I started a bunch of VoIP calls and fax related websites on Bluehost a few years back.

In overall, I think Bluehost is doing okay… They were very good back at that time but things are going down slope right now. There are more downtime, less customer supports, and with so many web hosts offering unlimited hosting at a lower price now – Bluehost deal just doesn’t sound as attractive as it used to be.

I’m thinking about FatCow or JustHost – who are relative much cheaper….

idk about anyone else but Bluehost Tech Support (both email and phone) is horrible. When I called for tech assistance on a webiste I’m working on the guy who answered was rude and argumentative; even after I told him I didn’t like how he was speaking to me he continued. Email support is no better; they give canned responses and 2 or 3 line quick comments; no solutions offered outside what you could find doing a simple search on Google.

Their other departments are good friendly and courteous but not tech support so if your tech savvy and will never need their assist then fine but if not I’d stay clear and go with another host.

I received an email from Bluehost support two weeks ago requesting that I reduce my file size count to under 50,000 in one week. Email follows:

Dear Tommy:

“It has come to our attention that your site is using an excessive number of files stored on your BlueHost.Com account. This is causing performance problems on your website as well as for other customers that are on this server. It can cause our servers to crash and cause additional downtime.

Our research shows that server performance degrades when accounts have over 50,000 files. In order to ensure optimal performance for your account and the others in your shared hosting environment, we request that you reduce the number of files on your account to under 50,000 by 07/28/2009.”

I spent three hours weeding out some places they reccommended might be some places I wasn’t aware of like old logs and spam email boxes etc. I went from around 300,000 files to around 200,000 files which I thought would show good faith on my part as this was a request and not a warning etc, just a request. So a week goes by….. nothing. Afternoon of August 4, 2009 I return from lunch and check my email which oddly was my last email received which read……. Email follows:

“Dear Tommy:

Your web hosting account for clubt.com has been deactivated (reason: excessive file count).
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″

Sure enough I check my 4 web sites we have at Bluehost, all have a account suspended notice on a white background, making all 4 businesses appear that they had gone out of business and all email accounts down as well. I called Bluehost support and asked what was going on, they told me I had been suspended and the only way to get my web sited back up was to get my total file count to below 50,000. My current file count was 214,000. They were asking me to delete 75% of my website to get back online! For those that do not understand file counts and inode counts, every email, page, picture etc takes up one inode on linux servers. One of our companies is a DJ company. We take photos at our events and use a program to put them into thumbnail catalogs. If we start with 100 photos we might end up with close to 1,000 inodes when the program is done with it’s thumbnail views etc. 50,000 for us is a very small number of files.

Anyways, here’s my argument. When I signed on with Bluehost, they were happy to take my business advertising unlimited transfer, unlimited storage space etc. I thought, this is fantastic, we can keep our photo sets online for students to enjoy for a long time. I even made sure to mention this to the support rep when I signed up to be certain that unlimited storage was unlimited storage. When I signed up we had well over 50,000 files and simply grew. There was never any mention of this limitation whatsoever until I received the email on 7-21-09, otherwise I would have went elsewhere in 2006. Our site is so big it takes days to move via ftp (site is about 15 gigs). What i’m asking here is that shared hosting companies be a little more honest with people. If they’re advertising unlimited storage it should not be restricted by file count or inode counts. They shoudl have an asteric next to the unlimited with a link taking you to the legal section where it clearly explains their file count, then I’d have no argument. I think you’ll find it interesting reading that in their terms and conditions page http://www.bluehost.com/cgi/info/terms.html
there is absolutely no mention of file count or inode count restrictions. These people are just really bad business people that just kicked a good paying customer with a legitimate business to the curb. We do not reccommend Bluehost to anyone anymore as they falsely advertise their product!! We have moved to Media Temple where their customer service has been fantastic over the past week of moving files in desperation to get our businesses back online after Bluehost turned a “request” into something entirely different. Read the fine print before you sign on the dotted line. If the fine print doesn’t answer your questions then get customer reviews on products before you commit, you’ll often be surprised to what you find.

My situation is similar to Tommy Walsh’s above. I am hosted on Hostmonster (one and the same company) and recently received the same message. Communication is everything. I brought my file-count down from over 200K to 80K removing many things I really preferred not to but… they asked and I tried, Just as Mr. Walsh. However, I kept in daily contact with them as to my continued efforts and my inability to bring the file-count all the way down to 50K. I called their support and it was resolved that I would be OK. It was explained that any account which maintains a file-count over 200k for a sustained period will be asked to remove files. However, you have to read through the TOS to see that they do not have a legal right to terminate your account for overage unless you are violating other terms, mainly, using your account for offline tile-storage not related to your site.