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.
Hi there, sad to hear about your website hosting problems. Is there any way I can get a copy of your Goat Gadget cache that you made for the Mega event? I would like to recreate it for a local event in Canada, full credit would be given to you of course.
Thanks for your help
Hi. Sorry to hear this, I have made couple of your caches. Actually purchased parts and modelled and 3D printed mechanics for the memory game (with screens and those cache symbols). But did not save code or schematics… Do you still have those in any form, would love to finish the cache. Love your page, given me a hobby to learn things.
Since you asked, let me see if I can get that page restored. Might take a week or so.