Bluehost

Last updated

Bluehost
Company type Subsidiary
Industry Web hosting
Founded2003;21 years ago (2003)
FounderMatt Heaton
Headquarters Jacksonville, Florida, US
Key people
Matt Heaton
(Founder & CEO 2003–2011)
Sharon Rowlands
(Current CEO)
Owner Newfold Digital
Number of employees
501-1000 [1]
Website 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. [2] [3]

Contents

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

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. [5]

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. [6]

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

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. [8]

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. [9]

In 2021 the parent company Endurance International Group, merged with Web.com forming a new company, Newfold Digital, hence Bluehost became a subsidiary of Newfold Digital. [10]

In July 2023, Bluehost launched WonderSuite product which offer an AI-powered site-building guide. [11]

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. [12]

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. [13]

Security breaches

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. [14] [15] Syrian Electronic Army posted screenshots of the attack on Twitter. [15] [16]

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. [17]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Denial-of-service attack</span> Type of cyber-attack

In computing, a denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. The range of attacks varies widely, spanning from inundating a server with millions of requests to slow its performance, overwhelming a server with a substantial amount of invalid data, to submitting requests with an illegitimate IP address.

<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.

In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that stores, signs, and issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate. This allows others to rely upon signatures or on assertions made about the private key that corresponds to the certified public key. A CA acts as a trusted third party—trusted both by the subject (owner) of the certificate and by the party relying upon the certificate. The format of these certificates is specified by the X.509 or EMV standard.

A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. The term "virtual dedicated server" (VDS) 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 such as computers and mobile phones.

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

Webcentral, 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 & managed services. Founded in 1996, it was the first Australian domain name registrar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Newegg</span> American online electronics retailer

Newegg Commerce, Inc., is an American online retailer of items including computer hardware and consumer electronics. It is based in Diamond Bar, California. It is majority-owned by Liaison Interactive, a multinational technology company.

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">Media Temple</span> Web hosting and cloud services provider

Media Temple was a website hosting and cloud hosting provider, which focused on web designers, developers and creative agencies. The company was founded in 1998 by Thomas Anthony, Demian Sellfors and John Carey. It was headquartered in Los Angeles, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">INCA Internet</span> South Korean software company

INCA Internet Corporation, also known as nProtect, is a corporation which sells computer software. INCA Internet was founded by Young Heum Joo, the current CEO and President of INCA Internet, in 2000. It offers anti-virus, anti-spyware, game security, and unified corporate security. It is headquartered in Seoul, Republic of Korea.

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 was an American cloud hosting provider that focused on providing Linux-based virtual machines and cloud infrastructure.

<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.

Endurance International Group, Inc. (EIG), previously named BizLand, now part of Newfold Digital, was an IT services company specializing in web hosting. The company was founded in 1997 and headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA. In 2021 Endurance International Group merged with Web.com forming a new company, Newfold Digital. It is one of the Internet's largest webhosting providers, with a global market share of 3.5% according to W3Techs. The company was structured differently from other large hosting companies such as Rackspace, GoDaddy, or 1&1 Ionos. The company has grown its hosting and related business through numerous acquisitions.

<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.

<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.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yoast SEO</span> Search engine optimization plugin for WordPress

Yoast SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) tool plug-in for WordPress.

References

  1. "Bluehost News, Hiring, Layoffs, Competitors, CEO, Fundraising Insights". RivalSense. Retrieved October 28, 2024.
  2. Visually (2015), The Worlds Largest Web Hosts , retrieved April 19, 2015
  3. "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.
  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..." Archived from the original on September 17, 2016. Retrieved July 13, 2016.
  6. 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.
  7. "Introducing Next-Gen VPS and Dedicated Hosting". Bluehost.com. Retrieved November 3, 2013.
  8. "Endurance Appoints Mike Olson as New CEO of Web Hosting Brand Bluehost". Hosting Journalist. January 28, 2015.
  9. Novet, Jordon (January 25, 2017). "Bluehost owner Endurance is laying off 440 people in Utah". VentureBeat. Retrieved August 21, 2018.
  10. "Web.com merges with competitor, becoming Newfold Digital". jaxdailyrecord.com; Jacksonville Daily Record . February 11, 2021.
  11. "Bluehost Launches WonderSuite Product with AI-Powered Site-Building Guide". WP Tavern. July 14, 2023. Retrieved March 21, 2024.
  12. Morozov, Evgeny (March 6, 2007). "U.S. Web Firms Practice Self-Censorship". News Week. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
  13. Lee, Justin (February 28, 2011). "Web Host BlueHost Pulls Anti-Gay Website Following Complaints". Web Host Industry Review. iNET Interactive. Retrieved October 26, 2011.
  14. Khandelwal, Swati (March 20, 2015). "5 Biggest Hosting Companies hacked by Syrian Electronic Army". The Hackers News. Retrieved April 1, 2015.
  15. 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.
  16. SyrianElectronicArmy [@Official_SEA16] (March 30, 2015). "Next time... we will change the DNS. #SEA cc @Bluehost" (Tweet) via Twitter.
  17. "Report: We Tested 5 Popular Web Hosting Companies & All Were Easily Hacked". Website Planet. January 15, 2019. Retrieved May 20, 2019.