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

It is also worth noting that Hostmonster will supply you with a free domain name if you sign up to their hosting plan. When compared to other web hosts, I usually find that there isn’t much difference when it comes to pricing – almost everyone seems to fall within the same pricing range give or take a couple of dollars. However, not all hosts will offer you a free domain name. A domain name may not cost much nowadays but it’s always nice to get something for free!

I am going to give the Host monster pricing a score of 4/5. I have gone for a 4 instead of the full 5 due to the $30 setup fees charged if you decide to sign up to a short-term contract. This is obviously not an issue if you plan on going for one of the longer-term plans but, if you are looking at a short-term solution, then you may find the $30 setup fee unacceptable. Having said that, if you are looking for a short-term contract, most web hosts will charge you a setup fee (like Hostmonster) or they will charge you a higher monthly rate.

Do also bear in mind that all hosting fees with Hostmonster need to be pre-paid. So if you sign up for 12 months you would pay a lump sum of $95.40 ($7.95 * 12) up front to receive the 12 months service. Unfortunately this now seems to be the normal way for web hosts to work, very few will offer you true “pay monthly” contracts any more so this isn’t specific to Hostmonster.

Hostmonster Review score for Pricing: 4/5

Reliability

An unreliable host can be a massive hindrance. When looking for a web host, one of the things you need to look for is reliability – this is also known as “uptime”. Back when I first started web design in 1997, uptime was a big problem. Technology was still trying to catch up with the .com boom and a lot of my sites frequently appeared “offline” to visitors. Thankfully, this is no longer a problem as hosts now use state of the art data-centres to house their servers. These servers are monitored 24/7 by fully qualified technicians that ensure your site stays online 99.9% of the time (the industry standard).

You will notice that I didn’t say 100% of the time. Even today, no host can claim to have your site online 100% of the time – they can’t account for fires, power cuts, natural disasters and such like. However, the hosts can protect you from hackers, DOS attacks and other forms of abuse that may result in downtime for your website. Hostmonster does this as well as anyone; server hardening has been performed and technicians are always on hand to cope with any problems quickly and efficiently. At the time of writing, my site has been online since early last year without any major outages. I have never noticed the site being down but obviously I don’t sit there hitting my F5 key 24 hours a day!

For the excellent uptime I have experienced whilst using Hostmonster I am going to give it 5/5. This is the highest score I can give and, in my opinion, it is fully justified. My site has been online for the best part of 18 months and I have suffered no downtime and no business has been lost.

*Update April 2008

Since writing the above, my site has been offline on one occasion. This was due to an apache upgrade but no warning was received and the sites were offline for around 24 hours according to visitors. So with that in mind, I’m chaning my score from 5/5 to the 4/5 listed below. I’m not saying that Hostmonster have suddenly become unreliable, far from it, but it was a bit of a headache whilst the apache upgrade was on going, it’s worth noting that since then the uptime has been fine.

Hostmonster Review score for Reliability: 4/5

Control Panel

I often feel that this is one of the most overlooked aspects of any web host. An easy-to-use control panel can save you hours of hard work. There are countless times I have been forced to stumble around a badly-designed control panel looking for features that might not even exist. Thankfully, Host monster uses the “cPanel” control panel. The “cPanel” is my personal favourite control panel, mainly for its pleasant appearance and its layout. Everything that you would possibly need to do can be done from the “cPanel” and can usually be reached within a couple of clicks.

The “cPanel” can be run in a number of different themes or “Skins”. Host monster have decided to use the “XP Revolution” skin. As the name suggests, this is designed to look like Windows XP. Whilst this isn’t my favourite Cpanel skin, it has proved popular with may users.

*Update April 2008

Since writing the above, Hostmonster have moved to the new “cPanel 11″ and no longer use the “XP Revolution” skin.

You can viewa screen shot of the Hostmonster cPanel below:

Another great thing about the cPanel is that it is one of the most widely used control panels on the internet. This means if you ever run into any problems or have any questions, then a simple search on google will return hundreds, if not thousands of results. This is a lot better than using a custom control panel that is very hard to navigate and understand. (I’m looking at you 1&1 and Godaddy!)

I am going to give the Hostmonster’s control panel another maximum score of 5/5. Mainly for the reasons I have stated above, when looking for a web host control panel you simply won’t find better than the “cPanel”. As you can probably tell I can’t speak highly enough of the cPanel and I commend Hostmonster for going down this route rather than the custom control panel route like so many hosts seem to do nowadays.

Hostmonster Review score for the Control Panel: 5/5

Features

It’s all well and good having a great pricing plan, control panel and uptime, but none if this matters unless the hosting plan has the features you need. As far as features go, you will find it difficult to top Hostmonster’s package. Here is a breakdown of what I feel are the most important parts of the Host monster package:

• 200 GB Disk Space
• 2,000 GB of Bandwidth (per month!)
• Host unlimited Domains
• Free Domain name
• Fantastico
• 100 MYSQL Databases
• PHP4 and PHP5 Support (You choose)

The first two bullet points are the first things you should look for in a host. This is the amount of disk space and bandwidth you will receive. 200 GB of Disk Space and 2,000 GB of Bandwidth will be more than enough for any website, even one packaged with multimedia files! I run a number of sites on my package and I have never come anywhere near my disk space or bandwidth allowance.

The next thing on the list is the Hostmonster “Deal Clincher” for me. Host monster is one of the only web hosts I have come across that allows you to host an unlimited number of domains. If you have more than one website, then you really need to look at how many domains a host will allow you to run from the one account. As I said, Hostmonster allows you to run an UNLIMITED number of domains on the one hosting account. This means that you will be saving a fortune in extra hosting costs as you will be able to run all of your websites from the one hosting account.

The free domain name feature is one I have already mentioned in the pricing section so I am going to skip that. The next thing on my list is “Fantastico”. Fantastico is a great little add-on that comes with your cPanel and it allows you to install a number of popular web scripts via a simple wizard. So, if you are planning to run a blog, guest-book, helpdesk, image gallery or any other script on your site then Fantastico will be able to do the installation process for you, no messing around with databases or permissions, just follow a simple wizard!

The final two points to review may not be relevant to you, but if you are planning to run a script on your website then the chances are that it will need to use a MYSQL database. Thankfully, Hostmonster provides customers with 100 MYSQL databases with their hosting plan, so you won’t have any problems running your scripts. The final point is also for those of you who wish to run scripts. Some scripts will only run on a certain version of PHP (usually 4 or 5) and Hostmonster actually let’s you choose which version of PHP to run – it is the only host I have come across that gives you such freedom.

With the amount of features offered for this amazing price, I feel that I have no choice but to give Hostmonster another 5/5. There are lots of web hosts out there to review that offer great deals and Hostmonster defiantly falls into that category. You will be hard pressed to find another host that gives you as many features for the small price you pay for the hosting.

Hostmonster Score for Features: 5/5

Support

Last, but not least, I look at the single most important aspect behind any good webhost – the support system! Before you sign up to any web hosting program you should make sure that you know what type of support is available to you and how helpful that support is going to be when you do need to use it. I always send a test email with a general hosting question BEFORE I sign up with anyone – that way you can check too see how fast the response time is and how helpful the support is.

I did this test with Hostmonster and am pleased to say that they passed with flying colours. First of all I emailed them a rather technical question via their helpdesk; I asked them about ION CUBE (a PHP encryptor) and if they allowed you to edit the php.ini files. Within 2 hours my question had been answered by a friendly, competent technician and he even offered to do any ION CUBE installations for me if I had any problems.

I sent my second enquiry to the “affiliate” department. I asked them about the differences between their own in house affiliate program and why they also used Commission Junction. Again, I got a reply within two hours and the response was friendly and efficient.

The email support is great, but there are times when you may need to get in touch with them as a matter of urgency. So it’s important to make sure there is phone support available as well as email. Again, Hostmonster provides you with great toll free phone support. Thus, my advice would be to ‘phone them before joining and ask them a few basic hosting questions, just to see what their response is like! All the contact information is detailed below, so you could even try them out right now!

Toll Free Phone Support – (866) 573-4678
Live Chat and Email Help

To conclude, I am going to give the support for Hostmonster a rating of 5/5. It’s another maximum score but you can’t fault them on their speed, knowledge and friendliness. Just give them a call for yourselves or send them an email and you will see what I mean. You will be amazed at the response time. A lot of other big hosts take up to 48 hours to reply to emails. It’s refreshing to come across a web host that replies to you within a couple of hours. It reminds me of the good ol’ days!

*Update April 2008

As I mentioned earlier, the apache upgrade meant that I needed to contact support. Unfortunatelty a lot of other customers had the same idea so the helpdesk took longer to reply than normal. I did however call the support line via Skype and managed to get through to a “real person” who fixed my problem in less than 10 minutes. However, for the longer than usual helpdesk reply I’m going to take off a point!

Hostmonster rating for Support: 4/5

Conclusion

In closing, I would like to thank you for reading my Hostmonster review, I hope that you have found it helpful and I hope you are now able to make an informed decision about which web host to use. It goes without saying that I would definitely recommend Hostmonster to any of my friends, family or future clients and if you decide to go down that route, I’m sure you will be delighted also. As you can see from the final score below, I was very impressed!

Many thanks for reading this Hostmonster Review, I hope that your quest to find a new web host is a successful one!

Visit Hostmonster Now!!

Administering and managing websites might sound like a tough task that requires a myriad of professional knowledge about servers and networking. However, this does not apply to hosting services that are powered by cPanel. Just as its name suggests, cPanel is a web-based web-hosting control panel with a really user-friendly and straightforward interface designed to make website administration easier.In this article, we’re going to give a brief overview of the front ends that cPanel offers for server maintenance, such as administration of e-mail accounts, FTP, sub-domains, parked domains, file managers, archive of logs and statistics, SQL databases, redirects, CGI scripts, PGP keys, cron jobs, SSLs, indexes, and so forth.

Keep in mind that the scope of this article is not documenting the use of cPanel. Actually, there are already dozens of guides and tutorials on that topic; still, the best place to start learning cPanel is always the official documentation, which is located here. If this does not satisfy your needs, then check the frequently asked questions. You may also search Google for tutorials regarding your issue or just contact technical support.

This article focuses on pointing out the “things” that can be done with the help of cPanel, rather than explaining “how to” do a particular task. However, the latter cannot be excluded entirely because the user interface of cPanel is so intuitive that presenting an overview of particular tasks will help you realize how to approach resolving those administration-specific tasks.

First, we’ll see what cPanel is all about and how it has become the most popular and reliable web hosting control panel in the world. Then we’re going to talk about accessing cPanel in order to use its administrative front ends. These days, cPanel is almost always taken for granted with commercial web-hosting services; due to its popularity and usefulness, customers pretty much expect cPanel.

Sure, if you are running your own web server, then cPanel might not appeal to you. Chances are you won’t need it, and acquiring a license for personal use isn’t that easy. Even so, non-profit organizations and charities can contact cPanel and request a license for a reduced priced or even for free.

All of this being said – let’s begin.

The Beginning

The original author of cPanel is J. Nick Koston. The cPanel project started out in 1997 and was destined to be a main control panel for Speed Hosting. The author himself also had a stake in this company. After a relatively short time, the company merged with Web King. Due to some agreements, cPanel was available exclusively to networks hosted by Virtual Development Inc [VDI].

Apparently, there were some internal problems between the author, J. Nick Koston, and VDI. Consequently, the project was split into two independent applications: cPanel and WebPanel. The latter was run by VDI, while cPanel remained with its leading author. Ultimately, cPanel was vastly improved during the first two years, while VDI’s WebPanel variation failed.

The author focused totally on improvement and turned cPanel into a world-class, web-based web hosting control panel. It became “contrasted” and “extended” with Web Host Manager (WHM), which is a powerful and reliable utility used to manage and administer hosting accounts on a web server. This is critical in the case of resellers.

(Image Courtesy of cPanel, Inc.)

Another important thing that cPanel does to stand out compared to other web-hosting control panel alternatives is manage software packages on its own. cPanel can update Apache, MySQL, PHP, and other server-side applications to ensure that they are up-to-date and that bugs and security holes are fixed and patched.

Last, but definitely not least, we must point out that cPanel runs on various Linux distributions, such as Fedora, Red Hat, SuSE, FreeBSD, and so forth. You won’t see this with servers running on Microsoft Windows. The authentication is secured with SSL (on port 2083) and administrators with the necessary permissions can just log in via a simple web browser.

Let’s see how we can access cPanel. For the sake of simplification, let’s assume that you’ve just purchased the following “hostname.com” website. We’ll also assume that you’ve opted for a domain. We all know that it takes a few hours until the domain names are resolved. Thus, during the first few hours, you can only access your website (including your cPanel) via the direct IP address.

Accessing your cPanel can be done by typing the following URL into your favorite web browser: “hostname.com/cpanel“. If your hostname isn’t resolved yet, then it should be something like the following: “XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/cpanel” where those Xs stand for the IP address of the server. Don’t worry; you are always informed of the IP address of the server and the login information for your cPanel.

In case you were given a randomly generated password, it is more than recommended that you change it. Lately, however, companies tend to automatically set  cPanel’s login information to the same username and password that you registered while signing up to purchase the specific plan.

Now that you’re in, let’s check out the dozens of front ends and supported features.

Functions and Features

First of all, before we begin, let’s glance at the attached screen shot below. That’s how the main control panel of cPanel looks. It has plenty of “icons,” right? Each of them is a front end for a particular server-side administration or maintenance task. We’re going to enumerate and give a basic overview of each of them.

The first thing you notice is the way cPanel displays two panes. The left column contains general information about your account, the server on which your site is hosted, and some brief statistics about your monthly bandwidth and storage status. The right column is the larger one, and it’s where you can access various administrative tasks. Basically, that’s where all the maintenance happens.

Think of it like this: the left part is the information section, while the right section is where the actions is. At the top right corner of cPanel you can see the Home and Logout buttons. These are omnipresent, so you can always do either of these actions regardless of the menu you are in.

Now let’s explore the icons. The first one stands for actions related to Mail. This is where you add, remove, manage e-mail accounts, set up forwarders, mailing lists, auto-responders, configure email filters and anti-spam functions, etc. Then you have the Webmail option, which is basically a web-based email client. Nonetheless, it’s rather minimalist compared to a stand-alone desktop email client, but it works decently.

We’re going to skip naming and describing the self-explanatory front-ends, such as changing passwords or the ones related to statistics. There are lots of fancy FTP and Web statistics, so check them out! Oh, and by the way, you can access webmail without entering cPanel by pointing your web browser to hostname.com/webmail.

Here at the control panel you can manage your domains too. You can add parked domains, which are other additional domain names that can be set up to redirect to your current hosting account. At addon domains, you can configure new domain names that link to certain sub-folders on your account. You can also create sub-domains, which are basically prefixes to your current hostname, such as “tony.hostname.com.”

You can manage your MySQL databases through cPanel. Some of the tasks that you can do with existing databases are “delete,” “check,” and “repair.” You can create new users and new databases, set up other access hosts, and add specific users to your databases. Also, there’s PhpMyAdmin, which is a tool that allows MySQL database management in an effective web environment. It is definitely very useful!

The control panel also sports a feature-laden File Manager. It is a simplistic web-based FTP-like client. It doesn’t work through the FTP protocol (port 21), but it surely looks like one. Most importantly, you have full access to the whole root of your site (since you are logged in as an administrator in cPanel). You can also password protect some directories. Disk Space Usage and Backups are self-explanatory, again.

At Error Pages you can customize your error pages, such as the typical 400, 401, 403, 404, and 500 ones (bad request, unauthorized access, forbidden, wrong page, internal server error, respectively). You can also set redirects. For example, typing “hostname.com/blog” would always redirect to “hostname.com/blog_index.php.”

Some interesting features are the Chatroom and PhpMyChat, especially if you want to create something that resembles the decades-old and outdated IRC. You can also set up a bulletin board (based on YaBB), Agora Shopping Cart (important for eCommerce websites), and then you have the CGI Center and Scripts Library. These let you manage, install, and work with CGI and other add-on scripts.

Newcomers to cPanel who are not familiar with UNIX systems often wonder what cron jobs are all about, so let’s briefly explain. The best way to imagine cron jobs are as scheduled tasks. Cron is a time-based schedule in UNIX-like operating systems. A job represents a task. So basically, you can specify which shell commands (or entire scripts) are to be executed periodically on a given schedule.

At Network Tools, you have utilities, such as trace route and domain lookup. These are handy in particular situations. The MIME Types part is important if you know what you are doing; if you don’t know what they are, then chances are you don’t need them. Here you can specify user-defined types and modify system-defined ones.

Jokes aside, at MIME types you can specify the way file types are going to be interpreted by your web browser (i.e. “.doc” extension should be linked with “application/msword”). MIMEs are part of the Internet standard that extended e-mail support. Should you want to read more about this, I suggest checking Wikipedia.

Apache Handlers are similar to MIME types, but there’s a significant difference. Apache handlers specify what Apache, the open source HTTP web server, should do with certain files. So basically, this is the place where you can tell your web server what to do when it comes in contact with particular file types/extensions.

The final front ends to mention are the following: Manage OpenPGP Keys, HotLink Protection, Leech Protection, Index Manager, SSL Manager, and IP Deny Manager. PGP keys are sported by GnuPG, which is a free open source alternative based on OpenPGP standards. You can create public and private keys. The protection front ends can restrict users from publicly giving out their passwords (leech) and prevent others from stealing your bandwidth (called hot-linking).

The Index Manager is where you can turn indexing on or off. Without having an index file at a certain directory, users won’t be able to see its content. Once it is indexed, the index file is generated. At the SSL Manager, you can generate keys, sign requests, and SSL certificates. This is really important if you need them!

Ultimately, we must not forget about Fantastico de Luxe. It is a cPanel/PHP-based web-based application that fully integrates with cPanel. There’s no guarantee that your hosting provider supports it, but there is a high possibility, since it is an amazing wizard that helps users (clients) automatically install open source web applications on their website. Lately, it has gained a lot of popularity.

The beauty of Fantastico is that it executes the necessary installation scripts, sets up MySQL databases, imports structure, and chmods the required files and directories. Each action is thoroughly reported to the user in a straightforward manner. Installing applications, such as phpBB2, PHP-Nuke, Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress, 4images Gallery, customer support systems, PHPWiki, and dozens of others has never been easier.

Final Words

Thanks for sticking with us during this cPanel overview article. We hope that you’ve found it informative and educational. By now you should be feeling up-to-date with the latest web-hosting control panels, because the world of commercial web hosting services revolves around cPanel. They have been the leader in this area for about a decade.

If you are looking for a web space and you’d rather pay for a commercial and professional hosting company that can provide you with a plan that fits your needs, instead of running your own server, then don’t be afraid, because administering your website won’t be hard at all. You may want to double-check whether cPanel is included in your specific plan at your hosting company; chances are that it is.

cPanel was designed with the end-user in mind. Therefore, managing your own web space isn’t a black art anymore; it can be done by anybody, even those with limited knowledge of computers. As long as you have a basic understanding of the features that you want to use and a strong all-around grasp on the technicalities of the Web (which is also documented and can be learned by anyone), then you’ll be fine.

I also want to point out that the technical support of commercial web hosting companies does (depending on how “professional” the company is) an exceptional job helping you out whenever you’re facing dilemmas or struggling to get something fixed. You are a paying customer; it’s their duty to provide top-notch assistance on a 24/7/365 basis, or otherwise specified. All in all, don’t hesitate to contact them and ask for help.

Oh, and you should also join our ever-growing community at DevHardware Forums. That place is an online shelter for many experts, professionals, and enthusiasts in the fields of computer hardware, software, and consumer electronics, but let me tell you that we also know web-related stuff. Feel free to join.