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| Bluehost‘s director of customer service? Maybe. |
More than a year ago, after significant frustrations with Westhost, I switched Contentious.com to Bluehost — and went through the hassle of moving the complex mass of files that this 10-year-old blog has become.
I’m really starting to regret that decision.
When I pay someone for service, at the very least I expect to be treated with respect. Today, Bluehost failed miserably on that front.
One of the main reasons I chose Bluehost was that they offer add-on domains, and I knew I’d need to host a separate domain for another project I’m working on (it wasn’t huge and wouldn’t take up much space or bandwidth, so I saw no point in paying for a separate hosting account for it).
Things were generally going OK with hosting both sites on my Bluehost account, until last November, when Contentious got hacked — someone sniffed my password when I logged on over open wifi and inserted spam into my blog. From that, I learned the importance of using secure login (SSL) for my WordPress blogs.
After much help from Tom Vilot, I was able to get the Admin-SSL WordPress plugin working for Contentious.com. (Bluehost tried hard at the time to upsell me on their $45/year SSL certificate and $30/year dedicated IP address, which I thought was ridiculous just to get secure login for a WordPress blog. All I need for that is access to their shared SSL.)
Since my other Bluehost-hosted site on the add-on domain includes a WordPress blog, and since I travel a lot and thus must sometimes rely on open wifi, I wanted to implement Admin-SSL for WordPress on my add-on domain. Tom was trying hard to make that happen, but the secure login kept redirecting to Contentious.com, not the other blog.
On Jan 22 I contacted Bluehost to ask for help with this problem. I finally received a response this morning, Feb. 2, a full 11 days (!!!) after I submitted the request. Here’s what they said, in full:
No SSL on add-on or sub domains. The way our system is set up is to make the main domain the SSL domain, we can not and will not create an SSL for an add-on or sub domain. The only option you have if you need multiple SSL then you must create a new account with us.
Thanks
TrLevel 1 Support Engineer
Bluehost.com
Well, that simply sucks, in so many ways…