Bluehost

Bluehost
Private company
Industry Web Hosting
Founded 2003
Founder Matt Heaton
Headquarters Provo, Utah, USA
Key people
 Matt Heaton
(Founder, CEO 2003-2011)
Dan Handy
(CEO 2011-2015)
Mike Olson
(CEO 2015-present)
Owner Endurance International Group
Website bluehost.com

Bluehost is a web hosting company owned by Endurance International Group. It is one of the 20 largest[1] web hosts, collectively hosting well over 1.9+ million domains with its sister companies, HostMonster, FastDomain and iPage.[2] The company operates its servers in-house in a 50,000 square feet (4,600 m2) facility in Provo, Utah, which is now shared with sister company HostMonster.[3]

Bluehost was among those studied in the analysis of web-based hosting services in collaborative online learning programs.[4]

History

Matt Heaton was inspired to start Bluehost in 1996 when he was working on a web statistics program project of his own creation and discovered that web hosting services at the time left much to be desired. He believed web hosts could offer more space and be more convenient to use, and he set out to fix that, creating two other web hosts, 50megs.com and 0catch.com, before finally settling on Bluehost in 2003. [5]

In 2009, BlueHost introduced a new feature to all customers – CPU throttling. CPU throttling (at BlueHost and similar hosting services) simply refers to the process of reducing user’s CPU usage in 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.[6]

In 2013, Bluehost now offers VPS and dedicated server hosting.[7]

In January, 2015, Endurance International Group appointed Mike Olson to be CEO of Bluehost, as Dan Handy moved to enterprise-wide mobile development for small businesses.[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 US 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 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] SEA posted screenshots of the attack on Twitter.[12][13]

References

  1. ↑ Visually (2015), The Worlds Largest Web Hosts, retrieved 19 April 2015
  2. ↑ Top 100 Largest Web Hosting companies in the world – 20.6% Market Share « ManagedFTP – WebHost, ISP and SaaS Industry Blog
  3. ↑ "Overview: Bluehost". HostingReviews. Retrieved 2 October 2016.
  4. ↑ M Rodriguez; HJ Huang; M Merrill, Analysis of web based hosting services in collaborative online learning programs
  5. ↑ Heaton, Matt. "Genesis of Bluehost.com...".
  6. ↑ Heaton, Matt (12 June 2011). "It's been a blast!!! Now its time to move on...". MattHeaton.com. Retrieved 6 August 2014.
  7. ↑ "Introducing Next-Gen VPS and Dedicated Hosting". Bluehost.com. Retrieved 3 November 2013.
  8. ↑ "Endurance Appoints Mike Olson as New CEO of Web Hosting Brand Bluehost". Hosting Journalist. January 28, 2015.
  9. ↑ Morozov, Evgeny (6 March 2007). "U.S. Web Firms Practice Self-Censorship". News Week. Retrieved 22 November 2013.
  10. ↑ Lee, Justin (2011-02-28). "Web Host BlueHost Pulls Anti-Gay Website Following Complaints". Web Host Industry Review. iNET Interactive. Retrieved 2011-10-26.
  11. ↑ Khandelwal, Swati (2015-03-20). "5 Biggest Hosting Companies hacked by Syrian Electronic Army". The Hackers News. Retrieved 2015-04-01.
  12. 1 2 SyrianElectronicArmy [Official_SEA16] (2015-03-30). "Endurance Group(Bluehost, Justhost, Hostgator, Hostmonster) was hacked by #SEA for hosting terrorists websites." (Tweet). Retrieved 5 December 2016 – via Twitter.
  13. ↑ SyrianElectronicArmy [Official_SEA16] (2015-03-30). "Next time... we will change the DNS. #SEA cc @Bluehost" (Tweet). Retrieved 5 December 2016 – via Twitter.

External links

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