In this week’s Podcast episode, I talk all about my recent decision to switch my hosting recommendation from Bluehost over to Webhosting Hub.

It was NOT a decision that I took lightly, but with all of the info provided in full detail in the Podcast episode, it is definitely the right decision and one that I’m happy to bring you today.

Primary Reasons For Switching My Hosting Recommendation

Large multi-day outage experienced by community member Jeff with Bluehost, with no resolution, resulting in entire loss of website and data.

My own bad experience with Bluehost customer support, with a support case being submitted on Jan 19th, with no response until Feb 17th.

Recently becoming aware of multiple similar complaints from members of the Smart Passive Income FB group this past week.

It was brought to my attention several weeks ago that a community member and long time Private FB group contributor, Jeff was having problems with his websites hosted on Bluehost.

His sites were down initially for multiple hours, which turned into days and despite having paid extra to have them take regular backups, he was unable to recover any of his data through Bluehost.

Jeff provided me a quick write-up to share with everyone here today so you can hear it from him directly…

Jeff’s Play By Play Breakdown

“I’ve tried niche sites on and off before without much success. I decided to give it another shot. I went with Bluehost as my hosting provider: their price was reasonable and they came widely recommended.

For the past few months, I’ve been slowly building up my primary niche site Defeat Debt Collectors. I picked this niche, regardless of the competition, because I’d gotten myself out of tens of thousands of dollars in debt in just a few years — so I felt I had something of value to add.

A few weeks ago, my niche site went down hard. I had a site full of articles and what I got instead when the page loaded was just a prompt asking me to install WordPress! Lovely surprise, no?

Outages happen; I wasn’t too worried. I reached out to Bluehost and asked what was going on. They said it was “a known issue” and they were “working on it,” but had no ETA to give.

Satisfied all would be well *eventually,* I went on about my day. It soon became clear that their (air quotes) “support staff” had no real idea what the true scope of the situation was. I reached out to @BlueHostSupport Twitter to see if they could help — no such luck.

Unfortunately, Bluehost had the *only* real backups of my site. You see, I paid Bluehost *extra money* to perform backups for me so that I didn’t have to worry about it.

I had *one* final option to get *most* of my site content back and I took it. I ended up scraping Google’s cache of my site to get a copy of the *text* of each of my site’s posts.

That didn’t get everything: there were some new posts that hadn’t been indexed yet, and I had 4-5 pillar articles in the 2,500 word range that hadn’t been published yet. Yeah, I had to rewrite all of that from scratch. Also, trying to get images from Google’s cache was hit-or-miss, mostly miss.

On the Private FB group, Chris recommended recommended I try Webhosting Hub instead. I’m happy to say they have been quite accommodating and helpful in the transition. My hosting bill is in the same ballpark as before, but *my site is much faster* in its new home.

I’m very happy with my site’s new h...