Before I get into this post I just want to make it clear to you that the purpose of my Bluehost review is to guide you in making an educated decision and to give you a basic idea on what an affordable and reliable web hosting service must offer.
Perhaps you’re just planning to start your first website or maybe you already have a couple of sites but you’re looking for a better alternative to your current hosting provider this review post will get you one step closer in achieving your goals.
I also want to let you know that all my websites are hosted with Bluehost ever since I created my first website about 1 and half years ago. I currently have 3 niche content sites and 2 e-commerce sites which together form the residual income streams I managed to build and grow for my self.
All the information I share in this post is based solely on my past and present experience with Bluehost.
Who is Bluehost?
Bluehost.com was founded back in 1996 by Matt Heaton, and it’s steadily earned it’s place among the most popular web hosting service companies. With over 850 new signups every day the company surpassed the 1 million hosted websites mark early on in 2009.
Bluehost Benefits
Bluehost offers it’s services for the price of $3.95/month for the 3 year plan and $5.95/month for the 1 year plan. The benefits you get with each hosting account are:
- Unlimited number of hosted domains
- Free domain name
- Unlimited add-on domains, parked domains and subdomains
- Unlimited FTP transfers
- Unlimited disk storage
- 1 Click install WordPress, forums, e-commerce, wiki sites, social bookmarking sites
- Free CDN from CloudFlare
- Unlimited email accounts
- 24/7 Chat, email and phone support
These are only some of the benefits that Bluehost provides to every hosting account. But let me take things a step further and show you what you can do on your hosting account.
1 Click Installations
1 Click installs is something that most of the top web hosting services offer.
But the difference between Bluehost’s 1 click install and the others is that it uses the Simple Scripts service instead of Fantastico.
Why is SimpleScripts better than the Fantastico installer?
Well, the fact is that SimpleScripts releases the required updates for the CMS’s they offer within the same day they appear on the official websites.
So let’s take for example the WordPress CMS. It’s current version is 3.51. If WordPress.org were to release the next update tomorrow you would see an alert message from SimpleScripts in your cPanel telling you that a new update is available.
But WordPress isn’t the only CMS with 1 click install that SimpleScripts offers. In fact you can have 1 click install forum websites, e-commerce sites, wiki sites, social networks, classified ads websites, RSS websites(think Alltop.com).
You can check out all of these options in the Bluehost demo cPanel. You will find a link to SimpleScripts under the Software/Services tab down the page.
Bluehost Webmail
If you have a website than you definitely need to have an email address ‘@yourdomain.com’.
With Bluehost you can create unlimited email accounts and you also have the opportunity to setup an autoresponder.
So, for example if someone sends you an email to your personalized email you can setup an autoresponder message to be delivered to the sender’s inbox telling them something, whatever you want.
I’m sure you’re familiar with receiving automated messages when submitting a support ticket for a service you use.
So that means you could create more custom email accounts like ‘[email protected]’, ‘[email protected]’, ‘[email protected]’, each sending an auto-reply email.
After you create a personalized email account with your domain name you can then forward it to maybe your Gmail account, your AOL email account or wherever you want. This way you will have a personalized business email address and still receive those emails in your personal email account.
Here is a detailed tutorial on how you setup your own Bluehost webmail.
Website Performance
A lot of people think shared hosting servers have minimal performance when it comes to website load times, but that is not the case here.
When you signup for a hosting account, in your Bluehost cPanel you have the opportunity to sign up for CloudFlare’s free CDN service.
Although it doesn’t compare with paid content delivery networks like MaxCDN or Amazon S3 it still provides a decent increase in website load times.
Here is a speed test I performed for my website just the other day using the GTMetrics free website speed test.
So as you can see my website loads pretty fast, and as I said I have 5 websites that are hosted on this hosting account.
If you don’t know how to configure your CloudFlare account, you can find detailed tutorials on how to setup CloudFlare for your Bluehost site right here.
Bluehost Login
A lot of hosting services provide you with a special URL you need to use in order to log into your cPanel, for example HostGator provides you with something like ‘http://gator1245.hostgator.com/cpanel’.
With all the services and accounts we use on the internet today it can sometimes be hard for us to remember all of these details(at least for me it is).
On the other hand if you go to Bluehost’s home page you will see right there on the top right a big ‘Control Panel Login’ button, which makes it very easy for you to log into your cPanel.
Who Recommends Bluehost?
Well you didn’t think I was the only person that recommended hosting your websites with Bluehost did you?
Here are some of the top CMS platforms that recommend Bluehost to their users:
1. WordPress.org
2. Drupal.org
3. Pligg.com
Pligg is a free open source CMS just like WordPress, only instead of creating blogs with the Pligg CMS you can create awesome social bookmarking websites. They too recommend Bluehost.
4. Zen Cart
Zen Cart is among the most popular open source e-commerce platforms that suggests Bluehost to it’s users. You have the ability to 1 click install Zen Cart on any website using the SimpleScripts installer from your cPanel.
My Own Experience with Bluehost
As I said in the beginning I’ve been hosting all my websites with Bluehost for about 1 and a half years.
I’m not saying the Bluehost is the perfect hosting service, I don’t think that, but so far I’ve been fortunate enough to not have any bad experiences with their service. The worst thing that happened to me so far was my experience with the WordPress white screen of death affecting this blog, which had nothing to do with my hosting provider, the cause of that being a WordPress theme I was using.
All the information I shared in this Bluehost review is based solely on my experience with what Bluehost has to offer and the features I’ve been using so far for my websites.
I’m 100% sure that there are other people who had bad experiences with their service but overall if you want an affordable and reliable web hosting service especially for small business websites I recommend that you go with Bluehost.
Before I end this post I just want to make sure that you are fully aware of the fact that the links in my Bluehost review post that point to Bluehost.com are my affiliate links. If you decide to sign-up for a hosting account through these links I will receive a commission without any extra cost to you. I want to let you know that I highly appreciate your support and I thank you for it.
What are your thoughts on reliable and affordable web hosting providers? Are you already using Bluehost to host your website? Did you go through any bad experiences with your current hosting service? Please share this in the comments bellow. I’m sure the people reading this review will highly appreciate it.
This is one great information. I am actually thinking of finding another web host for a new website I am planning.
Hi Jeremy, I’ve been using Bluehost for more than a year now and it’s been a stress free experience so far, I can definitely recommend going with them if you need a hosting service. Thanks for your comment and feel free to ask me any information you might need about Bluehost’s services.
Have a great day.
I’ve never used Bluehost, personally, but I have always heard good things about them.
“A lot of people think shared hosting servers have minimal performance when it comes to website load times… ”
Agreed. In truth, however, most shared hosting is actually faster than most VPS hosting. Shared hosting providers know in advance they will be getting thousands more customers, and they will be sharing resources, obviously, so they typically get the best equipment AND more of it right from the beginning.
The few shared hosts that are slow are typically because of a) incorrect server settings, and/or b) allowing too many resources on each server. Either way, though, that is the fault of the company, itself.
Hi Bradley, well it seems like you know your stuff when it comes to hosting. I’ve only used Bluehost so far and I’m very happy with their service. I can’t say much about other hosting providers other than the stuff I’ve read on other blogs.
Thanks for sharing this information Brad, have a great day.
Hi Philip,
I can appreciate this review because I’ve been using Bluehost since 2008. Now, I’ve always praised them and stand behind them even now.
There is a big but coming though.
If I were to go into everything that has taken place the last three and a half months you’d cringe. I’ll just be polite and say that their personnel had not been trained enough to handle the issues I was having so they just said it was their issue and sent me on my way.
I finally spoke with a supervisor last week and she apologized profusely telling me that their techs needed more training. Boy ain’t that the truth!
So like you said no one is ever perfect but I still stand behind them. I may have had to take more steps then normally in the past but they came through for me still. I applaud them and will continue to recommend them so I’m happy to hear you’re pleased with them as well.
~Adrienne
Hey Adrienne, I’m sorry to hear about your experience with their customer support and I would like to thank you for mentioning this. I’ve using Bluehost for a while now, actually more than a year but I think I’ve been very fortunate and not face any kind of bad experiences with their service.
I’ve been recommended to Bluehost by someone who I really look up to and so far I’m confident I’ve made the right decision.
Thank you for your comment Adrienne.Have a great week.
Hi Philip,
I’ve heard many good things about Bluehost just recently from what I have read online.
When I first went through the jungle of hosting services it was quite a challenge. I had to sort out a lot of the details on my own not understanding a bit of it.
What I faced was finding an affordable, stable and reliable hosting that would meet my budget and not drop the ball on me, so to speak.
After finding my current hosting service, which provided $7.95 per month – month to month service – and being able to talk to my Sales Rep or Tech Support person within 5 minutes, I was impressed.
My sites are online 24 / 7 / 365 with no glitches whatsoever. If I ever had any problems, my Tech Support person got it fixed right away.
And this all comes with unlimited bandwidth and space, cPanel for website management, and Softaculous for loading my WordPress sites from. Plus they are a Domain Registrar as well and those prices are affordable too.
Don’t think I will be switching anytime soon. Well you know, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is what comes to my mind.
I think you just get fortunate when you find a good service, then you usually stick with them. Especially after the last one I had froze one of my websites.
Hi Philip,
I heard that Bluehost is one of the best hosting service. But I am already using Hostgator and I’m pretty happy with them. The thing about Hostgator is, their customer service is just EXCELLENT. Since day one they supported me all the way. And so I’ll stay with them for awhile. Hope you have a blessed week, my friend.
Angela
Hi Angela, I’m glad you’re happy with your hosting service, it’s great when you find a service or product that does what it says which sometimes can be very rare. Thanks for your comment, best wishes.
Hi Philip,
Thanks for this review – I use Hostgator and at the moment I’m very satisfied with their service, but I’ve heard lots of good things about Bluehost too and would certainly consider them if I ever want an alternative hosting company,
Sue
I primarily use Bluhost with HostPopa as my backup. I host around 25 personal sites between them and Bluehost has never given me any issues.
Thanks for the interesting info.
Hi Phil,
This is the most detailed review on buehost I have ever read. You’ve done a great job man
Good luck
Wonderful website. Lots of helpful information here.
I’m sending it to several buddies ans also sharing in delicious. And certainly, thank you on your effort!