Web Hosting: Bluehost Review
Monday, January 11th, 2010Bluehost is one of the oldest web hosting companies on the internet. They have repeatedly updated their hosting plan to include more features than their competitors. By keeping their old customers happy and by attracting new ones Bluehost has successfully grown into one of best known web hosts on the internet.
Bluehost hosting plan: Over the years Bluehost has been lowering the pricing of their hosting services considerably. In addition to being able offer cheap web hosting, Bluehost web hosting is very easy to use. Cpanel, the control panel that comes with their hosting plan, is widely recognized as the best control panel in the web hosting industry. The price to pay for Bluehost hosting is $6.95 per month if you take the two year contract. If you want a yearly contract instead, you’ll have to add $1 per month to the price.
The performance: Bluehost services lead other hosting company when we talk about performance. Though their advertised 99.9% uptime is not entirely met at the onset, but an average of 99.5% showed by a test account is not bad at all. It is important to note that the downtime decreases as your account get older. For a period of about 8 months, the downtime was noticed to have reduced from around 470 minutes to mere 1 minute. Interpreting this simply means that Bluehost services only gets better with time. The longer you stay with their services the better it gets.
Hosting features: When it comes to hosting features, Bluhost has always been in front of their competition by offering more features at a lower cost. Their hosting plan is extremely easy to administer using the best control panel in the hosting industry. The Bluehost hosting plan comes with unlimited storage space, unlimited monthly transfer and you can host unlimited number of domains on one account. The hosting plan comes also with PHP (including custom php.ini and .htaccess), MySQL and Shell access (SSH), a truly great feature for all advanced customers.
The help/Customer service: We have looked at the numerous sterling qualities that make Bluehost stand out but one thing is unfortunately lacking, their level of support to their customers is really not impressive. It has online chat room, which is common in the hosting industry, but the fact that they do not respond fast enough can be discouraging especially when you really need their help. Their 24/7 toll free service does not offer faster assistance too so you are advised to read their FAQ sections when you have some urgent concern.
Conclusions: As a conclusion to our Bluehost review, we can say that Bluehost is one of the best shared web hosting providers on the market. They have received a good number of positive reviews. Although their customer service could be better, they offer great value for money with their excellent web hosting plan. If you are looking for cheap shared hosting package with plenty of features, you should seriously consider Bluehost.
For more information see our full Bluehost Review and also visit our list of best affordable web hosting.