Bluehost Review

Bluehost has been in the web hosting business since 1996. As of July 2010, Bluehost has over 2.2 million domains hosted on their servers. They are the 10th largest hosting company in the world and are one of the fastest growing web hosting companies.

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Rating: 3.9/5 (10 votes cast)

Website: http://bluehost.com

Bluehost Web Hosting Plans

Bluehost only offers a single shared hosting plan, and it requires a yearly upfront payment at a rate of $6.95/mo. There is no setup fee, and they offer a FREE domain name when you sign-up with them. The Bluehost webhost plan offers unlimited diskspace, unlimited domains and unlimited bandwidth.

Bluehost uses the popular cPanel control panel for managing your website. Here’s a look at their branded cPanel from my own account.

BlueHost cPanel

I like the version of cPanel that they are using because you can drag around the different panels and organize it in a way that works best for you. Bluehost offers simple 1 click installs of many popular web scripts including WordPress, ZenCart, phpBB using the SimpleScripts installer. For developers, Bluehost also supports the popular Ruby on Rails web framework.

BlueHost Resource Protection

The main big issue with shared hosting is that one bad site or application on your shared server can cause problems for your own sites. That’s why Bluehost has developed its own proprietary solution for protecting your hosting resources that gives you VPS/dedicated hosting protection for a shared hosting price.

  • CPU and Memory Protection – Protects your site from other sites on your server that may be hogging CPU time or memory on your server. This means better uptime and performance for your own sites.
  • Bandwidth Compression – Customers should see a 10-25% decrease on their site load times.
  • Completely transparent and FREE – Works automatically for all Bluehost customers.

BlueHost does have a 50,000 inode (file) limit on your account. This should be fine for people with only a few sites, but something to keep in mind if you are planning on hosting many sites on your Bluehost account.

Bluehost Support

Bluehost offers 24/7 support via email, live chat and phone. You can easily find the Bluehost support number on the front page. You can also get your questions answered over at the Bluehost Forum.

—>> Click Here To Visit Bluehost

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Tagged as: shared hosting

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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }

Kim S October 24, 2010 at 4:59 pm
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I’ve been with Bluehost for the past year and they are decent. I’ve had a couple of instances of downtime, but nothing too bad.

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anonymous November 14, 2010 at 5:15 pm

Seems like just daily maintenance has been “termed” abusive. I have been hosting my websites at BlueHost for 3 years now, and I do not consider myself an abusive user however, lately anything I do including routine maintenance causes BlueHost servers to over throttle an lock my account. The claim of “Unlimited space” is also false advertising. My sites recently went over 3GB (6 sites combined) and my account was locked until I freed up space. The advertisements say “Unlimited” but the “terms” say otherwise and, you will get a nasty email quoting the terms you probably didn’t know existed because like me you didn’t read them. The trade off for using a cheap hosting company like BlueHost is that you get what you pay for: “limited, slow and hassles but cheap”.

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Chris November 14, 2010 at 6:59 pm

Unfortunately, this is not a Bluehost specific thing. It pretty much applies to any shared web hosting provider. There really is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth or unlimited diskspace, but unfortunately every shared web host advertises this.

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bluehost user November 18, 2010 at 1:07 am
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Eventhough their technical support representative is friendly. I contacted them about what seems to be complicated/advanced problem. six of their representative was either unable to present solution or had made assumption solutions which did not fix the problem. 8 hour of email/telephone marathon ensued, escalating all the way to manager. Turns out the manager knew the solution.

Caveat Emptor: expect to waste time in getting the complicated/advanced problem fixed.

I even filed complaint direct with the company about this hiding the information. their response is in fashion of an denial by parroting the solution that the manager knew back to me. very UNPROFESSIONAL.

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Veronica January 20, 2011 at 7:25 pm
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I am an entrepreneur who runs a personal business site and I have nothing but positive things to say about bluehost.com. Bluehost has everything I could ask for in a domain host, plus more. Like most web hosts, bluehost offers MySQL databases (which I require for running my customer forum) and blog support (I post my updates through WordPress). Bluehost supports a wide variety of scripts, which is useful because I frequently incorporate applications into my site that run on Javascript, Flash, Ruby, and Shockwave. All of these features, plus more, made me consider bluehost as my host, but what really drew me to bluehost was their 24/7 US-based support system and their SSH Secure Shell Access. These two features allow me to make sure that my customers always receive successful and secure service. I highly recommend bluehost if you are looking to start your own business, or already have one and need a great web host!

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Nik January 24, 2011 at 5:59 pm
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Having used Bluehost for the past 4 years I’m surprised at the number of negative reviews here. I have several domains, databases, blogs, image galleries, etc. and all have been running fine. There have been a couple brief outages. Customer service and technical support were both excellent. I was able to talk to a person quickly and they helped me out within a few minutes. I am not a full-time web developer. I basically run my site as part of my business, but I have helped out associates with their websites and have found their web hosts to be a real pain compared to Bluehost. With Bluehost all my installed apps and scripts work like a charm. I would recommend Bluehost

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Mike January 31, 2011 at 12:12 pm
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My original price was $6.95 a month, every year after it went up a $1.00 per month. Last renewal it was $8.95 a month paid in advance. I used their service for 2 years. According to who was in the tech department would be how helpful or non helpful they were. For example, I downloaded a wordpress script from them, with spy ware. I asked for help to remove the spyware/trojan, of course I got their standard answer, “Use a different browser.” (hmm-how does that help remove spyware/trojan?) I had an IT guy check out the site and the trojan attacked his computer too. Yet Bluehost tech which is customer support also, said we needed to use another browser. Last time I called Bluehost to assist with my sites, the tech told me to take all my sites (18) and move to a different host. I did.

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Wes51 February 1, 2011 at 1:35 am
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I have used Bluehost for over 12 months and have been very happy with the service they provide. For the money you get extremely good value – I host over 10 sites on the one account and have never had any problems with being told that I have gone over resource limits or used too much bandwidth. I have only needed to contact support a few times and they were always very quick to respond and help solve the issues, although it has to be said they were quite simple problems.

The only negative – sometimes my sites load quite slowly although this is to be expected sometimes with shared hosting.

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C. Kevin Barrett August 5, 2011 at 11:15 pm
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I like how the “Automatic Renew” button automatically re-checks itself after paying manually (nice, huh? — Steve at Customer Service says this is how it is supposed to work, ie – you can’t opt to just pay manually) — for me it hit an account which was closed. When I reversed the charges they shut down my domain and kept all my data citing their service agreement. After that they said that the only way they would even speak to me about the situation was if I sent in a photocopy of my drivers license and credit card, because for some reason they had decided they needed to verify my identity (which had already been done on the phone, BTW). Long and short of it — they kept my data, and I got hit with $100 worth of bank charges.

What can I say? You get what you paid for — bad customer service and a complete lack of respect for its customers, plus an automatic renewal feature that borders on fraudulent. In case your wondering, they’re out of Provo UT; the address is 1958 S 950 East Provo, UT 84606 — just in case you need to make a call to the Utah Attorney General’s office….

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