Bluehost Down Again

Firstly, let’s be perfectly clear about this, nobody pays money to be in any list on WordPress.org. Okay? Okay.

Second, we do have a list of commercial theme providers, right here: https://wordpress.org/themes/commercial/

There’s fairly strict requirements to be on that list, and we verify those companies individually when they request being added to it, and we go back and verify changes from time to time and remove companies when they no longer fit them.

Thirdly, any list of any kind is going to be opinion based, by its very nature. And people are going to have different opinions. I use DreamHost myself, but it takes little to no effort to find people who say it sucks on forums all over the web. Again, their opinion is as valid as my own, because it’s just an opinion. Any list is naturally subjective in nature, and some will agree with it and some will disagree with it.

However, just because no list will get 100% support from all parties reading it, does that mean we should not have them? New users wanting to use WordPress need hosting. Now, no hosting is ever going to be absolutely perfect for everybody. That much is obvious. But pointing out a few of them that we know are pretty good, which have support personnel that participate in the community in some way, which support WordPress and have extensive knowledge of it, this seems like a good idea.

You think BlueHost’s support sucks. That’s fine. But they do have good people working there, they participate in these forums helping out, they have decent enough pricing, and yeah, everybody’s tech support sucks sometimes. That’s not a valid reason for us to just close up shop and say “welp, you’re on your own with hosting, best of luck to ya!”.

Even a guide on how to choose a host would, by default, need to include a list of hosts. When you’re talking about users coming to WordPress who don’t even know what a “host” actually is, then you kind of have to give them a push in some direction.

Yes, we recommend hosts. We also recommend themes, plugins, places to get support, places to read about specific topics, and all sorts of other things. This is a community of people who often make recommendations. We’re not about to shy away from that and bland down everything into something everybody can agree on.

Some like Coke, some like Pepsi. Disagreement is part of being in a community and a vital part of the process of creating anything, be it software or soft drinks.

And don’t worry. We’ll change the lists as needed, when we think it is necessary to do so.

But there’s the rub: this is, indeed, an extremely short list, given the hundreds of hosting companies out there

I agree, it should have a few more. And it probably will, eventually. For now, this is what we got.

You’re criticizing a list for being too short when the list is literally less than a week old. We don’t wait until things are perfect before starting to make them.

and it appears there is only one important criteria for getting on the list

There are actually quite a number of criteria for getting on that commercial themes list. The GPL line is really there to prevent every single theme company out there from asking us to put them on that list. Some of those criteria are having a professional looking website, having visible support information, having a free theme in our directory that is less than a year old, giving us a decent haiku… Basically, it’s a manually curated and vetted list. Being 100% GPL is our big and important one, which weeds out the chaff.

they most certainly have lousy process. Don’t take my word for it

That was sort of my point. We don’t have to take *anybody’s* word for it. Everybody has their opinions. Every host has people who say they suck. That’s part of being a webhost.

I get that you feel strongly about this. That’s fine. Feel free to criticize the choices all you like. I’m just telling you why it’s there, what I think, and that I personally disagree with you about this. I like the list. I want more hosts on it. I want hosts to aspire to be on it. I want them to run newer versions of PHP by default. I want their hosting services to be good, fast, affordable, and widely available. You can disagree with those particular four choices all you like, but the purpose of having the list is a good one, regardless of who is currently on it after over a year of it being basically missing.

Everything starts somewhere. Might as well be here, now.

Edit: Also, I just noticed this is somebody else’s support post in the how-to forum, that we’ve now hijacked. For that reason alone, I’m closing this post.