Archive for October, 2008
Avoid Bluehost.com
My email just stopped this morning. No warning, no notice. I tried to log into my bluehost.com account to reset my password and couldn’t get in at all. “Call us” it says.
So I called, waited in the queue, and the rep can’t help me. Transfers me to the abuse department. Abuse? I run a low-volume blog and some email.
The abuse rep finally comes on the line. Heather is her name. Her tone clearly says she thinks I’m scum. She informs me with McCainish contempt that I am in violation of the terms of service because I have “stored files” in my account. Apparently, they changed their TOS back in April to say any file has to be served as part of a website and they crawled all my sites and couldn’t find a way to get to those files.
I log in through ssh after she reactivates that part and find that the “offending files” are about 90G worth of music and picture backups from when I was upgrading to Leopard. I just forgot to delete them. She says she can’t reactivate my email and sites until the files are gone.
I type rm -rf * inside the directory and ask her to wait for it to complete. She has other customers and says I have to call back. Can’t she see the files going away? Sorry, can’t wait. I ask for a supervisor. Without even missing a beat “she’s in a meeting.” Yeah, right. I ask her how much of the data remains to be deleted. She doesn’t answer or even say goodbye — just hags up on me. The rm finishes.
My files may have been a violation of the TOS, but I didn’t know that. There was no urgent reason to deactivate my account when they could have sent an email.
I have sent email to their CEO since their support department no longer accepts email. You have to call them.
You know, maybe Heather is just a bad apple who needs to be fired and Bluehost made a bad hiring decision, but deactivating my account unnecessarily is the big crime here as far as I’m concerned.
My advice would be to avoid any company that treats your data with so little care. Based on my experience with them, Bluehost.com is definitely one to avoid on that score.