Bluehost Review

Bluehost is a very successful web host in the industry. They are well-known for the fast & reliable web hosting service. Since starting the business in 1996, Bluehost have been 100% focusing on Linux Shared Web Hosting and become a leader in this area.

Now, their product is serving for around 2 millions domains and is one of the most popular web hosting solutions within bloggers, web developers, individuals and small business.

Bluehost Overall Review Score

Features    Pricing    Performance    Reliability    Easy to Use    Customer Support    What Bluehost is Good for: WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla Beginners, php Developers, Small Business, Personal Site, Family and Testing. Over Rating: A+ (Highly Recommended)

Bluehost Editor Review

Rich Product Features

It’s really hard to find a web host who could offer more features than Bluehost. By working with them, you could get  almost everything required to setup a site:

• Support for all popular Scripts like php, python, ruby-on-rail, Perl, JavaScript
• Create unlimited MySQL, PostgreSQL, eMail address, FTP account, and subdomain; host unlimited domains in one account; and consume unlimited bandwidth and disk space
• Hundreds of free web site scripts from WordPress, Drupal, Joomla to eCommerce shopping cart. You could quickly setup a site with some simple clicks
• Linux shell access, which most web hosts don’t offer in their shared hosting package.
• Easy-to-use cPanel to manage your web site from user account, email, domains, files and more.

Fast & Reliable Hosting Service

Unlike most of web hosts who rent space from the 3rd party datacenter to offer web hosting service, Bluehost build those facilities by themselves. Currently, they own  3 data centers , each of which provides UPS power, diesel generators, and multiple 10 gigabit fiber connections to locations around the world.

To bring the best experience to their customers, Bluehost deploy high performance web servers in their datacenters. Those servers are equipped with 24  Opteron processors and 32 GB memory,  which are obviously much faster and more reliable than their competitors.

Beside their first rate facilities, Bluehost founder and their engineers know Linux very well and understand all the tricks when come to shared Linux hosting. They carefully optimize the servers, and make it a great environment to support all the web applications related to MySQL and Php, which include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and etc.

Last one is about their controversial CPU Throttling system. This application will monitor the resource usage of each account, if one of your bad “neighbor” consume excessive resource than they should, the system will temporary suspend their account before they bring negative impact on the reliability or response time of your web site.

Courteous and Professional Customer Support

Bluehost invest a lot on their customer support system. As their customer, you could search for help from their comprehensive online knowledge base. If you cannot find the answer there, you can choose to contact them via email, live chat support and toll-free phone call. Live chat is our favorite customer support channel, via which you could describe your issues clearly and get the help from the web host without hassle like phone call. For Bluehost, we have used their service since 2007, and have never waited for more than 30 seconds to get connected.

Their customer support engineers are well trained and knowledgable. In most case, the question could be resolved with only one contact. Unlike some other web hosts, the first line support could only answer very basic questions, almost every technical issue will be escalated to the next level supporter and you have to wait not knowing what is happening on their side.

Any Time Money Back Guarantee

Bluehost is the first web host who allow their customers to ask for a refund at anytime. Even now, there is only very few web  hosts committing to this term. And this is one of the key reason we would like to strongly recommend Bluehost.

Below are some terms about Bluehost Anytime Money Back Guarantee:

• In the first 3 days, you could request a Full refund.
• After the first 3 days and before 30 days, you will be refunded with all fees except domain registration cost at $11.95.
• After the 30 days, you could receive a pro-rated refund for all fee with the exception of $11.95 domain registration fee and $30 setup fee.

Bluehost is Expensive? Bluehost is No More Expensive Now!

The regular price of Bluehost is $7.95/month, which is somehow high in Linux shared hosting. But now, they are promoting their product through a special discount link which all the new customers could signup their service at $3.95/month only. This is really affordable for almost everyone.

Bluehost Uptime Review

We have been using Bluehost since 2007, and have never met any downtime. Our internal monitoring system shows that the overall uptime of Bluehost crossing whole 2011 is around 99.93%, this is a really high number for a shared hosting solution. In below, you could see uptime record in the past 30 days:

Bluehost Constraints – Read Before Signup

Bluehost is one of the best shared linux hosting as far as we know, which gives you all the convenience when using their service, such as unlimited bandwidth, email, database resource, and the others. But they do set some constraints on the other areas to make sure they could profit. Below are some of them you should know before you sign up their service:

• Each account should not occupy CPU resource for more than 600 seconds in any given hour
• No more than 200, 000 files per account
• No more than 1000 tables

When to Consider Bluehost

As a natural of Shared hosting, even you could find many Unlimited features from Bluehost, it’s still not a good option for high traffic site or eCommerce site. In below, we list out the best cases when choosing Bluehost:

• WordPress blog with daily traffic lower than 500 page view per day. This is normally true for new blog, any WordPress blog without active promotion  or Alexa ranking lower than 100000.
• Drupal,  Joomla, vBulletin, and phpbb site with daily traffic lower than 300 page view per day.
• Small business sites
• Family or Personal sites

Is Bluehost the Right Choice for You?

Tell us Your Experience

If you feel we miss some critical information in this Bluehost Review (either positive or negative)  which is helpful for a potential service buyer, please add a comment here. We will do the investigation on your feedback and update our review accordingly.