Bluehost

Last updated

Bluehost
Type Subsidiary
Industry Web hosting
Founded2003;21 years ago (2003)
FounderMatt Heaton
Headquarters Jacksonville, 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)
Owner Newfold Digital
Website www.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]

Contents

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]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web hosting service</span> Service for hosting websites

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing web hosting services are sometimes called web hosts.

A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. The term "virtual dedicated server" (VDS) also has a similar meaning.

Bandwidth throttling consists in the limitation of the communication speed, of the ingoing (received) or outgoing (sent) data in a network node or in a network device.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Webcentral</span> Australian digital services company

Webcentral, formerly known as Melbourne IT Group, is an Australian digital services provider. It is a publicly-traded company that was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in December 1999. It provides internet domain registration, email/office applications, cloud hosting, cloud services, 5G networks, managed services, IT services, DevOps security, and digital marketing. Founded in 1996, it was the first Australian domain name registrar.

DreamHost is a Los Angeles-based web hosting provider and domain name registrar. It is owned by New Dream Network, LLC, founded in 1996 by Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil, undergraduate students at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and registered in 1997 by Michael Rodriguez. DreamHost began hosting customers' sites in 1997. In May 2012, DreamHost spun off Inktank. Inktank is a professional services and support company for the open source Ceph file system. In November 2014, DreamHost spun off Akanda, an open source network virtualization project. As of February 2016, Dreamhost employs about 200 people and has close to 400,000 customers.

Kloxo was a free and open-source web hosting control panel for the Red Hat and CentOS Linux distributions. As of October 2017, the project has been unmaintained with a number of unresolved issues, and the project's website is offline.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anonymous (hacker group)</span> Decentralized hacktivist group

Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.

A web threat is any threat that uses the World Wide Web to facilitate cybercrime. Web threats use multiple types of malware and fraud, all of which utilize HTTP or HTTPS protocols, but may also employ other protocols and components, such as links in email or IM, or malware attachments or on servers that access the Web. They benefit cybercriminals by stealing information for subsequent sale and help absorb infected PCs into botnets.

Linode, LLC was an American cloud hosting provider that focused on providing Linux-based virtual machines, cloud infrastructure, and managed services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HipChat</span> Web service for internal/private chat

HipChat was a web service for internal private online chat and instant messaging. As well as one-on-one and group/topic chat, it also featured cloud-based file storage, video calling, searchable message-history and inline-image viewing. The software was available to download onto computers running Windows, Mac or Linux, as well as Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. Since 2014, HipChat used a freemium model, as much of the service was free with some additional features requiring organizations to pay per month. HipChat was launched in 2010 and acquired by Atlassian in 2012. In September 2017, Atlassian replaced the cloud-based HipChat with a new cloud product called Stride, with HipChat continuing on as the client-hosted HipChat Data Center.

HostGator is a Houston-based provider of shared, reseller, virtual private server, and dedicated web hosting with an additional presence in Austin, Texas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OVHcloud</span> French web hosting and cloud computing company

OVH, legally OVH Groupe SA, is a French cloud computing company which offers VPS, dedicated servers and other web services. As of 2016 OVH owned the world's largest data center in surface area. As of 2019, it was the largest hosting provider in Europe, and the third largest in the world based on physical servers. The company was founded in 1999 by the Klaba family and is headquartered in Roubaix, France. OVH is incorporated as a simplified joint-stock company under French law. In 2019 OVH adopted OVHcloud as its public brand name.

Internet censorship in Syria is extensive; with numerous websites and online platforms being banned for political reasons. Internet usage is authorized only through state-run servers and people accessing through other means are arrested. Filtering and blocking was found to be pervasive in the political and Internet tools areas, and selective in the social and conflict/security areas by the OpenNet Initiative in August 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Syrian Electronic Army</span> Hacker group affiliated with the Syrian government

The Syrian Electronic Army is a group of computer hackers which first surfaced online in 2011 to support the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Using spamming, website defacement, malware, phishing, and denial-of-service attacks, it has targeted terrorist organizations, political opposition groups, western news outlets, human rights groups and websites that are seemingly neutral to the Syrian conflict. It has also hacked government websites in the Middle East and Europe, as well as US defense contractors. As of 2011, the SEA has been "the first Arab country to have a public Internet Army hosted on its national networks to openly launch cyber attacks on its enemies".

THG Ingenuity Cloud Services, formerly UK2 Group, is a global provider of internet services. It forms part of THG Ingenuity, an e-commerce services platform. Its services include web hosting, virtual private servers, domain name registration, management, dedicated servers and a content delivery network.

HackingTeam was a Milan-based information technology company that sold offensive intrusion and surveillance capabilities to governments, law enforcement agencies and corporations. Its "Remote Control Systems" enable governments and corporations to monitor the communications of internet users, decipher their encrypted files and emails, record Skype and other Voice over IP communications, and remotely activate microphones and camera on target computers. The company has been criticized for providing these capabilities to governments with poor human rights records, though HackingTeam states that they have the ability to disable their software if it is used unethically. The Italian government has restricted their licence to do business with countries outside Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DigitalOcean</span> American cloud infrastructure provider

DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, US, with 15 globally distributed data centers. DigitalOcean provides developers, startups, and SMBs with cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platforms.

Lizard Squad Hacker group

Lizard Squad was a black hat hacking group, mainly known for their claims of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks primarily to disrupt gaming-related services.

HostPapa is a Canadian-based privately owned web hosting company that provides shared, reseller, and virtual private server (VPS) hosting. It operates in Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Mexico, Singapore, India, Hong Kong, European Union, France, Ireland, Belgium and Spain. In 2023, the company provided hosting services to more than 500,000 websites.

NearlyFreeSpeech is a privately funded, US-based, low cost web hosting provider and domain name registrar that began in 2002. It was started in response to concerns about the entry of large companies into Internet publishing, and to promote freedom of speech.

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. 1 2 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.