Britches of enormous proportions

So, this is another example of what happens when companies get too big...

As most of my acquaintances know, I make part of my income from developing websites. I lease server space from a company called Bluehost for most of my accounts, including my own.

On my own server, I host about 15 sites pro bono for deserving individuals (mostly artists of one kind or another) and community non-profs. About five days ago, these sites all started malfunctioning. Since then, I have been utterly unable to get any support from Bluehost. I’ve sat on hold on the phone twice now for over an hour. Their live chat system is down, and no one has ever responded to the trouble ticket I filed.

In trying to figure out what was going on, I discovered that there are a whole lot of people having similar problems with Bluehost. I think I also discerned why.

I learned that there is a mega-corporation called Endurance International Group (EIG) that has been buying up every hosting company they can lay their hands on - including Bluehost. The list of hosting companies they’ve acquired is rather jaw dropping (go to the end of this article to see the entire list).

Anyone who has experienced the consequences of corporate acquisition and consolidation knows what happens next. People get laid off, services get combined, and everyone suffers - particularly customers.

EIG now owns so many hosting companies that it’s likely if you leave one of their companies because of dissatisfaction, you’ll likely end up signing up with another that they also own - thus starting the cycle all over again. I myself have used at least four of these companies now.

I’ve broken that cycle by signing up with a company I researched well and am confident will not be bought up by EIG anytime soon. I’ve begun the extremely arduous task of transferring all these sites to this new company, as well as recommending to my clients who have their own accounts with Bluehost to do the same thing when their current contracts expire.

I originally signed with Bluehost because they had excellent customer service. I’m leaving them because that’s no longer the case, and based on previous experience, I expect it to just get worse. I would also expect that the same changes and deterioration in customer service probably applies to all the companies owned by EIG.

(I also learned that EIG recently acquired Constant Contact, so good luck if you use them for email campaigns.)

I can only implore you to not employ the services of any company on this list. I predict you’ll be sorry if you do.