On Thursday, September 25th, at around 2:25PM Pacific Standard Time, our web host, Bluehost, pulled the plug on Blender Underground without word or warning. What followed was a cold, impersonal, auto-generated email message:
Your web hosting account [...] has been deactivated (reason: site causing performance problems).
Although your web site has been disabled, your data may still be available for up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted.
This website was shut down summarily and without warning, and I was given 15 days to retrieve my data. Actually, I was not able to access my data at all — my email and cPanel access was also revoked. Had I not been working from a Gmail address, I would not have received any notification whatsoever, nor would I have been able to email Bluehost technical support for a resolution.
The problem is not even with Blender Underground, it’s with Bluehost. This site has no script issues and no configuration issues.
I posted a plea with Bluehost CEO Matt Heaton at his blog on Friday morning, but it’s stuck in the moderation queue. I’ll post a longer and more detailed account of my support experience early next week. The short version is, Bluehost support has labeled Blender Underground’s video tutorials as resource-heavy, and I was forced to either take them down or find some other solution to ease their server load problem before the site would be put back up.
For the time being the video tutorials can be accessed with a username and password combination.
user: theman
password: hasfoundus
This means that all external links to these video tutorials will essentially be broken.
This is Apollos, signing off — trying to break free from the gnarled claw of The Man. See you next time.
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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Web Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Fight it!
September 28th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Hey if you’d like some space i’ve got unlimited space/bandwidth with my host, not sure if the speeds can match yours but i can help host anything you need at the very least give a second link to help out with the server load issues.
September 29th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
teagus, who’s your host?
Perhaps you can email me, apollos@.
September 29th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
That is absolutely disgusting behaviour!
October 1st, 2008 at 11:15 am
Hi Dave!!!
Yeah it’s pretty outrageous really. I try not to expect too too much from a cheap shared hosting situation, but pulling the plug without warning was not only uncalled for, it was apathetic on the part of Bluehost.
Hope all is well brother.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:04 am
[...] first, I wouldn’t be complaining. In the meantime, a little research told me that I was not alone in my experience. Piss-poor customer service seem to be part for the course with this [...]
December 29th, 2008 at 10:01 am
[...] first, I wouldn’t be complaining. In the meantime, a little research told me that I was not alone in my experience. Piss-poor customer service seem to be par for the course with this [...]
December 30th, 2008 at 5:59 am
[...] first, I wouldn’t be complaining. In the meantime, a little research told me that I was not alone in my experience. Piss-poor customer service seem to be par for the course with this [...]
December 30th, 2008 at 5:59 am