My letter to bluehost.com owner Matt Heaton or “Why Bluehost sucks”

Hi Matt.

I’ve held off a month before writing you this email because I didn’t
want it to come across as a personal attack.

One of the reasons I initially chose to go with Bluehost was because
of your excellent blog.

Unfortunately there’s nothing that can change the way I feel now when
someone mentions your company (please note again, not a personal
attack).

Around the 19th March 2009 my bluehost account giantfriend.com was
closed and all data deleted without warning or even explanation.

Bluehost had always been my main hosting site (around 14 websites) and
I have a server in Sydney (I’m in Australia) for latency important
sites.

This is my business and of course all of my clients relied on DNS
email & site hosting from me.

I spent the next week after this catastrophe attempting to get the
account reinstated and all the sites back.

Although the bluehost staff are friendly and helpful there was no-one
who could tell me what the problem was that caused account deletion
and no-one could retrieve any backups at all.

I have no idea if this was a violation of the terms or a mistake or an
overzealous sysadmin. My entire account was just ‘gone’.

Needless to say I was absolutely gutted and don’t need to tell you
that there should have been some measures in place to protect from
this now apparent ‘Sword of Damocles’.

To the best of my knowledge the account was using ~5GB of data &
serving up pretty standard php/mysql based websites. There was no file
sharing or dodgy content on the server.

I include the first email I received as none of the subsequent emails
or phone calls provided any more clarity:

———————–
“Dear Gareth:

Your web hosting account for giantfriend.com has been deactivated
(reason: call customer support).
Although your web site has been disabled, your data may still be available for
up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted.

If you feel this deactivation is in error, please contact customer support as
soon as possible.

Thank you,
BlueHost.Com Support

http://www.bluehost.com

For support go to http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/
Toll-Free: (888) 401-4678″
———————–

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Gareth