Bluehost
Company typeSubsidiary
IndustryWeb hosting
Founded2003; 21 years ago (2003)
FounderMatt Heaton
HeadquartersJacksonville, Florida, US
Key people
Matt Heaton
(Founder & CEO 2003–2011)
Dan Handy
(CEO 2011–2015)
Mike Olson
(CEO 2015–2016)
James Grierson
(CEO 2016–2017)
Suhaib Zaheer
(CEO 2017–2021)
Sharon Rowlands
(CEO Present)
OwnerNewfold Digital
Websitewww.bluehost.com

Bluehost is a domain registration and web hosting company owned by Newfold Digital. It was one of the 20 largest web hosts in 2015 and was collectively hosting over 2 million domains in 2010.[1][2]

Bluehost was among those studied in the analysis of web-based hosting services in collaborative online learning programs.[3]

Bluehost sells shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting and WooCommerce hosting as well as professional marketing services.

History

Matt Heaton first conceived Bluehost in 1996. However, he first created two other web hosts, 50megs.com and 0catch.com, before finally settling on Bluehost in 2003.[4]

In 2009, Bluehost introduced a new feature called CPU throttling. CPU throttling (at Bluehost and similar hosting services) refers to the process of reducing a user's CPU usage whenever the particular user is pulling "too much" server resources at one time. At that particular time, Bluehost would freeze (or drastically reduce) client sites' CPU usage substantially. This effectively shut down clients' websites hosted on the Bluehost server for several hours throughout the day.

In 2010, Bluehost was acquired by Endurance International Group. In June 2011, company founder Matt Heaton announced on his blog that he was stepping down as CEO to focus on the company hosting platform's design and technical structure, while COO Dan Handy took over as CEO.[5]

In 2013, Bluehost introduced VPS and dedicated server hosting.[6]

In January 2015, Endurance International Group appointed Mike Olson as CEO of Bluehost, while Dan Handy moved to enterprise-wide mobile development for small businesses.[7]

In January 2017, the company announced that it would lay off 440 Bluehost employees at Utah, in an effort to consolidate its business to improve customer support.[8]

Controversies

In March 2009, Bluehost appeared in a Newsweek article that condemned the hosting company for censoring the web pages of some of their customers who were believed to be citizens of countries that the United States government had listed as rogue states.[9]

In February 2011, Bluehost took down a religious website that they were hosting on its servers after receiving thousands of complaints when that website posted comments blaming gays and lesbians for an earthquake in New Zealand.[10]

Security breach

In March 2015, Bluehost was hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. Also hacked were Justhost, Hostgator, Hostmonster and Fastdomain, all owned by Endurance International Group. SEA claimed that these services were hosting terrorist websites.[11][12] Syrian Electronic Army posted screenshots of the attack on Twitter.[12][13]

In January 2019, the magazine WebsitePlanet uncovered client-side vulnerability in some of the largest hosting companies in the world: Bluehost, DreamHost, HostGator, iPage and OVH.[14]

References

  1. ^ Visually (2015), The Worlds Largest Web Hosts, retrieved April 19, 2015
  2. ^ "Top 100 Largest Web Hosting companies in the world – 20.6% Market Share « ManagedFTP – WebHost, ISP and SaaS Industry Blog". Archived from the original on August 26, 2018. Retrieved June 6, 2010.
  3. ^ M Rodriguez; HJ Huang; M Merrill, Analysis of web based hosting services in collaborative online learning programs
  4. ^ Heaton, Matt. "Genesis of Bluehost.com..." Archived from the original on September 17, 2016. Retrieved July 13, 2016.
  5. ^ Heaton, Matt (June 12, 2011). "It's been a blast!!! Now its time to move on..." MattHeaton.com. Archived from the original on July 2, 2014. Retrieved August 6, 2014.
  6. ^ "Introducing Next-Gen VPS and Dedicated Hosting". Bluehost.com. Retrieved November 3, 2013.
  7. ^ "Endurance Appoints Mike Olson as New CEO of Web Hosting Brand Bluehost". Hosting Journalist. January 28, 2015.
  8. ^ Novet, Jordon (January 25, 2017). "Bluehost owner Endurance is laying off 440 people in Utah". VentureBeat. Retrieved August 21, 2018.
  9. ^ Morozov, Evgeny (March 6, 2007). "U.S. Web Firms Practice Self-Censorship". News Week. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
  10. ^ Lee, Justin (February 28, 2011). "Web Host BlueHost Pulls Anti-Gay Website Following Complaints". Web Host Industry Review. iNET Interactive. Retrieved October 26, 2011.
  11. ^ Khandelwal, Swati (March 20, 2015). "5 Biggest Hosting Companies hacked by Syrian Electronic Army". The Hackers News. Retrieved April 1, 2015.
  12. ^ a b SyrianElectronicArmy [@Official_SEA16] (March 30, 2015). "Endurance Group(Bluehost, Justhost, Hostgator, Hostmonster) was hacked by #SEA for hosting terrorists websites" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  13. ^ SyrianElectronicArmy [@Official_SEA16] (March 30, 2015). "Next time... we will change the DNS. #SEA cc @Bluehost" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  14. ^ "Report: We Tested 5 Popular Web Hosting Companies & All Were Easily Hacked". Website Planet. January 15, 2019. Retrieved May 20, 2019.

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