A complete review for Bluehost web hosting provider.

Do you want to know if Bluehost is worth of your money or not? There are some things to check with any web hosting provider before we make a purchase decision. Let us help you in checking for these requirements, which include support, features, uptime, downtimes, price … etc.

Company Overview

First of all, it would be good if we learnt some about the service provider we are about to host our website at. Bluehost is a well known web hosting company and even one of the most famous, though it is one of the oldest web hosting companies. Bluehost’s packages have gone through major changes recently, and all of them goes for the goodness of you and me: their customers! As they increased the space you can get to host your website, their bandwidth and the number of domain names you get per account. These mentioned changes puts Bluehost on the top of the market while keeping their prices cheap. With Bluehost, you can get unlimited number of domains! Besides, you can also host multiple domain names.

You should be aware too that both Bluehost and Hostmonster share the same management and thus; you will find that they have similar, if not typical, offers. So don’t be surprised! One last thing to mention here, is that if you’re looking for a shorter contract period, then it would be better for you to go for Bluehost.

Reliability: Bluehost’s reliability is well-trusted by many… as their features set includes the following:

• Secure, accurate and reliable backups
• A very high quality customer support:
  - Quality equipments and servers
  - Maximum guaranteed uptime
  - Various and efficient functional tools for administration

The Operating System and Features

Bluehost plans come with Linux hosting only, although; their features set makes it an easy mission for both; professional and ordinary users.

Let’s talk a bit about Bluehost’s packages in details, as they offer almost everything you need to work in a Linux web hosting environment. This includes: cPanel , which is seen as the best control panel the Web Hosting arena, Fantastico; the famous and friendly-use script installer. Fantastico helps you to install most of the popular open source scripts and platforms, such as Joomla and Wordpress, with a few clicks. Bluehost’s packages also comes with an advanced level of customization for PHP, including: .htaccess, Custom PHP.INI Files … etc. If you’re a savvy, so you should know that with Bluehost you can get the Shell Access(SSH) feature which makes it easier for you to setup your website. Besides, Bluehost provides a large numbers of sub-domain names, plus, you can host unlimited number of domains in your single account!

Hardware-wise, Bluehost has DDOS protection and power backup services to make sure your data are secured and to keep your uptime as long as they can.

Performance

Bluehost’s performance doesn’t differ much than most of their competitors. Customers reviews and feedbacks are significant that Bluehost’s service level is high and good enough.

Upon testing a group of webhosting providers, Bluehost’s service was found to secure an average uptime that reaches up to 99.3% uptime. So if you’re going to run a serious web project, you can trust Bluehost to be your web host.

Bluehost’s support team is very good and helpful. Although; they have put recently some restrictions to contact their customer support agents, as you have to book a trouble-ticket before you get the support you need. But don’t let this point to worry you much, as Bluehost’s service wouldn’t cause you a headache that requires their support, but it will be as stable as you wish. And just in case, it’s worth to mention that Bluehost provides a knowledge base to educate you more on dealing with any technical problems you may suffer.

Price Plans

Bluehost offers a single pricing plan! May be it points out how far do they trust their product. You can subscribe with them for $6.95 to get a two year contract, or $7.95 per month for an annual contract. Bearing on your mind the whole set of features they provide, then Bluehost would be a very good deal for you.

Bluehost Price Plan

• Platform: Linux
• Price: $6.95/month
• Space: Unlimited
• Bandwidth: Unlimited
• Domains: Unlimited

The Web hosting review section of www.topwebhostingrating.com.

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As with many purchases, our first impulse when selecting a web hosting company is to go with the cheapest. Hey, they’re all alike, why pay more? Au contraire.

There are a number of objective criteria that separates one web hosting company from another and money is only one of them. And not the most important one. Selecting a company based on price alone is equivalent to selecting an auto mechanic on price alone. Sure, he may maintain or fix your car cheaper. But will the car spend all the time in the shop and none on the road?

The first consideration is ‘horsepower’. Do they have the capacity to carry your load and deliver decent performance? Most hosting companies will advertise that they have huge bandwidth and hundreds of servers. They’re usually telling the truth.

But there’s a difference between existing capacity and usable capacity. If they also have thousands of sites with millions of visitors per day the available or free capacity will be much lower. A big pickup truck may be able to tow 5,000 lbs. But not if it’s already carrying 4,999.

Be sure to ask about available capacity, and have the prospective company back it up with reliable numbers. If you can’t interpret the information they provide, find someone to help you do so.

Next, and a very close second, is reliability. A lot of power is worthless if it’s cut often. Outages are a normal part of business. Even Google and Microsoft go down from time to time. The difference is, it happens rarely and they have failover plans. That means, if their site/system does go down it’s either up again in a flash, or you never see the outage because a backup system kicks in automatically and seamlessly.

Be sure to grill the company closely about their up time. They’ll often tout 99.6%, or some such figure. But, like the on-time figures of the airlines, those numbers can be shaded by adjusting the definition of ‘up time’. What matters to you is whether your visitors will be able to reach your site at any time of the day or night they might want to.

Find out what systems, both technical and human, they have in place to deal with failures of all sorts. Servers can go down, networks can fail, hard disks can become defective and lose data even when the other components continue to work fine. The result is YOUR site is unavailable, which is all that matters to you. The web hosting company should be able to deal with all of that and have you up again very quickly.

Last, but not least, is security. With the continuing prevalence of viruses and spam, you need to know that the web hosting company you select has an array of methods for dealing with them. That means a good technical plan and staff who are knowledgeable in dealing with those issues. The old saying: ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ is more true here than anywhere else.

All these issues are central to finding a web hosting company that can deliver the services you need. After those criteria are satisfied by a number of candidates, then you can start narrowing them down by price.

Popularity: 63% [?]