Home For Fiction – Blog

If you missed the “new beginning” post, I recently decided to shake things up regarding Home for Fiction. By the way, this was a few months after I had already taken control of my own site, reprogramming it from scratch (on top of WordPress, of course) and getting rid of all the useless stuff. And a few days ago, I was finally able to say, Goodbye Bluehost and if I ever see you again it will be a million years too soon.

You see, after programming my own theme and moving the site away from Bluehost’s shared servers to my own virtual private server, where I have full and total control, there was still one thing left: move the homeforfiction.com domain registration away from Bluehost.

The utterly appalling overall experience inspired me to write this post. You can consider it a review coming after I spent almost eight years with that bottomless pit of deception and predatory policies. Considering the fact that Bluehost – and its super-aggressive marketing – is what attracts most newcomers to it, if I manage to contribute to even one person’s informed decision, that’d be a huge win.

Some Basics before Goodbye: Bluehost? What the Hell Is that?

If you are reading this post simply for the laughs, having no idea what Bluehost is, first of all, you’re lucky. Secondly, here’s the very short version:

Bluehost is a hosting company. As I mentioned earlier, they are extremely aggressive in their marketing, which means that a significant percentage of people just starting with web hosting opt for Bluehost because it’s cheap – that’s what I did, too.

They also make sure to tell you that you don’t need to worry about how complicated web hosting is because they have the solution. If that sounds like something from The Goodfellas, you might be on to something.

Eight Years a Slave a Bluehost “Customer”

As probably most other victims out there, I started with Bluehost because of the cheap price. But just like drug traffickers who offer you discounts to get you hooked before they raise prices, after the first year (it might have been two, I don’t recall), the price went up.

Alright, fair enough. This likely happens with other companies as well. Still, the equivalent product – domain and hosting on a shared server – elsewhere is far cheaper. As I calculated the year before saying my gleeful goodbye to Bluehost, the absolute cheapest way to maintain Home for Fiction with them would cost about $150 per year (for domain plus hosting).

Wanna know the equivalent price on my current provider? About $35. In fact, I pay a bit more because I don’t want a shared server but a VPS – as I said, I wanted full control. So I pay about $45 per year for domain and hosting.

Still, the price wasn’t the only issue. Deception, lies, and predatory practices were the real problem.

Lying to Customers to Sell them Stuff

Domain owners in many places – including the United States – need to pay extra to have something called “domain privacy”. This basically means that, without it, anyone can find out your address, phone number, etc. by simply going on a web page and looking for it.

There are exceptions to this rule, and one of them is for European Union citizens. If you go to this whois page of Home for Fiction, you will see that the only details publicly available are the country (Finland) and region (Pirkanmaa). This is equivalent to something like “United States, California”.

Bluehost happily kept pushing extra surcharge for “domain privacy”, making me believe that I needed it. But let’s assume I ought to have been more vigilant – supposedly I was a customer, but let’s assume.

Why, then, after I stopped paying for this, was I met with constant full-page warnings every time I logged in, warning me my private information was exposed and I needed to buy “domain privacy”? Is that not Bluehost literally lying to its customers?

Scaring Customers to Keep Them in Line

Fearmongering is pretty disgusting and predatory as a corporate strategy (what isn’t, you’ll ask). In a way, it’s a particular form of lying, as I showed in the example above, where the customer is made to believe something awful will happen if they don’t buy a service. But what also infuriated me and led to “Goodbye, Bluehost; sod off” was that they kept lying and making misleading claims just to keep you as a customer.

When you go to the settings for your website domain to initiate a domain transfer, you are met with multiple, dire warnings: Your website will be inaccessible, you will miss important emails, blah blah blah, fire and brimstone and people waking up from capitalist comas.

In reality, transferring a domain in itself has nothing to do with any of this if you have already set up the DNS records. There’s no need to get into technical details here, but if you have already entered a couple of numbers in a box on your new registrar’s dashboard, no downtime will occur.

The Endless Push for More Products

Every time you chat with Bluehost customer support, you will invariably be asked to consider buying something. That’s clearly a company strategy, and every poor devil working as customer support needs to abide by the script.

The apotheosis of ridiculousness came at the very end, when I had already initiated the domain transfer away from Bluehost. I didn’t want to wait for a week for the process to be approved, so I contacted customer support and asked them to manually approve it.

As a very first thing, they asked me to reconsider my decision, telling me they’d be happy to help with any issues so that I could remain a Bluehost customer. There was a hilarious meta- quality there, as the very reason I wanted to say a pissed-off goodbye to Bluehost was the use of these predatory policies.

In any case, I told them I’d already initiated the transfer and I wouldn’t be changing my mind. So they lied once again, saying there was nothing they could do and I would just have to wait. It was a lie, because it can be approved manually – and you can do it yourself! All you have to do is click a link in the confirmation email they send you.

But guess what? They deliberately make it sound threatening, to keep you from doing it. They tell you to click the link if you want to cancel the transfer, without revealing that clicking the link takes you to a page where you can also manually approve it:

There is no justification whatsoever to keep this from the client, other than just to be mean about it. It’s a passive-aggressive tactic. Well, fuck you too. To say it once more, because I’m just so happy to have gotten rid of them, Goodbye Bluehost, and if I ever see you again it will be a million years too soon.

After Saying Goodbye to Bluehost, what next?

In my case, the answer was easy. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve moved the site to a virtual private server belonging to a company in my home town – why support American corporations when I can support European ones?

At the same time, however, I’m not fooling myself: Cloudflare, where I moved the domain registration and also use for performance and security, is an American corporation. At least they’re not predatory – well, not to the same degree as Bluehost. But they’re basically a monopoly, which is troubling.

I mean, anyone remotely familiar with web developing, knows how hard it is to operate on the internet without using Cloudflare. It’s definitely doable, but it complicates things. Still, at some point in the future, I might consider it.

Until then: