Bluehost Web Hosting – The Real Review

Update, 3 May 2016: Bluehost emailed me a survey question asking whether I would recommend the Bluehost web hosting service? I ticked 0 out of 10, extremely unlikely. The next question is why? Here’s my answer, “You are not helpful when my site was attacked by malware. You horde all my data and demanded money to clean up the malware. You threaten to delete my data within 10 days if nothing was done. Now my data is all gone. Just look at the number of years I have been with you. Those are the years of data and blogs accumulated. I cannot trust a company who does not give a damn to clients.”

Please DO NOT use Bluehost! They haven’t compensated me for the lost data yet!

FYI. There WAS a backup, but Bluehost refused to use it, saying that the malware is highly likely to be in the backup too. 

Please share this real review. There are just too many fake reviews out there on how good Bluehost is. 

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My WordPress site on Bluehost Pro Hosting is slowing down, based on google speed test.  I am told this will affect traffic and search ranking.

While trying various plugins that promise to speed things up, I chanced upon a free “Cloudflare” offer within Bluehost that will solve my problem.

CloudFlare has everything to speed up my website and uses a content delivery network (CDN). They say it’s easy to set up, and so I activated it.

LUCKILY… it’s easy until it instructed me to change my site nameservers before Cloudflare could work. This got me wondering.

I thought I did not have to do anything else? Does directing my DNS (Domain Name Servers) away from Bluehost mean anything? It’s free and there is an option to choose a paid package with more features, which means, is there a catch? Will they pester me later to upgrade? Does it work as it says and has anyone tried it?

Most reviews I found were positive, until…

• Can I use Cloudflare without changing nameservers? Nope, must change nameservers to work.
• Can I switch back to the original nameservers if I decide not to use Cloudflare?  Yes.  Follow this procedure, and note that it will take about 24 hours to take effect.
• Is it worth to switch the DNS to Cloudlfare? Who else did it with honest reviews? Read the comments here and all my doubts are cleared. Post saving error.  IP not trusted and blocked in some places.  Site sometimes go offline. Most disturbing of all… Bluehost (where our hosting money goes) does not support any Cloudflare issues and will just point back to Cloudflare customer service.

Research complete. Not going to change nameservers. Not going to use Cloudflare. Sorry Cloudflare.

Let’s use other methods to speed up WordPress. Most recommended method is to use this plugin called W3 Total Cache.

Please share your thoughts if you have used Cloudflare.