When the Basics Break: Why I Don’t Miss Traditional Hosting

The other day I helped a client with a WordPress site hosted on Bluehost—a massive, well-known hosting provider. Somewhere along the way, she’d managed to purchase two separate SSL certificates for the exact same domain, just a month apart.

That shouldn’t even be possible in 2025.

Any competent hosting dashboard should have caught it with something like:

“Heads up: you already have a valid SSL certificate for this domain. No need to buy another one.”

But nope. No warning. No guardrail. Just two paid certificates quietly set to auto-renew.

And here’s the part that really got me:

There was no visible way to turn off auto-renew from the dashboard. The button simply didn’t exist. I had to contact support, sit in chat, and wait while someone on the backend manually disabled it.

So… why make something so basic so difficult?

Is it an oversight? Maybe.

Is it a subtle little revenue strategy where frustration = profit?

I can only speculate—but let’s be real, it sure didn’t feel like a UX mistake.

For context: Bluehost is owned by Newfold Digital (formerly Endurance International Group), which itself is owned by private equity firms Clearlake and Siris Capital.

So yeah. That tracks.

Modern Tools Should Make Life Easier, Not Harder

This is exactly why every project I build at Emly uses free SSL through Let’s Encrypt—a nonprofit initiative that automatically issues and renews certificates without upsells, traps, or mysterious missing buttons.

And when you pair that with a Headless CMS and modern deployment workflows, you avoid these legacy hosting headaches entirely. No arbitrary upsells. No opaque settings. No confusing dashboards from 2009.

Just:

Free SSL by default

Cleaner builds

Faster sites

Simpler deployments

Real control without corporate trickery

Headless CMS → fewer headaches → happier clients.

It’s that simple.