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My website michaelpwright.com went down yesterday and was down for 8 hours. The WordPress debug function didn’t work to tell me the errors, so after an hour of troubleshooting that problem, I decided to sign-in to Bluehost and restore the website from a backup.
I knew that Bluehost creates restore points at the following intervals: 30 days, 7 days, 1 day. So, restoring wouldn’t be an issue. I’d just roll it back to yesterday. Well, after some heavy-duty searching the Bluehost cPanel and Help documentation, I couldn’t find the backups. Something to note here is that before Bluehost changed their cPanel in 2018 or 2019, it was a much more functionally and logically designed resource center for managing your website. Suffice to say, it was simple.
Why make backups inaccessible?
I couldn’t find the Bluehost backups because Bluehost made those default backups accessible to only Bluehost technicians. What we customers get instead is an offer to buy something called Codeguard that gives us the privilege of accessing our backups directly for a small fee.
Yes, you’re understanding that correctly: in order to access our backups directly – a feature that was standard with paid hosting – we have to buy a third party product. How every GoDaddy-like of Bluehost to pull that kind of crap. “Aye, Bro, I know you used to get this for free, but you can get the same thing for only $60 more a year!”
Getting my website restored
Of course, I didn’t pay. It’s a ridiculous notion and a very poor choice for Bluehost. But they’re a business, and I probably shouldn’t be so offended by the hustle.
To get my website restored from the 24 hour backup, I contacted Bluehost and a technician opened a ticket that would be forwarded to the Restoration Team to complete the restore after the technician tried to sell me Codeguard.
My website was down as long as it was because the Restoration Team eventually got to the ticket and restored my website.
That can’t happen for client websites
I’m not happy with the way Bluehost does business right now. This would be completely unacceptable, very not OK to happen to a client’s website.
I guess I could appreciate that this happened to one of my personal websites instead of a client’s live site. As a selling point of my services, I list the backup restore points 30-day, 7-day, and 1-day.
I still promote Bluehost because of the features and services they offer, including unlimited email address hosting, their prices are pretty great. Also, their affiliate program is top-notch. My business has earned over $300 through signups using my referral link – each Bluehost mentioned in this post has been tagged with my referral link #nofreepromotion. Thank you for using the link!