Bluehost has really pissed me off. If they don’t make me happy, I won’t wait until Trump is out office to shut down this site. I’ll do it before my plan renews at the beginning of next year.
What did Bluehost do to make me so mad? Here are a couple of comments I left for them on LinkedIn.
I am a 16-year customer, on a Bluehost chat right now, and I am not pleased. All of sudden, without prior notice, I need to buy a security certificate, just to log onto my email accounts with Thunderbird?! This is unacceptable! SIXTEEN YEARS a customer, and out of nowhere you clobber my email client access without prior notification. Less marketing and more management, please! Send me a promo code for a Wildcard DV SSL to make me happy.
Follow-up: The LinkedIn complaint get a response. Cloudflare being the only change I have made in the past day, I put it on the table as a possible cause of the problem. Initially it seemed to be unrelated, because it should only affect website access, but now we aren’t so sure. Cloudflare is in the process of being deactivated. It remains to be seen if, assuming the process completes and Cloudflare is decoupled from my domain, e-mail client authentication works again. As I used to say at work, “Let’s swap all the tires until we find the flat one.”
Further Follow-up: Mail client access is working again for both sending and receiving messages. I’m waiting to hear what was broken and what fixed it.
Follow-follow-up: Bluehost doesn’t know. They’ve offered a suggestion as a workaround in case the problem returns, but that’s all it is. A workaround that I know isn’t necessary. For the moment, it seems that Cloudflare, that should only touch WWW access, is mucking with MX access on my domain.
There is also the fact that whoever I was initially chatting with, AI or human, they guessed wrong and pointed me to a rabbit hole that would have caused me to buy an extra service that I don’t need. Major support points lost on that one.
The site is back to a “D” performance grade on Pingdom. 🙁 I will take reliability over performance every time.
