How to Activate SSL certificate for BlueHost Hosting - 2021 Edition

SSL Security BlueHost Website Hosting (2021)

Bluehost is an officially recommended hosting company for the WordPress platform by WordPress.org. In recent times, it has also raised many questions from experts around the world about its contribution to the WordPress open source community.

Even I had a similar question until, during the 2015 State of the Word address, WordPress co-founder shared how Bluehost is tackling their 1.6 million outdated WordPress installation.

There are many takeaways here for all WordPress users and hosting companies. It is also a vote of confidence for existing Bluehost users.

Bluehost hosts about 2 million WordPress sites and in a recent audit they realized that almost 80% i.e. 1.6 million WordPress installations are outdated. This is a major security risk and one of the main reasons why WordPress sites on Bluehost are being hacked. Needless to say, a hacked site requires immediate support from a hosting company, which increases operating costs for the company and also creates negative social media emotions for any hosting company.

How did Bluehost handle the 1.6 million outdated WordPress installation?

To address this problem, Bluehost has written a Perl script that uses WP-CLI to update all WordPress sites. What’s interesting here is that it has also updated WordPress sites that are using a completely outdated version. If you’ve ever tried updating WordPress from 1.X or 2.x to the latest version, you would know it’s not as easy as the regular WordPress update we do.

This is what the Bluehost Perl script did which is also available for download as an open source tool on Github for other hosting companies.

The script first checked the status of the entire WordPress site.
Then backed up the whole site.
Runs all updates via WP-CLI
After the update is complete, it checks the script for errors such as a white screen of death.
If something appears to be broken, the script automatically restores the site from the backup.

It took them about 1 month to update all the sites and they have successfully updated 99% of the WordPress sites hosted on WordPress. Only 0.006% of the updated sites were dealing with the issue handled by the Bluehost support team.

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Another interesting thing you would want as a hosting company is; The request for technical support related to WordPress fell by 18%. This was mainly due to the site becoming secure with the latest version of WordPress and the plugin / theme compatibility issue gone.

from photomatt

Twenty-five percent of the internet runs on #WordPress.

CLICK TO TWO

You can watch the full presentation in the video below:

If you’re a hosting provider, you should get the best part of this post. Since WordPress powers 25% of the websites in the world, chances are; you may have a large number of users hosting WordPress based sites on your server. You need to make sure that your customers are using the updated version of WordPress and, if necessary, update the WordPress for your customers. I know SiteGround that also offers automatic updates for their WordPress customers. You can always use open source WordPress tools to roll out backup / update / restore on a large scale for your clients’ WordPress sites.

Bluehost has been an award-winning hosting provider for years and they also offer one free domain with every hosting plan. You can get a discounted price on Bluehost using the button below.

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Here are some of the best Bluehost + WordPress resources from ShoutMeLoud:

How To Buy Hosting And Get Free Domain From Bluehost
How To Create Your WordPress Blog On Bluehost In 5 Minutes
How To Manually Create Database On Bluehost Or any other cPanel hosting
How to Set Up Google Apps on Bluehost

Are you a hosting company? How do you deal with the outdated WordPress installations in your company? If you are a Bluehost user I would love to hear your feedback and experience with them.