For over 20 years, I have hosted various web sites and email addresses with Bluehost. On Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 9:25AM EST my sites and emails Bluehost was serving stopped working all at once. I ended up calling support three time. This is what I was told:
- Thursday morning: The DNS and MX relays were being repointed. It would be finished in 8 hours.
- Nine hours later: They know nothing about the DNS and MX relays, but the server my domains were on had crashed, and would take up to two hours to repairs.
- Friday morning: I am told I had not renewed my hosting. I told them it was set to automatic and had been renewed automatically for over a decade. They had just used my credit card on file to renew a domain in November, so they have valid payment info. I am told they have no way to check this. They turned off my hosts and deleted all content: all web sites, and all @hyliston.net email — all less than 24 hours after payment “not going through”. I have been told they have no way to restore it.
It is a bizarre business practice to suspend all web and email hosting and then immediately, permanently delete all content.
So, anyway, I’m not with Bluehost anymore, and I would tell anyone to stay away from them. I did have all email backups, and have restored my last year of email.
I have some geocaching blog backups. As time permits, I’ll try and add them back. My backups are old and won’t import due to data object changes, so it’ll be a completely manual thing. At some point I may decide it’s not worth it. It’s frustrating.
So sorry to hear of your woes with Bluehost. I have used the Geoart for a couple of years now.
I have to fix the pages for my mystery caches first, but the geoart page is next on my list to repair. It gets a decent amount of traffic.