Experiences with BlueHost Reseller plan? This is what I talked with them yesterday

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Posted by Surferride, 03-13-2014, 04:59 AM
Hi community, I had a 1 hour chat with a BlueHost representative because I am seriously considering their basic Reseller plan. Some people also recommend A2Hosting and Inmotion but I am not sure about them really. I am currently using Dreamhost for most of my stuff but I really hate them since they moved me to another server (I don't know why) and then all my sites started to fail and of course I started to receive a lot of cr@p about having to upgrade to a VPS in a very pushy way. I didn't like either how they decide to put down a site before giving me the chance to correct any errors or problems it may have. So, with the idea to share with the community what I discuss last night: March 12, 2014, I will describe here what I discussed with them. I would like to know what has been your real experience with them till now. All the main questions are basically referred to the basic Reselling package: https://my.bluehost.com/hosting/help/pricing-reseller - The general concept they confirmed is that reselling would basically mean that you would be reselling their Shared Service type but under your own panel & control with the bandwidth and storage restrictions. Limits: - They told me the 15 Mbps limit is per each CPanel account I would create and not for the Master Reseller account. - They also commented that there is a 100 concurrent connections CAP per each CPanel account. Although the cap exists they told me they will allow particular peaks. Also these limit apply for all the rest of the Reseller plans if you need more simultaneous connections you need to go for a VPS which the basic plan gives you 1500 concurrent connections and each better VPS plan adds 500 more to this. - Backups: They will make daily, weekly and monthly backups of my Reseller account, but this would not include my own CPanel accounts I create. But they will offer the tools for me to schedule full backups of each Cpanel account. I can back them up to my own reseller main account space but to be able to recover on a file by file basis I will need to hire the Backup Pro service that prices an additional USD 20 per year so its not so bad. I guess? They support Cronjobs too and support can help you set them up. - The 100 GB storage on the basic plan is for all the reseller account and all the CPanel accounts created (overall storage). They don't offer additional storage, if you need more, you need to jump to the next plan. - When I asked about their servers specs, they told me they are the following and they have around 1500 shared hosted accounts per server or 500 reseller accounts on each of them. They also clarified: There is no dedicated RAM per hosting account or per domain.: The server specs are as follows : 8x AMDOpteron-627416Core(Processor) 1x SuperMicroAS-2122TG-HTRF(Chassis,Motherboard,Heatsinks) 16x 8 GB DDR3-1600 ECC / REG (Memory) 12x Western Digital Velociraptor- WD1500BLFS (Hard Drives) 8x OCZDanevaII's240GB(SSDDrives) 4x LSI9285-8eor9280-8edependingonavailability(SataController) 4x LSIBBU09(ControllerBattery) Email: - Antispam: They offer 2 free anti spam tools: Spam Hammer and Spam Assassin and a third one called: SpamExperts for 2.5 USD per domain. - SMTP: They have a 750 emails per hour per Cpanel account restriction. Email forwarding is not considered a sent email and these type of emails are being sent through different servers. - Webmail Interface: Although they offer Horde and Squirrel, they also offer RoundCube. I didnt have experience with RoundCube but for what Ive checked online it looks nice. The others are like from the 80's, I don't know why they still exist. Support: - The guy said they have 24/7 email, phone and chat support. - All their representatives know a lot about Wordpress and they will give advice and support on Optimizing Wordpress sites and scripting. - You will receive a warning if the sites start having too many connections (over 100) so you can plan accordingly. - When I mentioned I didn't like Dreamhost's policy that they force you to update to a VPS all the time he answered: "support will do everything they can to find an issue before forcing you to upgrade. We're not shady like some others. " Billing Software: - They offer a fully automatized billing platform so my customers will get the reminders, payment platforms, etc. General other questions: - You have full power with WHM, which is the master control panel. This was the answer when I asked if I was going to be able to manage all my sub CPanel accounts in a centralized way. - They have monthly or 12 month plans, not 24 or 36 to get better prices. - If you hire anual and you want to cancel during the first 30 days they give you a full refund. If you want to cancel afterwards they will give you a prorated refund. - You can cancel anytime, no questions asked. No early cancellation fees. - I commented that I would use XCloner for my full Wordpress backups and I needed this to work properly, he said this would work without problems. - All servers are located in USA only. No plans to expand to Europe. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- As you can see I bombarded the representative "Lou B." with a lot of questions, what I liked is that although it took more than an hour the guy kept calm and clarified everything pretty clearly. I liked that. But something like this already happened with JaguarPC and then the experience was very bad with a full week downtime on all my sites. In real life how does the 100 connections limit really affects you? So, before taking the decision I would be very happy to see what others have to say about their service in general, the recent support experiences and so on. Thank you all very much!
Posted by Forward Web, 03-13-2014, 05:46 AM
Most of what they offer is fairly standard, have you had any history with blue-host prior to this?
Posted by Surferride, 03-13-2014, 05:55 AM
Hi there, no history at all with BlueHost yet.
Posted by Forward Web, 03-13-2014, 05:57 AM
What are your plans for the reseller account? are you planning to start your own business? have you ever used shared web hosting before?
Posted by Surferride, 03-13-2014, 07:19 AM
Yes, I have experience with them but always managed it manually. I dont plan to do anything massive, just specific things for particular customers I kept over time. Hosting is not my core business but an added value one. Also I will use the reseller plan to create sub accounts for each of my blogs so I can have the best possible performance in the lines of a shared hosting provider for my Wordpress sites. Then if I need more I can always update to a VPS.
Posted by Surferride, 03-13-2014, 08:11 AM
UPDATE: I asked them over Twitter if I would be able to move to another CPanel based hosting because I read that after all the mods they made to Cpanel you couldn't do it. These are the Tweets they responded: We have made many of our own custom changes to cpanel, but none of which would change the ability to switch to another cpanel host. When moving between cpanel hosts, using the cpanel backups the biggest issue is always the same, can you get the same username. It's when the same username you had on the previous host cannot be obtained at the new host is when a cpanel move can get tricky. IMPORTANT UPDATE: I asked over chat and Twitter again (the same thing I asked yesterday) because it smelled fishy. If the 15 Mbps speed on the reseller plan was for each CPanel account I would create or if it would be for the whole reseller account. - Yesterday they told me it was for each CPanel account. (over Twitter and Chat) - Today over Twitter and two different persons over chat told me its for the whole Reseller account. I started not to like this company, yesterday I was very happy feeling to buy, today I feel like pulling back because of this misleading information. If they don't even know their own stuff, how would I expect them to properly help me?
Posted by DWS2006, 03-13-2014, 08:22 AM
If you search WHT for "BlueHost Review" I'm sure you'll notice a common theme. There are much better providers out there that will provide a faster and more reliable service without the headaches.
Posted by Kingfish85, 03-13-2014, 08:26 AM
Sounds about right - ask each day & I bet you'll get different answers. Regarding the backups, if I'm not mistaken you can edit the URL to allow access to the cPanel backup utility. It's been a while since I've been in one of their accounts - can't remember if it's BH or DH that I'm thinking of. Edit the URL right after the theme name (most of the time it's X3) and put this: backup/fullbackup.html OR backup/index.html Of course, unless you're actually using them, the URL's are irrelevant. They might help someone else though.
Posted by Surferride, 03-13-2014, 09:22 AM
Thanks for your comments, I am reading a lot of things about a lot of providers. Site 5 Seems to be good, any experiences ? I will read on them but I like the idea of being able to choose the server where my stuff is going to be, it allows me to choose good speeds and low latency.
Posted by WPCYCLE, 03-13-2014, 11:46 AM
Bluehost customized their cpanel and disabled cpanel backups about 2 years ago. I don't believe those links would work anymore, but it doesn't hurt to try.
Posted by Kingfish85, 03-13-2014, 11:57 AM
I'm pretty sure the function itself still works. Even though the icons from cPanel have been removed, it's possible it wasn't completely disabled on all servers. There's a handful of hosts (mainly EIG) that remove the icon, but not the actual feature. There's also a handful that completely disable the feature completely.
Posted by WPCYCLE, 03-13-2014, 12:28 PM
I agree and as you said, some just hid the icons, and some disabled it. When I had to transfer some customers from Bluehost, at the time it was completely disabled (panel, whm backup = extremely slow time outs, ssh, etc). I personally saw it as a hostage attempt since most customers are not tech savvy and would rely on those icons. This allowed Bluehost and others to setup other "backup" icons where you had the option of either downloading your site directly to your computer, or paying another "company" $400 to backup and move your site. Vdeck hosts, pretty much the same. It's a double-edge sword. It takes and gives the power to the customer. They can't freely backup...but it also stops everyone from running backups at any given time. I could only imagine after their usual outages and a few hundred people wanting to leave and running backups all at once.