Web Hosts – From The Awful To The Awesome

January 15, 2009

If you choose an awful webhost, you may find yourself in the same situation I was in recently. My website was disabled and I was unable to access my webhosting account at all – so I couldn’t move my blog to a more reliable webhost for a whole week. And if you’re with Bluehost, you might want to switch now, to avoid the same bad experience.

Why Bluehost Sucks

Bluehost were hassle free initially. But I didn’t get a lot of traffic to my website for a while, so there wasn’t a lot that could go wrong. But when my blog began to get heaps more traffic, the trouble started. Every time I had a traffic spike, they would temporarily suspend my site. And over a week ago, they disabled it permanently, with no warning.

They didn’t give me an actual reason for disabling my blog but in one of their final emails they did mention that I could have outgrown their service.

Now, I can understand that if it’s too expensive for them to continue to provide a service to me, they might not want to continue to do so. But there’s ways to deal with a situation like this, if you want to prevent bad word of mouth.

Service Like This Is Bad Enough But Did Bluehost Really Need To Behave Like Assholes?

If a customer has outgrown the service you provide them, it’s a good thing, as it means they’re doing well. And I think there’s two ways you can deal with such a situation. Bluehost chose Option B:

A) Tell your customer they need to upgrade to a different service and either offer it to them, if you can, or refer them to someone else.

B) Disable your customer’s website with no warning; don’t allow them access to their website at all, so they can’t move their account. Leave an onscreen message saying that you’ll delete the customer’s blog within 2 weeks, then send them a few annoying emails and mess them about for a week, to prevent them from accessing their account. *If you want to do a really good job of this, be like Bluehost and don’t ever call your customer by their name, when you’re sending snotty emails out.

Lucky For Me There’s Still Some Awesome Webhosts About

John Hoff of EventureBiz web hosting, is in the process of launching an exceptional new product. And when he heard about my dilemma, he offered to take me on as a customer, before his product officially launched. And he also moved my blog over to the new hosting account and did a whole heap of things to make my blog more secure.

John did a lot of this over the weekend. He provided an awesome service and if you want to move hosting accounts, I can’t recommend him enough – it is a truly hassle free experience.

Have you had problems with your web host? Would you know what to do, if you’d been in the same situation as me? I would have been fine moving an ordinary website but I wouldn’t have known where to start with a Wordpress blog.

Related Reading

Is Blogging Dead?
How To Get 150,000 Page Views A Month
Improve Customer Service With Great Recommendations
How I Became Sky TV’s Customer Complaints Centre

Posted by cathlawson | Filed Under Mistakes, Planning | 38 Comments 

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