BlueHost Web Hosting Review

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Support:
Features:
Reliability:
Value:

IP Address	Service	Status	Response Time	Last Monitored
74.220.198.218	HTTP		0.152 secs	05-13-2008 22:10:00pm
74.220.198.218	HTTP		0.195 secs	05-13-2008 22:00:01pm
74.220.198.218	HTTP		0.191 secs	05-13-2008 21:50:00pm
74.220.198.218	HTTP		0.149 secs	05-13-2008 21:40:00pm

BlueHost.com Background

BlueHost has been established since 1996 providing web hosting services to both consumers and small businesses. Unlike many of its competitors, BlueHost offers only a one-size-fits-all plan that packs plenty of value for money. Although this has its pros and cons, it does make it a lot easier for those moms and dads out there who don’t know anything about web hosting to make a purchasing decision!

Signup Process

The signup process was very straight forward in that it asks you for an existing domain name or to register one if you do not currently have one. Since we already had a list of domain names we could use for testing web hosts, we chose the first option. The rest of the form involved us filling in our contact and payment information.

With any security conscious online business, BlueHost employs the use of SSL during the ordering process. This ensures all data sent across the Internet is encrypted including our credit card details. Once the signup was completed, we received an electronic receipt via e-mail. So far so good.

Price

Even though on the front page of the BlueHost’s website, it promotes the cost of its web hosting package at $6.95/month this is only a reality if you pay two years in advance. If you sign up for less than 6 months, you will also incur a setup fee of $30. We sincerely hoped BlueHost would be more upfront with their potential customers since you won’t notice this requirement till you actually signup.

Another feature BlueHost don’t advertise discretely with their free domain is that you will need to sign on for at least 12 months to not pay for the registration costs. However, if you remain with BlueHost, they will continue to pay for your registration.

Features

On first impressions, the features that really standout from the plan is the 4 gigabyte storage and the 100 gigabyte monthly transfer allowance. Unless you operate a bandwidth intensive website(s), a majority of consumers purchasing this plan will have plenty of legroom for growth. The plan comes with plenty of value as well with 2500 e-mail addresses and 50 MySQL databases.

With our account details at hand, we logged into the CPanel powered web based control panel. CPanel is a well recognised product in the server automation sector particularly being a very user friendly product. On the initial page, we were presented with an overview of the account including usage information and access to various other tools. Users who are used to Microsoft Windows environment will have no trouble navigating and enabling features they need. Everything is simple and self explanatory.

Support

Support is an area BlueHost can say it excels in. Through our first couple of months, we lodged numerous support tickets ranging from issues including script problems to database access difficulties. Four out of the five support tickets were responded to within an hour. There were even instances of follow up e-mails asking if we needed further assistance. Now, this is the level of service and support we expect from bigger companies but it seems BlueHost can equally match it.

Futhermore, they have an extensive knowledge base that you can search through if you want to help yourself. This is probably not for the newbie but for more experienced folks.

Network Reliability and Performance

According to our in-house monitoring software, during our two months of network testing, our website experience approximately only 10 minutes (or less) of downtime. This is quite outstanding considering the price of the web hosting plan and the low latency we experience from our test locations.

However, we did notice from our graphs that latency (response times) seems to rise quite significantly from 4pm to 1am on frequent occasions. Although this was expected during peak hours, it was the two to fourfold rises in latency that really concerned us. For most users, they will probably not notice it but from a technical standpoint, it is worth disclosing.

Summary

Our time with BlueHost was indeed a breath of fresh air in many regards particularly in the area of customer support and value for money. However, the advantage of offering a single plan is in its simplicity and cost control, it does force users who might require greater resources such as that of a VPS or dedicated server to migrate to another web hosting provider. For those who simply need a solid hosting provider then it is the ideal choice.

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