Let me start by saying I don't use BlueHost for any of my domains. I have never recommended it to any clients, and I'm still not necessarily recommending it. I'll explain more about this at the end.

I do have to deal with BlueHost fairly regularly for client accounts that use them as their website hosting provider. While their control panel features are thorough and powerful, a few times a special case has come up where I needed to contact their technical support. I'm a big believer in solving problems on my own or with the help of already existing knowledge. To me personally, support is a last resort. Professionally, there are times where the trade-off of spending my time in figuring out a problem versus picking up the phone to support doesn't equate.

There are reasons I generally dislike calling technical support beyond my personal beliefs. In my experience, the process is generally a painful recipe of waiting on hold, being bounced back and forth between departments, and fighting to understand someone who barely speaks English. Not so with BlueHost. They have always answered promptly, and the support person has always spoken clearly and understandably.

More than that, they have actually been knowledgeable about the technology and situations. In one instance, I was working with a somewhat strange WordPress migration. The tech support in this situation - the one who answered the phone, not a specific transfer to WordPress support - was able to tell me some very specifics about the technology, all the way to what database fields may need updating, and that I would likely have to edit a couple of lines in the wp-config.php file. Not something I expected just any old tech support guy to know!

Both times I called they were so helpful that I actually stayed on the line to answer their automated one question survey, and then stayed on the line longer to give a voice-recorded message about the support I received. I imagine that most people who leave those messages do it for the exact opposite reason, but I happily bragged about the level of help I was given.

Now the million dollar question: would I recommend BlueHost? Possibly. There are three things that bug me about the company:

It's still shared hosting, so there's no telling how many other websites are on the same server, or what kind of sites they're serving.

In all instances the sites I have worked with on BlueHost run slower than they should.

When calling support, they ask for the account password or last 4 of the associated credit card number to verify me.

I guess asking for the last 4 of a CC is acceptable - those numbers are used in a lot of places. But asking for my account password is very strange. As a rule (and a very good one), I don't give passwords out to anyone. I hate giving my social security number out over the phone, and a password is equally dangerous. Call me paranoid, but there's nothing secure about a phone call, and how do I know that _you _are who you say you are? With websites, people frequently buy up slightly different domains to fool people who mistype - gogle.com, yaho.com, etc. What's to stop someone from doing that with a phone number?

What is to stop a rogue tech support agent from quickly jotting down my domain and password on a Post-It, taking it home, and doing whatever he wanted with my account? Plus, how are they verifying my password? Do they just enter it and login as me to offer support, or are they just checking it against a plain text stored password? If they can verify me with the last four of the CC, then they don't need the password to login.

Maybe the next time I talk with their support I will ask about the password.