ways to list in which a user can abuse a webserver. You could have 1000 users downloading the same mp3 off a webserver at once, or hundreds of people trying to post to a php/mysql based forum at tne exact same millisecond. It’s not feasible for every user on a shared server to be able to server 17 terabytes worth of bandwidth in a short amount of time. Do your research, find out what bandwidth really costs. The bottom line here is when a site gets enough simultaneous traffic that it’s compromising the other websites’s on the same box ability to serve pages, it’s time to graduate to something else than shared hosting. If you were trying to run a business would you rather keep 1 customer or 1000 customers? Congrats to Frogpants on his success.
People jumping on the ‘defend Scot’ bandwagon – read and comprehend before posting. The use of the word ‘unlimited’ is not what he’s questioning – it’s the way he was kicked off – ‘…if I were them, I would want me off their network too’.
There are definitely better ways to do business; as folk have noted the company’s advertising isn’t any different from many in the same business and position. Anyone using an isp for bog-standard internet access who has an unlimited bandwidth type account will proably see something in the small print telling them that that depends on fair use of the service.
enjoyed reading this blog and am bookmarking and sharing this with my social community on news vine
Randy,
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but after looking at your whois information http://whois.domaintools.com/randydeluxe.com , it shows you are hosted by Hostmonster. Bluehost, Hostmonster, and Fastdomain are all pretty much the same organization. In fact if you follow the above link and go to the server stats tab you can see your ip location is listed as “Utah – Orem – Bluehost Inc”
Good day,
Dancing
Ouch, looks like Randy’s gonna have to find another internet provider, and quick!
@Peter Griffin: Um, an internet service provider (ISP) is different from a hosting service.
@RandyDeluxe: So, Randy, when are you migrating your blog? You can’t preach the talk if you don’t walk the walk.
Otherwise, you’d be a hypocrite. :O
Shared Hosting and a popular site such are yours is not a good idea. I wonder if you read the TOS, and was it something that was broken by you or BlueHost?
Just a thought
Sorry to read about your experience with BlueHost. I’ve been with them for close to 6 years I do have several sites with them and that is what I recommend to all my clients.
Never had a major issue. Of course issues could arise, but always have been resolved. I’ve been able to compare service with other providers and I’m sure I’ll continue with BlueHost.
I wish they would’ve called you to offer you a dedicated server based on your needs.
Bluehost doesn’t offer dedicated hosting, only shared hosting unfortunately.
It’s sad that n00bs to the interwebz that claim to be pro don’t understand basics of web hosting and then complain about something that happens to them because they made a mistake in how they managed their files and their usage.
Bluehost is horrible in my opinion. They say unlimited bandwidth and space but they over sell their servers and started CPU throttling everyone running WordPress sites. This caused many of my sites to actually get delisted from Google because of the slowness and then they called it a feature! Stay away from BlueHost and Hostmonster!
Kevin
Kevin, as much as I’d like to side with you, not liking Bluehost myself – I have to disagree with your statement.
In a shared hosting environment a user shares the server and CPU / bandwidth with 500 to sometimes 1,000 different other users. Bandwidth is not infinite and it’s not cheap either. Duh. If 1 user is taking up all the bandwidth and other sites cannot be reached because of it, of course, they’re going to shut down the bandwidth hog. Randy/Scott should have known that they take up lots of bandwidth by the numbers they see that can easily be monitored (if they knew what they were doing). Lets be smart about this.
Unlimited means there is no official cap, from what I gather. They’re not giving you a set amount of bandwidth. They kind of twist it that way and they have a pretty decent Terms of Service that justifies their terms, you just have to read it (which I might add, they require that you do before you sign up. So Randy or Scott or whoever would have had to click “Yes, I have read and agree to the Terms of Service” when they signed up. The Terms of Service itself…let me find it. Oh, here it is: http://bluehost.com/terms/ – it states and defines unlimited usage under section 7. “UNLIMITED” USAGE POLICIES AND DEFINITIONS and it also informs you that they will shut you down with or without notice if you violate any terms of the service agreement.
Anyway, just being the Devil’s Advocate because I think this article was blown out of proportion.
just out of the blue? no email nothing? thats just… wow…
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