Bluehost Review

About Bluehost

Bluehost Hosting has been providing web hosting services to thousands of businesses and personal web sites since 1996. This puts Bluehost up there with some of the longest running hosting companies which should mean Bluehost won’t disappear overnight and take your valued web sites with them.

Bluehost Data Center

The hosting solutions provided by BlueHost are extremely reliable. They utilize world class technology. Hosting plans are hosted on high performance Intel Xeon Servers, they also utilize UPS Power Back-up as well as a Diesel Back Up generator at their datacenter. The network is monitored 24/7 to provide customers with even more peace of mind with their hosting services, this insures that your sites are online 24/7, and if a problem does occur, it is dealt with quickly. At BlueHost, they know that reliable services is the key to a host’s success and most importantly reliable services are what their customers demand.

Bluehost’s $6.95 Per Month Plan

Currently Bluehost is offering some very good features such as a free domain name to get you started, UNLIMITED storage, and UNLIMITED bandwidth per month, they also have free search engine submission, free keyword tools and free search engine position report to help you with getting a new web site off the ground and into the search engines to bring in customers, which is what it is all about, what good is a website if nobody ever visits.

Below are some of the standout features

Customer Support

Bluehost strive to provide the ultimate level of customer support. Their staff are friendly and are always available to help with any issues you have with your hosting. Whether you are a new customer or a long term customer they are ready to answer your questions and help you with any problems that you are having. Bluehost provide a support ticketing system, live chat and toll free telephone support.

From the Bluehost support page, customers can login to their account and manage their contact information and personal preferences. From the support page customers can view their support ticket history and submit new tickets. Also in the support page is a comprehensive knowledgebase with information that answers many common questions.

Bluehost Terms of Service

The Bluehost Terms of Service is a fairly straight forward document, there is little in the way of legal jargon, it has a list of the major common sense terms that customers need to adhere too at the beginning. The only point that stands out is “All activities may be monitored, recorded, and examined by any authorized person, including law enforcement”, but given the state of U.S. Law today, this is a standard clause for any U.S. based web hosting provider. The good thing about Bluehost terms of service is that it is clear and concise, and not many pages in length.

Control Panel & Scripting Support

Bluehost use cPanel like many other hosts. Over the years cPanel has proven itself to be a very user-friendly control panel, there is many articles available on its usage, so for a new user it should take very little time to come to grips with the interface. Typical of cPanel hosts, Bluehost supports addon domains. In our testing adding extra domains was a relatively simple affair and everything worked as expected without any issues. By default Bluehost does not offer SSH (shell access), but it can be enabled if you fax a copy of a suitable photo id, such as a driver’s license or passport. Since cPanel also includes Fantastico, installation of common scripts is made easy, requiring little user intervention during installation.

Conclusion

For an individual or small to medium business website, Bluehost is an excellent host. They provide a great service for customers who have a limited budget to spend on hosting each month but are looking for a highly reliable hosting solution. In our experience Bluehost has been a superb hosting provider, offering excellent technical support and high reliability which we can wholeheartedly recommend.

			FEATURES INCLUDED / ALL ACCOUNTS		INCLUDED
			Disk Storage (NOW MORE!)		Unlimited
			Host UNLIMITED Domains (WOW!)
			Free Drag and Drop Site Builder (NEW!)
			Free Domain Name
			Support International Domain Names
			POP3/POP3 Secure Email Support		2,500
			IMAP/Secure IMAP Email Support		2,500
			2 Different Web Based Email Solutions