Smallville Drinking Game

Bluehost Web-hosting service Review

bluehost review

I looked at Bluehost after reading a few favorable reviews. I know a lot of them were influenced by the referral offers Bluehost puts out but the price was good for shared WordPress hosting. I set up my account and began the process of transferring my domain name from GoDadddy to Bluehost.

The first issue arrived right away when I received a notice that I needed to contact them to approve the domain transfer. That's fine, it is a "security" feature but what was annoying about it was that I couldn't do it online. This is a technology company right? And people have to call for service. So I called and the second thing that annoyed me was they wanted the last 4 digits of the password on my account for verification. You know that bit of information that people usually want to keep private.

I gave the person the last 4 of my password and the domain I was wanting to transfer. She verified my account then asked, "what domain do you want to transfer?"

"The one I just gave you." Thanks for paying attention.

Then she asked me how I wanted to pay. To which my response was, "what do you mean pay? I already paid when I set it up." 

After getting off the phone with her and thinking everything was good I went to the hosting panel and started to set up my WordPress site.

The next day, I went to log in to finish setting up my WordPress site and had this in big red letter:



DE-Activated Account!
This account has been COMPLETELY de-activated. We have disabled Cpanel, Domain Manager, FTP or any other forms of access.
If you have questions, please contact our Terms of Service Department.

I went to the online chat:  Who after putting me on hold for 5 minutes responded with:

I just checked the account, I see that the account is deactivated temporarily for pending verification. Nothing to worry ,you will have to email a copy of your Government issued photo ID to ''verification@bluehost.com'' 
Our verification team will check the documents and activate the account for you. 
Verification requirements: -Copy of government-issued photo ID (front and back), such as a driver's license or passport, matching the customer information listed on the account. The ID must be in color and show the issuing authority, name, address, and expiration date and showing all four (4) corners. -If the govt issued ID doesn't show the address on the account then we will ask Copy of a utility bill: - gas, electricity, water, telephone are accepted (not mobile phones and other billed postal mail). -If the account listed for the business name then will ask Business license, Certificate of Incorporation, A 501(c)(3) letter from the IRS, DBA/fictitious name documentation.
You can email us any of these documents for the verification.

So I responded with, "are you fucking kidding me? no, i'm not going to do that. I'll stick with GoDaddy. Please cancel my account and refund me what i paid as per your refund policy."

His response:
"The account will be cancelled automatically if the account is not verified in the next 7-10 days. The complete amount will be refunded." 

What a joke. They have no problem letting me set up an account, pay for an account, but they then want me to send copies of my utility bills to have a hosting service with them? I can tell you from experience that GoDaddy doesn’t require that or InMotion Hosting doesn't either. I've been happy with those two but thought I could get something cheaper, and I guess you get the quality of service you pay for with Bluehost. I'll stick with the better service providers.

Comments