Goodbye, BlueHost
I have used and recommended—strongly recommended—BlueHost as a Web hosting company since 2002. I cannot and will not do that now.
How to Break a Joomla! Website
Within the past few months, I have experienced an increasing wave of error messages and, now, the inability to use what are, to me, critically important Admin functions. These errors include:
| Error Message | Auto-Generated Error Description | Comments |
| 405 | AJAX Loading Error HTTP Status: 405 (Not Allowed) Internal status: error XHR ReadyState: 4 Raw server response: 405 Not Allowed nginx/1.10.1 |
Sometimes, this error is thrown merely by clicking a function in the Admin main menu; refreshing the screen clears it. On other occasions, such as running Akeeba Backup, it stops the process. If you click the button to Continue, you are uncertain of the integrity of the ultimately resulting archive file. |
| 502 | ERROR 502 - BAD GATEWAY Why am I seeing this page? The server that your request has reached is acting as a gateway or proxy to fulfil the request made by your client. Web Browser => Web Front-End => Web Back-End This server (Web Front-End) received an invalid response from an upstream (Web Back-End) server it accessed to fulfil the request. In most cases this will not mean that the upstream server is down, but rather that the upstream server and the gateway/proxy do not agree on the protocol for exchanging data. This problem is most commonly caused when there is a problem with IP communications between the Web Front and Back-Ends. Before you attempt to resolve this problem you should clear your browser cache completely. Our support staff will be happy to assist you in resolving this issue. Please contact our Live Support or reply to any Tickets you may have received from our technicians for further assistance. |
This error is most often thrown when you run SEO link checks (Jsitemap Pro) or the PHP File Change Scan in Akeeba Admin Tools. There is no recovery or work-around for it. |
Customer Technical Support?
Forget it.
Customer Ticket
BlueHost no longer allows customers to submit support tickets. The company claims that, “after careful consideration,” they offer only telephone or chat support to customers.
Phone Call or Chat
If you disregard the now exceptionally long wait times to speak or chat with a representative, you cannot send that representative the quoted error explanation or debug logs you have captured. In my case, repeated discussions with a Blue Host representative netted this recommendation: that I rewrite the code in the Joomla CMS or in the affected extension software to allow it to function with their server configuration. How to do that or what to change was not provided.
Tech Support on Social Media
When I contacted BlueHost support through Facebook, I received no answer to any of my queries.
However, I was able to “speak” with a service representative via Twitter. The first representative sent me a Direct Mail message that said:
“So the way our shared servers are configured is, to quote one of our server admins, "a trade secret". To be brief, we use a proxy to connect nginx to apache. Normally, you are correct. It is one or the other, nginx or apache. It was a bit confusing when explained to me but they get paid the big bucks to make sure everything works. They said to check code, for example, doing a POST to a URL that only accepts GET and HEAD requests, will cause this error message.”
Not good enough. So I continued and another service rep, via Twitter, submitted for me a trouble ticket (which I cannot do). That ticket was sent to the “Senior Web Advisor Queue,” which or who replied:
“Unfortunately the request in this ticket would not be something we could help with as it's outside the the parameters of what we can support, I suggest that you inquire from a web developer, or even call 888-401-4678 and speak with our sales department to see if this is something our inhouse web developers could assist with, and what the cost for that might be, also searching for videos or articles online would be a good idea. Sorry we were unable to resolve this, and wish you luck!”
It seems that BlueHost recommended that I pay them to fix the problem they created when they designed and implemented the Nginx/reverse proxy on their Linux servers running Apache.
Conclusion
I am taking the advice I was given by a developer and will run away from BlueHost as fast as possible.