Bluehost Review
Bluehost is one of the strongest web hosting companies in the world and it is hosting more than 1 million of domains at the time of writing. However, do you have any idea on their hosting performance? Is Bluehost really a good hosting despite its popularity? As a smart consumer, we understand that popularity does not mean quality. Therefore this Bluehost review serves to help you identifying its quality.
I have decided to review Bluehost web hosting based on the following criterion
Pricing
Hosting plan: Only plan
| Subscriptions | Price |
| 3 Months | $9.95/mo ($30 Setup + $10 domain) |
| 6 Months | $9.95/mo ($30 Setup + $10 domain) |
| 12 Months | $7.95/mo (Free Setup & Domain) |
| 24 Months | $6.95/mo (Free Setup & Domain) |
| 36 Months | $6.95/mo (Free Setup & Domain) |
With the only hosting plan, Bluehost offers 5 types of contracts with different pricing as shown in the table above. If you were to sign up 3 months with Bluehost, the one shot payment will be 3 x $9.95 + $30 +10 = 69.85. If you were to sign up 6 months plan, just change the multiplier 3 to 6. In fact the price for 3 months and 6 months is a bit pricy as compared to their 12 months subscriptions. A total payment of 12 x $7.95 = $95.4 and you will get 1 year hosting plan with free domain and free setup. It’s quite obvious that Bluehost encourage a longer contract term.
The pricing of Bluehost is not the cheapest in the industry at the moment but it is considered very reasonable for their 12 months plan.
Hosting Features
Below is a screen shot on the hosting features of Bluehost. You can access the full version by going to the “Hosting Features” link on the top left of Bluehost homepage.
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| More @ Bluehost |
Bluehost has the weirdest strategy which provides only 1 hosting plan. Whether you are hosting a hobbyist blog or internet business, you go with it. However, the Bluehost hosting plan is considered as comprehensive as it consists of most of the features that a blogger or business owner needs.
In term of storage wise, Bluehost offers unlimited storage space. You are also allowed to have unlimited add on domains in 1 account. By adding in additional domain, you can build another individual website. This makes you able to host as many website as you want in 1 hosting account. Of cause you need to pay for your additional domain name. Bluehost also allows subscribers to build as much as 100 MySQL and 100 PostgreSQL database. In term of technology wise, Bluehost use high performance servers that equipped with Quad processors, UPS and diesel generator power backup, OC-48 backbone connection and etc. Perhaps this is the reason for their stable uptime.
Overall, the Bluehost hosting features is pretty standard. Whether it is for business or personal, Bluehost is considered a budget web hosting covering all.
Script Library & cPanel
cPanel is a Window like interface control panel to manage your web hosting and it is perhaps the best hosting control panel you could find. Bluehost uses cPanel in its hosting and to enhance cPanel, bluehost actually categorize the functions into different grouping for more convenient navigations and management.
Besides cPanel, Bluehost has Fantastico and e commerce features enabled. With Fantastico, many application are easily available including blogging softwares, forum message, poll and survey software, Tikiwiki and etc. No worries on the installation as most of them can be ready by one click installation.
Hosting Performance
In term of performance, 99.5% uptime is what Bluehost has achieved. How I measure the uptime is simple, this website is hosted on Bluehost and if this website is up means bluehost is up. Apparently from the result, Bluehost is doing great on their hosting uptime.
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Customer Support
Like most of the web hosting company, Bluehost has 24/7 support. The types of support Bluehost provides inclusive of toll free telephone support, email, live chat, forum and ticketing submission. Their forum has active activity as their support staffs and experienced webmasters are actively doing sharing sessions as well as solving problems and queries.
- Bluehost Support Center
- Bluehost Forum
- Bluehost Live Chat – Access from this link or access it at bottom left of Bluehost homepage
- Telephone Technical Support: (24/7)
United States: (888) 401-4678
Outside US: (801) 765-9400
Conclusions
Bottom line, if you are looking for web hosting, Bluehost is a web hosting provider that you must take a serious look. Although they have only one hosting plan but they are giving the best in it. The scripts library in Bluehost has more than enough scripts to help you in building a quality website.
Although Bluehost is one of the web hosting providers who oversell, nevertheless their hosting performance is better than others by getting a 99.54% uptime. Combined with their strong customer support, I cannot see why Bluehost is not your pick. To continue I suggest you to justify Bluehost yourself.