Bluehost is by far the cheapest and popular web hosting company for bloggers. You can easily purchase a hosting plan for less than $3 per month and setup your WordPress blog in minutes. If you want to close the account after using some time, do not forget to disable the auto renew billing. In this article, we will explain how to cancel auto renew billing in Bluehost hosting.
Related: All you should know before upgrading Weebly account?
Renewal Prices in Bluehost
Bluehost offers four plans under the shared hosting section. The lowest plan is called “Basic” which will cost you $2.95 (or similar).
However, many bloggers overlook in this initial offer price and make a mistake.
- First, the initial offer price is valid for 36 months which is a 3 years contract. Though you can use the money on monthly pro rate basis when upgrading the plan, you will lose the money in case if you want to terminate the plan before 3 years.
- Similar to any other web hosting companies, the renewal rate is much higher than the initial offer. It mentions normally $8.99, however, this is also for 36 months contract. This means after paying $2.95 per month for 3 years, you need pay $8.99 for another 3 years term.
- As you can see below the “Select” button, the plan will auto renew at regular rate.
- You will notice a small star on the price tag. Scroll down to bottom of the page to find the meaning of that star. You will find a message saying “Promotional price is for the first term only and renews at the regular price” in small font.
- Click on the “regular rate” link to view the details. Here you can clearly see the renewal price for yearly, 2 years and 3 years plan. You should pay $9.99 per month, for renewing the basic plan for a year.
3 Points to Take
Many bloggers promote Bluehost for affiliate commission and you should not overlook these available details clearly available on the pricing page. Basically, below are the three points you should take:
- All plans are auto renewing
- Initial offer is for 3 years contract term
- Renewal rate is almost 300% higher than the initial offer price
The major problem here is the auto renewal. For example, if you forget to cancel the auto renewal option for basic plan, you will end up in paying $8.99*36= $323.64. Though Bluehost will send email reminders before billing, many people change the email or ignore in hurry.
Why You Should Cancel Auto Renewal?
There are two major reasons you should be interested in cancelling the auto renewal settings in Bluehost.
- You are not happy with them and want to migrate to other service provider in-between the contract term.
- Your current contract term is going to expire and you want to move to another service provider to avoid over paying to Bluehost which is a good solution in many cases. For example, instead of paying the renewal rate of $8.99 for 36 months, you can migrate your site to DreamHost and pay $2.59 per month.
If you are in one of the above situations, make sure to disable the auto renewal before you quit.
How to Cancel Auto Renew in Bluehost?
Bluehost will charge your card around 15 days before the expiry date of current plan. In order to avoid billing your credit card, we recommend you to change the auto renewal settings to manual renewal. Or you can disable the renewal completely.
- Login to your Bluehost account
- Click on your account profile icon on top right corner and choose “Products” option.
- This will take you to “My Products” tab which will show all purchased products with Bluehost under your account. Click on “Renew” button against the web hosting plan that you want to stop auto renewal.
- On the next screen, you will see the auto renewal option was the one selected by default. You can view the expiration date of current plan and the tentative auto renewal date.
- Choose “Manual Renew” if you want, otherwise select “Do not renew” option for cancelling the auto renewal.
- When you choose “Do not renew” option, Bluehost will show you a pop-up with customer care phone number. If you are interested, call the given number and check with them whether the renewal price can be reduced or try to solve your other problems.
- If you do not want to call the customer care number and decided to cancel auto renewal with Bluehost then simply close that pop-up. Next, you have to choose a reason for cancelling the billing. You will see a huge list of reasons and choose the best cause for your case.
- For example, you can choose “Unhappy with the renewal pricing” and click “Continue” button.
- Bluehost will show another warning pop-up indicating you to take care of domain and other stuffs connected to hosting plan. Click on “OK” button to confirm the cancellation of auto renewal.
- You will see the current plan details with an expiry date as below. Bluehost will also send an email to your indicating the renewal will be cancelled.
Remember, manual renew and do not renew are similar options that you have time till the expiry of your current hosting plan. You can also change your mind anytime later and reset the settings back to auto renewal.
Refund on Renewals
One good part with Bluehost is that they offer refund on renewals also. Below is the information on their knowledgebase:
If a customer is contacting us within 15 days of their renewal date (30 days after the bill date), agents can make an exception and issue a refund to the customer. However, offers billed on a monthly term are not refundable.
You will not get refund for some add-ons like SSL and you can check the complete refund policy retails here.
Final Words
Higher renewal price is one of the biggest problems with Bluehost and many other shared hosting companies. When promoting these shared hosting companies, many bloggers do not explain these details causing financial loss to buyers. We hope this article helped you to cancel auto renewal for your hosting plan that expires before charging of your credit card.
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