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Bluehost Unlimited Reseller VERY limiting

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February 15th 2014
Seth Carstens
6 Comments

So after being with Bluehost for nearly 2 years, I’ve learned the ups and downs of being on there “shared” hosting plans. The downtime, as with all other shared hosting, is horrible for businesses that live online. If you are an online business you need cloud services and you can get the best cloud faxing solutions here. Every single day, there are lapses in uptime as proven by the monitoring tools I keep on my websites. With a few exceptions, the reason I didn’t move was because the downtime is usually very brief. I’ve been with other hosts that have proven to be extremely poor at getting my sites back online.

Then today after sending a ticket to support and regarding something odd in my WHM interface (reseller control panel), I got this horrible letter from Bluehost. Apparently there “unlimited” package they market to us, is extremely limited.  The full letter is below, basically stating a limitation of 200,000 files and 1,000 tables in my databaes with a 3GB database limit. Let me do some math for you. There are 2,000 files per WordPress install, that limits you to 100 WordPress websites with CORE ONLY INSTALLS. Now add plugins, themes, and media uploads because lets be honest, all websites have these things, now your down to about 50 WordPress installs. Now on those 50 WordPress installs I hope you don’t have much content because all 50 websites must maintain less then 3GB of data storage in the databases… so keep your articles to a bare minimum. PS WHERE THE HELL DOES IT SAY THIS IN THE MARKETING MATERIAL???? Look for youself: http://www.bluehost.com/reseller (I even read the fine print when you click unlimited, which says nothing about these limitations). Bluehost, shame on you for this horrible, unethical business practice.

 

From: Bluehost Helpdesk <bluehost>
Date: Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 6:10 PM
Subject: Re: Contact me: Control Panel Issues
To: <me>

I can certainly understand your frustration. Please be assured that your account IS NOT limited to 15 databases. What you’re seeing is likely based on how you’ve set up one or more of your packages or individual accounts through the WHM. If you’ll give us more information about where you’re seeing this, we can help you get set up to not be limited in that way.

You should know that there ARE some limitations on your account for server performance reasons, and the impact that your file/database users could have on other server users. You are limited to 200,000 files and 1,000 database tables. Your databases in total can be no larger than 3G and any one database may be no larger than 2G. I just wanted to make that clear to avoid any misconceptions. You are well under your usage limits currently and should certainly be able to add more databases.

Thank you,
Jason
Sr. Web Advisor
BlueHost.com

 

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6 thoughts on “Bluehost Unlimited Reseller VERY limiting”

    • That’s fantastic, I’m sure its hiding in there nicely. My question was, where is it in the marketing materials. They specifically link out and define “unlimited” without defining the limits. Obscure hidden references to limits is not an ethical business practice. The marketing collateral is misrepresenting what they are selling, which is ANYTHING but unlimited. IT should for all intensive purposes be called the “limited” plan.

      • Brian, thanks for the link, after further review, I particularly DESPISE this concept of termination without warning: “Bluehost may request that the number of files/inodes, database tables, or total database usage be reduced to ensure proper performance or may terminate the Subscriber’s account, with or without notice.”

  2. My goodness, what are you thinking of, looking at 100 separate WordPress installs on a single account (or multiple accounts)?

    Instead of ranting about your hosting provider’s limitations, you could look for a better approach. Easier for you, and well within their limitations.

    Use WordPress in Multi-Site mode. One installation, one set of files, update the WordPress Core and Plugins and Themes once for all of your sites.

    For what you’re doing, the only use of another WordPress installation should be plugin development, so debugging your plugins doesn’t affect your production sites.

    Here’s my instructions for how to install WordPress Multi-Site, with the Domain Mapping plugin, for shared hosting accounts http://lcblog.lernerconsult.com/2012-wordpress-3-multi-site-installation-existing-web-sites/

    If you need to, it is possible to migrate stand-alone WordPress sites into Multi-Site, with all settings intact. Complex, only worth while if you have a lot of settings to keep, but I’ve done it. (Otherwise, just copy the individual post HTML and manually apply the settings.)

    By the way, a WordPress Multi-Site client of mine has about 140 sites, probably about 10 pages per site. The SQL export of all those sites is under 200MB. In phpMyAdmin it totals 113MB. Each site could be over 15 times its current size and fit in 2GB. Each site uses under 20 tables, including some plugins with custom tables per site, so 1000 tables is plenty for almost 500 sites.

    Use WordPress right, and your BlueHost account will fit your needs. (You might want to switch hosts to one with technical support that knows WordPress plugin troubleshooting, separate servers optimized for MySQL, GIT version control installed, stronger site and WordPress security, built-in content delivery networks — but those are much more advanced features than you are talking about, and cost slightly more.)

    So you might want to simmer down.

    • Apparently you missed the part where its a reseller account. I don’t want my sites in Multisite. Its not the answer for everything, in fact, its mostly never the answer. If you would have researched my site a little more, you would notice that I’ve been a developer for over 10 years. I’ll be happy to debate with you all the reasons why NOT to use multisite, but thats not the point of my article. You seemed to have missed it completely.

      Marketing misrepresentation. This is why I’m upset. So you can continue spouting that you think know how to manage websites better then me, but it has abosultely nothing to do with the article that was written here.

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