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Why I'm Leaving BlueHost.com web hosting

What started off as a wonderful hosting company in 2003 has become one of the many casualties of corporate growth.

The founder, Matt Heaton was personally involved and would communicate with subscribers like myself as he worked to build a world-class hosting company, while entrepreneurs like myself were working to build our own businesses and websites.

Reliability, value-for-the-money, security, and customer support were all excellent.

Matt divested in 2011, as is a normal course for business founders.  The new owners initially did pretty well with keeping standards up to par.

In my owning and maintaining dozens of websites, reliability is very important.  It takes a lot of work to maintain them as it it.  It is even harder when your WordPress sites and your hosting company are being attacked and penetrated by ill-doers and their malware.

Now in late 2024, all of my sites are down - gone.  In contacting BlueHost customer support last week I learned there is nothing to be done.  They told me their SiteLock product ($359/yr for up to 5 sites) is designed to help protect and recover compromised websites - but I don't feel confident that they can suddenly fix my issues if I'll just cough up some more money.  No thanks.  A cursory search on "BlueHost hacked" reveals that I am not alone in my BlueHost website hosting travails.

I am cancelling my account at BlueHost.com and getting away from the WordPress platform.  WordPress has a lot of cool functionality, but it is a constant target for hackers or other issues.  If you don't stay up with all the updates for the core platform and your themes and various plugins and databases, you can find your site broken.  And if there are incompatibilities in  the updates among the various components, that can break your site as well.

I am going to give Google Sites a try for these reasons and these considerations

• Easy to create a site in your Google/gmail account.

• Easy to insert images from your Google Photos or Google Images.

• The files reside in your Google Drive section of your account.

• Easy to share editing access with collaborators.

• You can sync Google Drive to your computer to keep your data safe and accessible.

• Google is very astute about security on their platform, thus comforting me that my website and content are probably safer than at other hosting providers.

• You can easily embed spreadsheets, presentations, and documents (Sheets, Slides, and Docs) from your Google Drive.  You allowing you to simply edit those files instead of your website files, if you like.

• You can use your own custom domain, and it's pretty easy to setup.

• No hosting costs.

Keep in mind...

• Google scans your content (on your website and your Drive as well as your email.  If they find your content disagrees with their terms of service - or their stated or unstated values - they can shut you down and lock you out of your account and/or content.

• Google Sites is made for simple websites.  If you want advanced functionality such as a blog, forum, or ecommerce, you'll probably need to go with a more traditional hosting setup and all that goes along with it.

• However, there are some skilled folks you can find on Fiverr and other such talent marketplaces you can hire to help you with designed or more-advanced integrations.