The Badge Archive

They sounded great. Reliable. Turns out – not so much.

Our Experience:

You sign up with a great rate but you also need this Content Creator package to get the same things you are used to in the Premium WordPress site you currently have plus the ability to use plug-ins. Okay, fine. Still cheaper than trying to sign up for a new package at WordPress that would allow plug-ins. So you upgrade.

You get assurances it is easy to transfer your WordPress site over to Blue Host. Sure, if you pay them extra to do it. Which they don’t mention until after you paid to sign up.

They give you a step by step instructions to do it yourself – which might be easy if you know anything about web design. Not so easy for those of us with zero experience beyond a basic dashboard from WordPress. But paying for the transfer would put you over the amount of just upgrading at WordPress, so you decide it’s okay to try and do it yourself. Step by step instructions will just have to do.

Then you get into the dashboard that Blue Host has for WordPress. Nice bright red exclamation points on several side bar headings – that never go away unless you pay for the upgrade on the free “Lite” versions that come with Blue Host. It’s like you downloaded a cheap game app that then tries to constantly ask you to buy upgrades or add-ons during game play. Okay. Fine. We can ignore the bright warning exclamation marks.

Except then you find out that trying to transfer will require anywhere from 24-72 hours of down time on the website. Which no one ever mentioned at all. Just small phrases of “if you pay for our transfer service we can minimize downtime.” Which implies there might be a slight downtime, but not days! You can’t afford to have your website down for days. And as you are learning this – they try to once again upgrade you or add a new service you really should have.

Then you ask for a refund for your money – except they gave you a second free domain that cannot be refunded. Fine. You’ll take the $12.99 hit. Except they only refund you for the basic hosting services – not that Content Creator upgrade they talked you into. You go back an ask where the additional funds are. They apologize and then give you a second refund…. except they can’t do basic math and are still off by $1.04. They apologize for the typo – they didn’t take into consideration of taxes. But the new number is still not adding up to the total you paid, less the non-refundable fee of $12.99. Fine. They can keep the extra $0.33 just so you never have to deal with them again.

In the End?

WordPress increased their fees for the upgraded plans and The Badge Archive’s hope of upgrading and using plug-ins for some of the features and the ability to convert the website into an app will have to wait.

However, we are still up. We got a new template to try out (it’s going to take a bit to work out the glitches), but hopefully will flow better on the Post vs. Pages layout. And we’ll continue working on content until we can afford the upgrade to use plug-ins.