Much to my dismay, I woke up yesterday to a horrifying situation that my site was down for almost 12 hours. To add to the remorse, for the past few days, I had been thinking of taking backups of my website content, mainly due to the lethal scars left from my past failures still weighing heavily on my brain. So, when the site wouldn’t load in the famed browsers I panicked and thought this was the end of it! My laxity had proved fatal and drowned me in immense pain and suffering yet again, I thought to myself. After all, this website has been my go-to place and a safe haven, for airing my views and opinions, for nearly 20 years.
Must say, yesterday’s was a rare occasion when the website wasn’t loading at all and I immediately counted a few possibilities. Technically, the website wouldn’t download if the server had crashed or had been hacked by overzealous techies — the latter seemed to be a rare possibility considering Bluehost’s market reputation, even being highly recommended by WordPress.org, though one could never stay so confident, then, by all means, I’d have lost access to the dashboard. And frankly, unless if I had left a security loophole in the platform or a plugin unattended by not installing the updates it’d be hard to blame the hosting service. Fearing the worst I attempted to log in, and to my delight, I realized that the dashboard was truly accessible. In short, it meant the server was in pristine health and most crucially, my content was safe. Through my observations, I clearly understood it was a technical matter which could only be handled by the technical staff of Bluehost, so I got on a live chat with one of them.
Here’s where I believe Bluehost could improve its reputation of being a world-class WordPress platform further by serving its customers expeditiously, the response time of its technical support is sluggish and excruciatingly long. To give an instance, I spent half of my productive day juggling between work and household until a resolution could be found. For instance, it was a fairly simple issue at the beginning which got much complex, but I wouldn’t get any reply from the other end, or the representative would keep me on hold for “3-5 minutes” and disappear, which would be annoying. After spending more than 2 hours with the member of the technical staff I had to leave the chat because there were other things begging for my attention on my to-do list. As I was later informed, everything boiled down to a disused Lightbox plugin which the representative promptly deleted on my request. On a side-note, that’s the biggest advantage and a native problem with WordPress plugins that inserts code at places you may not be aware as a non-programmer, that breaks the website apart. But the Bluehost representative did something else which I had no clue until I discovered that the site wouldn’t come online even after 2-3 hours.
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