Hi Matt.

I’ve held off a month before writing you this email because I didn’t want it to come across as a personal attack.

One of the reasons I initially chose to go with Bluehost was because of your excellent blog.

Unfortunately there’s nothing that can change the way I feel now when someone mentions your company (please note again, not a personal attack).

Around the 19th March 2009 my bluehost account giantfriend.com was closed and all data deleted without warning or even explanation.

Bluehost had always been my main hosting site (around 14 websites) and I have a server in Sydney (I’m in Australia) for latency important sites.

This is my business and of course all of my clients relied on DNS email & site hosting from me.

I spent the next week after this catastrophe attempting to get the account reinstated and all the sites back.

Although the bluehost staff are friendly and helpful there was no-one who could tell me what the problem was that caused account deletion and no-one could retrieve any backups at all.

I have no idea if this was a violation of the terms or a mistake or an overzealous sysadmin. My entire account was just ‘gone’.

Needless to say I was absolutely gutted and don’t need to tell you that there should have been some measures in place to protect from this now apparent ‘Sword of Damocles’.

To the best of my knowledge the account was using ~5GB of data & serving up pretty standard php/mysql based websites. There was no file sharing or dodgy content on the server.

I include the first email I received as none of the subsequent emails or phone calls provided any more clarity:

Dear Gareth:

Your web hosting account for giantfriend.com has been deactivated
(reason: call customer support).
Although your web site has been disabled, your data may still be available for
up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted.

If you feel this deactivation is in error, please contact customer support as
soon as possible.

Thank you,
BlueHost.Com Support
http://www.bluehost.com
For support go to http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/
Toll-Free: (888) 401-4678

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.