My wife leads workshops throughout the country. It's one her bread and butter means of income. These workshops require a lot of planning and coordination ahead of time. Reliable email has become an absolute requirement for her. So, when I received this email from a friend who manages the web services for one of her collaborators today - I was a little livid:
Well, looks like email to Bluehost is still not working as I just got the email I sent to Asha yesterday bounced back to me.
Just wanted to let you know that Bluehost is on a blacklist at LiquidWeb (possibly elsewhere as well). They/we tried to contact Bluehost for about 4 weeks to get them to take action to fix the problem (a script exploit repository hosted on your server). They did not reply or respond, so that means no one with a server on Liquid Web's network can send email to anyone on your shared server.
If you can open a ticket and have them investigate, they will probably be a lot more responsive since you are a customer. Just say you can't receive any email from abc@cdef.com or zyx@wvut.com and they should be able to sort it out.
Bluehost is reknowned for their usually excellent tech support, so I bopped over to their trouble-ticket system and opened a ticket on the problem. Sure enough, Bluehost got back to me within a couple hours. But the response about knocked me out of my chair:
What you will need to do is purchase a Dedicated IP, so that your website appears unique. You are currently on a shared hosting server, so your domain shares the same IP address as all of the other clients on that same server. So if they block one domain on the server, they will block all of the domains. The only way around that is to purchase a Dedicated IP so that your website uses its own IP and shares it with no other domain.
The cost for a dedicated IP is $30 per year ($2.50/mo prorated to the end of your agreement). If you would like to purchase the dedicated IP, simply login to your domain manager at http://bluehost.com/dm and click on the dedicated IP tab.
Lonny Jepson
Support Level 1
BlueHost.com
888.401.4678
I won't even bother explaining why this is a non-answer. So either Bluehost has just gone entirely to pot or they are using blacklists to sell services. Either answer now has me looking for a new hosting service!
4 comments:
I work as a freelance computer programmer doing web applications and database programming. So I have several years experience dealing with a variety of different hosting companies. One of my biggest clients, who sub-contracts alot of work to me, was setting up all of their clients' websites to be hosted at BlueHost. Mainly because they were cheap and promissed alot.
At first it seemed like a decent hosting company. But after a while I started to notice all of the sites we had hosted there slowing down greatly and then started to notice alot of down time. When this first started to occur I called their tech support and found out they were under what is called a denial of services attack from some hackers in China. This is actually very common. What is not common though is a hosting company that has no clue how to deal with it.
The first time it happened I gave them the benefit of the doubt and was very patient while they took almost a month to get the sites back up and running half way decent. But in the months to come it was happening all of the time. I could never get any development work done on the sites we were building and the sites that were live were down more often then they were up. And the ones that would still come up were extremely slow and produced tons of errors on the pages.
I again called their tech support when they again told me they were under a denial of services attack and as a result they had to disable many basic and common services on the server which is what was causes the errors. They did this without informing or warning any of their customers and then told me that it would be at least 2-3 weeks before they could turn them back on.
As I said before I have several years dealing with a variety of hosting companies and BlueHost is by far and without a doubt the worst option available anywhere on the internet!
Several months ago I began testing several other hosting companies to find a replacement for the accounts I had hosted at BlueHost. The one that I am the most happy with is HostGator. I have had no performance issues whatsoever with them. They have a 99.999% uptime garauntee and they take that very seriously. They have 24/7 tech support by phone and live chat. Their cPanel is the same as with BlueHost. And they have hosting plans as low as $4.95 per month.
If you are currently hosted at BlueHost and have noticed the same problems that I did I highly recommend you take a look at HostGator. And if you are thinking about hosting a site at BlueHost...Don't waist your time and money.
Rico
Eric, thanks for your interesting post. I googled "bluehost blacklists" and your the third entry down, I think. I agree that Bluehost has gone to pot; I'm guessing the Bluehost tech support engineer who hen pecked out this response to me had a couple of cones in the carpark before coming in for the graveyard shift: I can see his lips moving as he wrote it.
From: Bluehost Support
XXXXXX@blue
Date: Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 5:51 PM
Subject: [ #1985526]: bluehost mail server on blacklists
To: XXXXX@gmail
Dear Customer,
I do apologize but this is a draw back hosting on a shared environment, all it takes is one customer spamming from the shared ip and than anyone connected to that ip is blacklisted.
The only solution we can offer is contact companies like spamhaus and other spam listing companies to clarify that you are not sending spam. Or you can purchase a dedicated ip, if the ip is whats tainted using a purchased one that has no history would clear this up as well.
Thanks for contacting us.
We apologize for the trouble you've been having,
Thanks
JChristensen
Level 1 Support Engineer
Bluehost.com
866.410-HOST
My story is pretty much identical to yours. I'm a Tokyo based IT recruiter who transferred the whole shebang - e-mail, web hosting, domain name - over to bluehost mid December last year, on the deluded assumption I'd not have the blacklisting problems I'd had previously with Yahoo Small Business (as well as STMP problems too...) No probs till two days ago 1. A first mail response to a NEW client gets bounced because bluehost's mail server IP is on Barracuda's spamlist (a commercial security software!!! what's next, Symantec, Trend Micro?) and a day later I get a SORB blacklist bounce mailing an Indian support company.
The mail inserted above is a final outcome from a number of tickets posted; finally the truth is out, as you have unfortunatly confirmed for me.
What irritates particularly though, is that I had a long online chat with a tech support establishing that this would NOT occur with Bluehost prior to signing on with them (starting point was WHY did they have a dedicated IP option).
Looks like I'll have to take the dedicated IP path, as a move will be a waste of the $72 year package I got a month ago, and I'll have to keep an eye on my website (thanks for your comments Rico, and the recommendation; it will be a backup).
Not only has tech support catapulted me into the middle of 'Deliverance', but it looks like I'll be suffering the same outcome as one of the raftsman.
Thanks James and Rico...
To be honest, I think Bluehost is just dealing with a symptomatic problem in selling mass shared accounts. Their rates are pretty damned cheap - and I guess that it attracts the types one would expect.
I upgraded to the fixed IP but I still think I'm getting blocked. I need to research it more.
I've also been playing more with Google Sites. It's doing about 90% of what I need. Once my prepaid BlueHost account expires (in a little over a year), I may revisit Google Sites. I just might be able to forget about that missing 10%.
ebwolf,
I have to disagree. Hostgator has about 3 times as many shared accounts as BlueHost and they are even cheaper. But since moving my sites over from BlueHost to Hostgator I have not experienced any performance problems.
Rico
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