Bluehost Blues
This is a rant about current bad practices at Bluehost. If you don’t want to listen to me whine, turn back now.
TL;DR
If you want to work with a hosting provider that can properly support your website/web application needs, don’t choose Bluehost. They have broken processes that will result in business outages.
The Best of Times
When I built my first website and got my first domain, I was just learning about HTML and CSS. Coding in javascript or python or any other language was not really in my scope of mind at the time. It was a statically typed website that I managed primarily in notepad and uploaded to Bluehost. I’ve been a customer for a long time since.
My next level of evolution was building a python script that would take a batch of photos and create a statically generated web gallery. Again, no fancy javascript here as I didn’t yet understand the front end magic that was javascript (that would come much later). Everything I needed for a beginner website was provided at a pretty effective rate through Bluehost.
Eventually, I learned a lot more about development and building backends. I got familiar with AWS and Azure for application building and left my old “LAMP” stack days behind. I went through some fairly normal processes of doing things the traditional way with EC2 and eventually migrated to serverless capabilities with react based websites. I never forgot about Bluehost though and have maintained domains with them for over a decade.
The Worst of Times
Like many technologists, I suffer from people asking for my opinion and soliciting my help for their website challenges. I know that for most people, pointing to AWS or Azure to stand up a simple WordPress site or eCommerce solution is above their knowledge and interest. For these people I have regularly recommended Bluehost because of my personal experience. I have now come to regret this multiple times for multiple customers and last night sealed the deal.
The Story Times
For my client, we had setup a Bluehost account for two main values.
- Cheap email services that can be leveraged for transactional email.
- Relatively straight forward DNS configurations.
I was moving them off of an anemic WordPress installation on a different hosting solution and into AWS LightSail where site responsiveness would be improved and monthly costs reduced significantly. I didn’t want to pay route 53 prices for DNS management. All of this worked okay until the client and I had a temporary distancing during some personal chaos I was going through. They eventually moved their site to a different WordPress host and it worked out for them.
Flash forward, and I’m providing support in an ad-hoc manner again. Earlier this year the Bluehost hosting services were set to expire and my client wanted to know if we still needed Bluehost. After looking at the capabilities they were paying for in their new provider, I determined that transactional emails were already covered in the costs and so Bluehost’s hosting product could expire. We would still be using Bluehost for DNS because the pain of dealing with DNS transfers is just that — painful.
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The hosting plan expired in April and no disruptions were noted to the client’s website. Everything seemed great, until it wasn’t.
Destructive Product Procedures
After some grace period following the expiration of the hosting services, Bluehost disabled the hosting features. This was expected, and we had done the due diligence to ensure that we wouldn’t be impacted. I had talked with the Bluehost support staff to ensure I knew what did and did not work after the expiration. There was an important detail that was not disclosed, however.
As part of shutting down the hosting services, Bluehost took it upon themselves to fully reset all my client DNS records. MX records gone. CNAME records gone. TXT records gone. The only records we had were A records for @, www, and * which pointed to a random Bluehost IP that was not configured to listen or respond to the client’s domain name.
After hearing about the outage at 10:40 at night, I get into chat with Bluehost. After 20 minutes, they confirm that they had reset my DNS:
Bluehost Support:
Thank you for the confirmation. I have checked and see that the your hosting was expired on April 23, 2024 and the hosting plan is deleted, so the DNS records was reset and pointed to default record xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.
I quickly pointed out that DNS is a separate product from hosting, and as such, DNS should not be reset when hosting expires. For the next 30 minutes I kept getting ignored or fed with responses like:
Bluehost support:
I can understand, since you already had the hosting account and so when it was deleted, the DNS was changed. But if you purchase new domain, the DNS of it will not be changed to default.
I was pretty irritated. So I asked them to answer the simple question:
Me:
When I buy just a domain, does that comes with domain name services?
The answer:
Bluehost support:
Yes, when you purchase domain, you get it with nameservers and DNS.
So we established that hosting and DNS/NS are separate products, and that Bluehost will reset both products if you let hosting expire. How asinine.
After clarifying the product offerings, they ignored me another 20 minutes, likely hoping I would get off the line. It was only after I mentioned call metrics they decided to come back to the chat. I tried to work out some kind of compensation and was offered half off DNS renewal as a reimbursement. In all, the chat lasted 90 minutes from start to the end.
In Summation
In the two years this client had been with Bluehost, the DNS was reset automatically by Bluehost twice. I cannot remember the context around the first event, but I do remember taking the call from a Target parking lot as I worked to resolve the issue. With the repeat experience and poor communication from Bluehost, I can no longer stand by Bluehost as a reliable web partner for the small mom and pop clients or even larger clients who need simple hosting needs met.
Some part of me hopes Bluehost will see this article and reconsider their business procedures. The other part of me is doubtful. Regardless of how they handle it, I more hope I save others from dealing with Bluehost and their business practices, especially if their business depends on reliable name service management.
