When I was looking for a new web hosting company, the first thing I did was surf the net to find out who was rated the best. I wanted a hosting company that had great customer service, 99.9% uptime, lots of space, reliable, easy to use, and plenty of band width. Everywhere I looked on the net I saw so many companies which were rated 5/5 & 10/10. Wow, it made it very hard for me to decide which one I should choose. The more I searched and contemplated, Bluehost came up in more search engines and with higher ratings. So I chose Bluehost.
Who, how, what, and why are the ratings generated?
Then I discovered the following:
mattheaton.com @ box34.bluehost.com
hostboom.com @ box34.bluehost.com
webhosting-topten.com @ box34.bluehost.com
zaneheaton.com @ box34.bluehost.com
webhosthelpline.com @ box34.bluehost.com
Wow! Look at the good reviews that are hosted on the same server as the one Matt Heaton uses for his blog! So what are the odds of this happening by accident? It is really interesting the bottom three all have the same theme “WebHosting-TopTen.com.” And the graphics and contents are very similar.
Go to http://serverstatus.bluehost.com/ and type in mattheaton.com
In the drop down directory under mattheaton.com, we find hostsafari.com (parked), hostboom.com, webhosting-topten.com, zaneheaton.com, zachheaton.com (inactive), and webhosthelpline.com. So mattheaton.com is the main domain name and the rest are addon domains in the same account.
So it looks like what we found here is a rating and review factory, right in the office of Matt Heaton to promote Bluehost and Hostmonster. The reviews are written as if they were created by an unbiased third party, but in reality they appear to be written by Heaton and associates. In the review areas, Bluehost or Hostmonster are both rated either #1 or #2, with a 5/5 or close to a 5/5 rating, showing positive stats of 97% to 100%. Business techniques like this border on false advertising and should be illegal. Such deceptive business practices are amoral and is one more reason to avoid Bluehost and Hostmonster like the plague.
Their uptime is extremely unreliable, email has many problems, and you cannot run any reasonable dynamic content without getting an exceeds cpu error. Plus promoting fake third party reviews, when in reality Heaton & staff generated them. Bluehost and Hostmonster are dishonest and unethical concerning many aspects of the way they conduct business. Matt from your own words, “When you stink you stink!!!”
Not to say that hosts don’t write their own reviews, or even that it isn’t the case here, but…
All hosts are home to host rating sites, since there are thousands of them out there. Their purpose is to make money, mostly off of hosts that have CJ programs. Some of them are even admittedly owned by hosts — that seem to like making affiliate money when they lose a sale to a competitor.
The reason many look similar in the “top 10″ appearance is because they’re generally ordered from highest affiliate payout to lowest–not by quality, (real) user reviews, etc…
So, you could make this same accusation towards every single host that has an affiliate program. The problem with that, is that it’s a good way to get sued for libel if you don’t have anything to back it up with.
If you wanna see just how low a crooked host will stoop, check out Lunarpages. It doesn’t get much lower than that.
I saw a link to this site on WHT and since BlueHost is my webhost I thought I should see what you had to say. While looking through this I noticed that all of the sites there are VERY outdated. Using the waybackmachine.org I did some snooping to find when the last time HostMonster.com offered 20GB of space and it was August 23rd of 06 – http://web.archive.org/web/20060823051742/http://www.hostmonster.com/index.html
Looks to me like an idea that was never really promoted as I can hardly find any of those sites linked to, indexed etc. which normally happens if you use PPC or other promotional methods. Interesting read though. I think I will email Mr. Heaton to see what he thinks about it all.
James,
I am glad you are going to email Matt Heaton about the content of hostboom.com being outdated. It bothered me as well. I just checked all other links in the article and they all seem to display current information.
I did a bit of looking around myself. And I found you have hostslide.com (this site really looks like crap in Opera), websiterates.com (very nice outdated info from 08/2004.), dollarjar.com, vontastic.us, vontastic.ca. hostslide.com and websiterates.com are registered by James Grierson of Grierson Affiliate Services. Next, I find a James Grierson VP of Business Development – BlueHost Inc. What a coincidence? It seems to be a very small world down in Oremville.
Does Praedo Properties sound familiar to you? Because I find a James Grierson at Praedo. When I look up praedohomes.com with netcraft it shows that the web hosting company is HostDime. For what ever the reason, I find it comical that you are using HostDime and NOT Bluehost. Headline news at six, “James Grierson, VP of Bluehost, uses HostDime and NOT Bluehost to host praedohomes.com.”
Have a good day,
Crazy Penguin
Matt Heaton on this topic at Web Hosting Talk forum.
The thread topic is, “Do You Think This is Ethical?”
Originally Posted by mheaton View Post
Oh really!
High prices of advertising force shared hosting providers to invest in their own web channels so they can reach targeted audience. Some web host like Bluehost, Lunarpages, HostGator create owned affiliate networks of websites that recommend their services, and provide coupons to prospective customers.
[...] someone for a client, and we don’t send staff in to make fake reviews on forums, or create fake sites telling everyone just how great we [...]
[...] HostMonster are put ahead of others in hosting reviews quite frequently. But as you can see from this post on inetintegrity, many of these review sites are hosted on BlueHost’s servers by some guy named Matthew [...]
FTR, Matthew Heaton is BlueHost’s CEO. His remarks strike me as very tacky.
I completely agree – the reviews about Hostmonster.com MUST be faked. The system performance sucks, the maximum I get out of them for a FTP upload is 8 Kbps – that is about twice as much as with a dial-up connection. Their first level of support is staffed with incompetent idiots and does not have any clue about what they are doing. The availability is terrible as well. A six hour ping to their gateway showed only 5 packages lost, the server running the web services behind that had 300+ packages lost, try yourself and run only a constant ping to the one of the there hosted machines. Even if the server is pingable, it does not mean that you would be able to retrieve information from your website – the apache server is constantly (about every 54-10 minutes) rebooting because of a “user signal 1″ – which is a user defined signal – most likely their “overload protection”.
This company stinks big time, and I will get in contact with the BBB to complain and will move on to another provider.
The only positive thing I have to say is that their first level support was decently responsive (within a day).
Thomas
(R_3 a t gmx.net)
To Whom It May Concern:
Please tell this side of the story regarding Bluehost. If you use too much storage space and too much bandwidth they close your account. Matt Heaton is not ethical.
My account is being deactivated due to a Terms of Service violation. Heather in the abuse department informed that you do not allow copyrighted material to be displayed on your hosting site. Matt Silbert from Nimbit recommended that I use your Hosting site. Nimbit is an affiliate of yours and has sent many customers to Bluehost. All of these contain music and remain hosted by Bluehost.
I am the owner and publishing administrator of a catalog of music registered with ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. I have a contract with every writer in my library and have the legal right to administer every composition. I am willing to sign a waiver if that is something that will keep my site on Bluehost. It took me three weeks to upload all of my music (at a very sizable cost). When I registered with Bluehost I informed the individual with whom I spoke that I had a music publishing business and needed a lot of space to host my music library. I also asked if it would be possible to send a hard drive with my music library on it to Bluehost in order for it to be uploaded. My intentions were clear.
I have a legitimate business. I am a music publisher and have been so for over twenty years. My business is registered with the Secretary of State in North Carolina (Editors Choice Music, LLC).
Please inform me what I can do to assure the fine people at Bluehost that my business is legitimate and that I have the legal right to administer all the music that is currently on your hosting site. I am willing to provide copies of contracts, get letters from ASCAP, BMI and SESAC (performing rights organizations that represent copyrighted material), and sign a letter that indemnifies Bluehost.
Thanking you in advance for your prompt attention to this matter.
Gary Fitzgerald
Editors Choice Music Library
6015 Fordland Drive
Raleigh, NC 27606
Tel: 919-803-3678/919-803-3679
cell: 718-446-3857
http://www.editorschoicemusic.com
[...] this out at first, I wouldn’t be complaining. In the meantime, a little research told me that I was not alone in my experience. Piss-poor customer service seem to be par for the course with this [...]
I don’t know much about Bluehost, but any time I see “unlimited bandwidth” I RUN. Gary’s experience doesn’t surprise me.
“Unlimited”? What is that supposed to even mean?
I’m a bit baffled by the HostGator phenomenon as well. I do have friends who seem genuinely pleased with them, but I canceled in under a month – now that was nearly 2 years ago, so maybe they’ve changed.
I had a similar rude awakening. First, I have to agree with their deceptive advertising: They say “voted best” but they never say who voted them best. Now you’d think that if it was legitimate, they’d say who, right?
So my big beef – and everybody should be aware of this – is because they shut me down too, with no notice, just like that. I went online and there was an email from them that I’d been shut down, and lo! and behold my whole website was gone! And I too am a legitimate business, educational software, and have been using them for almost 4 years now. I have no porn, no smut, no foul language, nothing immoral or unethical; every photo and every audio file was either created by me or has appropriate attribution. And they were going through my files and “decided” on their own that some of them were not related to my website! And just shut me down! They handed me over to the “abuse” department when I phoned, which is really nice and made me feel really great. Along with the porn and other abusers.
I explained that they have an administrative process that is inappropriate, that I would like to talk to somebody about that, and asked whom to speak to. The guy didn’t want to give me any contact info for administrators. I suggested that they should at least, if they think there is a problem like storing files unrelated to the website, send an email and request contact within 48 hours. But no, he didn’t even want to hear that. All the guy kept saying was “YOU VIOLATED THE TERMS OF USE”.
So I say clearly that if you are dependent on your website for your business, do NOT absolutely do NOT get fooled by their low rates because in the end they can really screw you and your business and have no moral compunction against it or even good business sense that it is not a good way to treat long-term and loyal customers.
It sounds like you’re creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in the first place
I can’t change the lack of ethics Bluehost / Hostmonster choose to use in their marketing tactics. If that is not a problem to you so be it, however such deceptive methods are not acceptable to me.
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/webhosting-topten.com
Ahem, so let me get this straight? BH does not own any one these sites but the registrar of “webhosting-topten.com” IS Bluehost? Does that mean they concealed the actual owner because of their so-called “BlueHost Privacy” service or they are the actual owners? Why is “Matt” not clearing this up? Why all the anger?
I don’t have a web site at all at the moment, so if someone is using “BlueHost Privacy” could you check if the wording “BlueHost Privacy” is added to your whois record or not? Would be interesting to know.
Btw: I’m glad I found this page before I thought of signing up with BH, and I’m glad I found Matt’s blog, and saw he was a “missionary” once. And BH is registered in Provo, Utah. Go figure. I’m in Kiev, Ukraine, and I often see these little “missionaries” walking around in their suits. I hate to say this: But if you’re so brainwashed to think your religion is the only “true one”, it’s easy to lie to others and not be bothered about it. If there’s something I don’t like it’s mixing business with religion. Only a mess can come of it.
i signed up with bluehost and was suspended 12 hours later, with no email to me to question any problem, they just hind behind there terms of there contract, the problem was they put the wrong country code to my mobile #! after a lot of stress and 2 days chasing my tail around they said,
Your account has been re-activated. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. We want to protect your security.
what kind of confidence do i have with a company that treats its new customers this way, GREED its no wonder there had to be a world financial crises with companies like blue host . com around
now i just email them everyday asking questions about there terms, keeps them busy and me satisfied, im sure they will suspend me again but im taking a stand and going to bother them till the end of time. lol