Change in storage policy

[ofer4]

Hi, fellow BH'ers -

Let me begin by saying that my first year of service with Bluehost has been stellar. I have a simple, personal webpage. Any issues that I've had have been resolved efficiently and politely. And I've recommended BH to several friends and even advertised their services on my site.

Until today.

My webpage magically disappeared tonight, along with an email from BH stating that my account had been suspended for violating their Terms of Service. After the initial gasp ("what in the world did I do?!"), I realized that they are not allowing personal (i.e., non-webpage-related) backups on their servers...something that is now, admittedly, clearly state in their ToS. I have 24 hours to remove this directory.

I am writing for two reasons.

(1) When I signed up for BH, half of my intent was to use it as a backup of my personal computer and important work files. The directory in question is 66gb...larger than the standard webpage but well below the 1.5TB of storage I signed up for. Most importantly, the part of the ToS prohibiting personal storage was NOT in the ToS when I purchased two years of service. (The current version is at http://www.bluehost.com/cgi/info/terms.html.)

(2) The terms of service to which I agreed also contains the following line:
"While Bluehost.com will provide our clients with reasonable notification, Bluehost.com reserves the right to change its policy at any time to meet the needs of our customers, changing laws and new technology."
If you hadn't guessed this by now, I never received notice of any changes, including the policy that they are now trying to enforce. Furthermore, the same original terms of services states:
"BlueHost will use reasonable efforts to provide you with 7 days advance notice of changes to the Rules that materially and adversely impact your use of the Services."
Again, no such notice was provided.

I understand that web hosting is a dynamic industry and that the terms will change. However, posting the terms on the website does not constitute "reasonable notice" of an important change in policy. As a customer, I, nor my family and friends, should not learn of these new policies by seeing an "account suspended" page in lieu of my personal webpage.

As fellow customers, I urge you to contact Customer Support with the following two requests:
(1) Email notification of specific changes to the Terms of Service.
(2) An allowance for a reasonable amount of storage space not directly related to the webpage.

If current storage is supposedly "unlimited" (and advertised as 1.5TB when I signed up), an allowance of 100-500GB of misc storage could easily be accommodated.

Please join me in striving to make Bluehost a customer-friendly service again.