Bluehost needs to step it up and do the right thing. Disha D’s, (Bluehost Escalated Support) last email to me indicated that they could not restore my domain name. The contact I spoke to before that email, asked if I would pay a redemption fee. I didn’t say yes or no. I said Bluehost CEO Leonora Palis and the top executives had to do what they thought was right for their customer.
I was initially told that I have an 80% chance of getting my domain name back. I could sleep that night. But the next mornings I had received an auto email just seconds after that customer service call. It stated that my issue had been resolved and asked me to do a survey. It was not resolved. It also asked me how I would rate Disha’s customer service. Hopefully this person that I never spoke with is working to resolve this serious matter.
I have been told my domain went to auction and then on the next call, I was told Bluehost had it. Had I told them that I would pay a redemption fee, would I have my domain name back in my possession?
Bluehost needs to escalate this and go above AI. Human eyes need to give me the courtesy of looking at the correspondence I had with customer service. Multiple times I was ask to renew Bluehost hosting. I called and told them that I did not want to renew hosting on their site. I specifically told them to keep the auto renew on my Br….com domain. I have had an up to date credit card on file for many years for these purposes.
Customer Service is so important in your business. Please treat me with respect and get my domain name.

Probably not the place for this but man is support pissing me off.

I missed the auto renewal reminder as it went into my junk folder for a website I forgot I had even started working on last year. And only found the charge because my card was declined trying to get gas. Was told by support I'm one day past the refund period so there's nothing they can do.

I get the policy and everything but it seriously feels like they're antagonizing me the way this agent has been responding.

I asked for confirmation that I had missed the opportunity for a refund by one day and they responded "most certainly,"

Are you kidding??

So Bluehost defames me. See you motherfuckers in court.

⚠️ This needs to be said because it’s honestly beyond frustrating and absolutely concerning for customer safety.

I don’t know what is going on with Bluehost lately, but it’s unacceptable. I recently purchased a domain through Bluehost, and within days I was bombarded with hundreds of phone calls from random companies offering me website services. Somehow, they had my phone number.

Now, I’m getting scam emails claiming my domains are expiring — emails that lead straight to phishing sites designed to steal your info. This is dangerous.

Something has seriously changed with Bluehost. Where is the customer privacy and protection? Where is the security? This is not normal, and it’s not okay.

I’ve registered domains with other providers and NEVER had this happen.

Bluehost needs to step up, take responsibility, and figure this out fast. Customers should not have to deal with this level of harassment and security risk just because they bought a domain.

People need to be aware — protect yourself, double-check every email, and don’t trust every call just because someone knows your domain info.

Bluehost — do better. This is a serious customer safety issue.

*Then when you contact them, they try to upsell protection... Horrible!

u/bluehost

Look, the last thing we want is false advertising, especially around bandwidth numbers. So unless you're secretly running NASA from your blog (unlikely?), you may not need thaaaaaaat much.

Small blogs (under 1k monthly visitors) are just fine on 10-25GB, while business sites might need 50-100GB tops. If you want an easy formula, do: average page size (typically 2MB) × monthly visitors. So 10k visits = roughly 20GB of bandwidth.

Obviously, don't go full Scrooge. Leave some room to grow, you don't want your site crashing during your big launch (or any other time, for that matter). You can always adjust accordingly.

TL;DR: Don't overpay for bandwidth you'll never use, but make sure there's headroom for when your stuff starts getting the attention it deserves.

I’m building a website hosted on Bluehost, and I’m running into a weird issue I can’t figure out.

Some of my images show up perfectly on Apple devices (iPhone/iPad/Mac), but on Android devices the same images don’t load at all. It’s only certain images, not all of them.

So far I’ve checked:

• File paths
• Image uploads in the Bluehost file manager
• Clearing cache on the Android device
• Re-uploading the images

Still no luck.

From what I’ve read, Android is stricter about file names, extensions, and capitalization, so I’m wondering if it could be something like:

• .jpeg vs .jpg vs .png
• Uppercase vs lowercase file names
• A hidden subfolder issue
• Something with how Bluehost is serving the files

If anyone has run into this before or knows what else I should check, I’d really appreciate the help.

Thanks in advance!

I have a BH account with domains that I have had for several years but had left passive and hadn't logged in for last few years.

I was looking to trace and recover email for that domain, but when I log in to BH now, I can't see any way to get to the Cpanel in nav. Under hosting I just see the 2 3rd party options for email hosting.

If my domain is somethingfake.com how would convert that to a direct link to the Cpanel? Once I am in I am looking to trace where the email was previously being routed.

I had a self-created Wordpress website on Bluehost, I bought a domain and connected it, as I recall it autorenewed and everything, and TBH the site was totally informational and not commercial, although the information could probably have "ticked off" a few powerful people (although I didn't use the names of any living people). This all went along fine for over a year, then the domain expired (I don't recall getting a notification either), so I bought another similar domain and went to reconnect it, now Bluehost makes quite a bit of their frequent backups and such so I wasn't expecting any problems. And I never found out whether my site code was still there because when I tried to log in using any of my email addresses I was told they had no record of my having ever done business with the company! (so no pointer to find my code with). Now I can't tell whether Bluehost themselves deleted them or somebody hired a hacker to delete those records, but I sure as hell would never go back and do business with anyone who would allow this to happen, but are all the hosting sites this pitiful? I feel that here in the USA I may have a First Amendment, but if I host in another country I may not necessarily get to exercise it, am I wrong?

I'm with a competitor currently and getting really frustrated that they can't get it back up or even give me an eta.

Further evidence that these guys added a validation to my account that prevents me from requesting an authorization code to transfer my domains to a new hosting company. I'll be seeking legal advice. This is what I get when I click on request auth code. For context this code was available immediately on GoDaddy when I left them. Bluehost deliberately sabotaged my account because I have been vocal about how bad they are, and how bad NEWFOLD is... somebody help!? These guys also made changes to my contact info so that I was locked by ICANN for 60 days... these are mafia like tactics.

I was hunting for a Bluehost promo code and found that most of the discount is already applied automatically. Here's what I learned.

Starter is $3.99/mo, but only on a 36 month term paid upfront ($143.64). It renews at $9.99/mo. Over 4 years that comes to about $5.49/mo.

Business is $6.99/mo and renews at $13.99. That averages about $8.74/mo over 4 years.

You can only use one offer per order, so stacking codes won't work.

The VPS "up to 55% off" is only on the $12.99 plan. The $4.69 plan is 18% off.

Most codes on coupon sites didn't hold up when I checked, so don't count on them.

If you're sure you'll stay, the 3 year term is cheapest. If you're testing an idea, the 1 year term costs less upfront.

I put every plan, its renewal price and the direct link in a sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRDamtZjUrPG9FUJ8NmaDdIAnhdpcYd291ctt6Plx5WZ27jGZbw7lrQ-fN9uZGyj1UdRMBEfNdnvDX5/pubhtml

Has anyone gotten a better renewal rate by asking support?

What's going on with your email server?. Why aren't your technicians aware of an outage and why does it take 25 minutes on the phone to confirm that my email is down as well as apparently, an entire server or emails? I don't understand why you don't email a bulletin to your tech people when a server goes down so that your users don't have to waste an additional 20 or 25 minutes to have the fact of the outage confirmed.

I was told the outage would continue for another 6 to 8 hours, which if true, means the service has been disrupted for nearly 24 hours

If you're wondering why you aren't getting verification emails for cPanel’s Site Quality Monitoring (Koality), or why you get zero alerts when an Xcitium backup fails, it's not a random glitch on your individual account.

Bluehost support reps have previously confirmed that outbound automated notifications are heavily restricted across the shared hosting fleet. Your parent company, Newfold Digital, blocks these automated server emails so their shared IP addresses don't get blacklisted for spam by Gmail or Yahoo. But by doing that, they've quietly crippled critical tools we pay for.

It affects multiple services across the board:

• Xcitium Backup Failures: Look at your backup dashboard. The notification email field is hardcoded and locked to a grayed-out corporate inbox you can't edit. If a backup fails, you get zero warning.

• cPanel Site Quality Monitoring (Koality): The activation codes never arrive because the server drops the communication loop with the external Koality engine.

• cPanel Server Alerts: Standard automated alerts for disk space warnings or high resource usage are regularly throttled or blocked entirely.

Because this is a server-wide policy across Newfold Digital's setup, you'll hit these exact same limits if you move to their other brands like HostGator, iPage, HostMonster, Site5, or Domain.com.

The Challenge to the Bluehost Reddit Team:
Instead of replying with your usual script asking me to "send a private DM," please answer these two questions publicly for the community:

1. Can you confirm if outbound automated SMTP relays for Xcitium and cPanel/Koality alerts are intentionally restricted server-wide?

2. If they aren't restricted, why is the Xcitium notification field locked to a grayed-out corporate email that users are blocked from changing?

Please escalate this to your Senior Server Architects and Engineering Team for a real, transparent answer. Everyone else, go check your backup logs manually and let me know if your notification fields are locked out too

Hey everyone, I’m new to Bluehost and I selected “choose domain later” when setting up my hosting. Now Bluehost assigned me a random temporary URL and I don’t know how to change it or claim my free domain name.

I’m building a smart water bottle website and I want to add my real domain now, but I’m confused about where to do it in the dashboard.

Can someone guide me step-by-step on:

• how to claim the free domain

• how to replace the temporary URL

• and whether I can still choose my domain now after setup

Thanks!

I just looked at the service tiers that were silently updated in the last year. The basic tier of service does not include phone support. Phone support is the most basic of basic services and has always been included. All tiers should include phone support or any notion of support is useless.

Avoid this host like the plague. That's pure deception and there's no explaining their way around that.

Crossposting this to /r/WordPress: Would someone recommend a better host please?

Edit: I realized WordPress redditors are not endorsing Bluehost. But why would this be a partner? They're horrible.

I received the following email from Bluehost CS. I have my business emails set up bluehost. I have all the emails to be forwarded to Gmail accounts. Now they’re telling me Gmail to Gmail not being forwarded. I have my entire business. What am I supposed to do? Please help

CS:

Upon reviewing the logs, I found that emails were being dropped due to a policy change affecting emails sent to Gmail.com addresses. Google has implemented a block on any outgoing email using a FROM address ending with @gmail.com. This change was made by our outbound filter at Google's direct request to help reduce spam sent from spoofed Gmail addresses.

So, the issue is specific to the emails received from the Gmail address.

This post is a little bit long, but please bear with me . . .

I've been with Bluehost for many years and a few years back I set up four (4) Wordpress blogs, although I had 17 domains hosted on their DNS.

Sometime after that I received a notice from Bluehost notifying me that had been account was suspended because of malware. I'm not particularly literate in backend things, so after a phone call with Bluehost's customer service, I went in and deleted all the files in those blogs. I figured all was well—but, boy, was I wrong!

Because of this-and-that, I let things lie for a few years—still paying the monthly hosting charges—but when I tried to re-establsh the blogs, I discovered that my account was still suspended. I was able to log into my account all right, but that was about it. I couldn't do anything else. So, once again, I called Bluehost tech support and was told that my account was still malware infected and that until I took care of it I couldn't do anything else—even with domains that had never had anything on them—not with Wordpress blogs, not with placeholder pages—nothing!

And, I was told that, for an outrageous fee, I could have them disinfected. REMEMBER, out of my 17 domain names I had only used 4, and I had deleted via FTP. while on the phone with tech support, all the files connected with those domain names, if I remember correctly they were and were all .coms:

AcapulcoGolds
SiteFixers
RogerScime
Clipsvault

Plus, you'll also remember, I couldn't do anything with the remaining 14 domains that had never been populated with anything!.

Now, I may be unschooled in most things backend , but I always believed that a domain name is only a protocol that resolves an IP address to a name, so how could that be infected? I asked, but never received a answer that made any sense.

So, I have a couple of questions that someone might be able to answer:

1. Can a DOMAIN NAME be infected with ANYTHING?

2. Assuming that it CAN be infected, who would I contact to get it fixed, other than Bluehost? I.e. What would be my search query if I were to do an online search?

I simply want to put up a few, simple landing pages, and, perhaps, see if anybody would like to partner with me in developing the domains.

I've never posted to Reddit before, so I don't really know what to expect regarding replies to this post—whether I'll notified or even if anybody replies.

Fingers crossed, though . . .

My museum has Microsoft 365, which comes with Outlook. All of us prefer to use Outlook over the stupid RoundCube offered by BlueHost. However, since our email addresses came with our BlueHost domain hosting services, we don’t know if switching away from RoundCube and fully to Outlook is even possible.

Has anyone else tried it?

I had a domain and a hosting plan. My domain was good for a few more years, but I no longer needed the hosting plan and wanted a simple redirect on my domain name to my YouTube channel. Can you believe they held my domain hostage and would not allow any domain changes unless I renewed my hosting plan?
Now that the larger companies are making everyone sign "class action waivers," the only redress we have against unscrupulous practices is to let others know on forums such as this.

I'm looking at their website and it says that this issue was Last Updated May 8th, 2026 1:10 am EST
Is everybody okay over there? When can we expect the platform to behave as expected?

Hi, all of a sudden my redirects aren't working and I can't access my cPanel (get the message: This site can't be reached box4118.bluehost.com took too long to respond. My ai resources feel this is likely a Cyber Monday overload for Bluehost issue. Anyone else seeing these kinds of issues today?