Bluehost Shared Hosting Review - Are They Good or Bad?
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Bluehost Review

Bluehost web hosting began operations in 1996, which is neither young nor old by internet standards. Presently they claim to be hosing literally millions of websites, and are signing up new customers at a rate of 20,000 a month. They started out as a low cost web hosting alternative, and later made a business decision to become a moderately priced option.

Their management selected this path for their future business model in order to upgrade their products and services based on a few factors. First, they wanted to ensure that they were able to afford the latest and greatest that technology had to offer. Second, they were very aware of the fact that in order to survive and thrive in the highly competitive web hosting market, they absolutely must provide exceptional customer service.

Since both of the reasons referenced above are particularly critical to the well-informed web hosting buyer, and they are also enormously expensive to implement, they felt it was necessary to increase their fees. Based on the fact that they are still in business today, a considerable number of their clients must have agreed with their objective of trying and become a top player in this market place.

Our firm did an all-encompassing review of BlueHost web hosting to try and ascertain how they stack up against the other first class alternatives in this field. After all, they are quite a few companies in this industry that claim they are “the best in the business”, but in reality, only a very few of them are able to cut the mustard.

Bluehost Pros

Bluehost now offers multiple plans and solutions for their customers including 3 shared hosting plans, 4 VPS hosting plans and 3 dedicated server configurations. $200 in marketing offers available with your unlimited hosting “Plus” account.

Bluehost Cons

Bluehost’s main page currently indicates “starting at” $3.95 per month on their main page while suggesting unlimited domains, space and more. However, when you click to get started, you’ll find the unlimited hosting offer is actually $6.95 per month.

Bluehost Web Hosting Packages

Their basic package starts at $3.95 a month. If this is going to be your first website, almost assuredly this type of service will meet all of your requirements until you need a 2nd website.

Some of the features that it provides are the following, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, a $200 in free marketing credits, a free site builder with custom designed templates, website statistics, and a MySQL database, which is required if you are going to use WordPress on your site. All of the above features are pretty standard, and what you would find being offered by most of the high end web hosting companies.

If you examine their website thoroughly, you will notice that they do not promote either virtual private servers (VPS) or dedicated severs. Almost assuredly they offer them, but for whatever reason they are not vigorously trying to sell these services. The reason this is important, is that if you get lucky and work very diligently on your website you might need to upgrade to a more powerful web hosting package. Because of this, we are going to have to knock down BlueHost web hosting a few notches for this major blunder by them.

Customer Support

It is almost impossible to explain to a person who has never had a website before, how important of a factor that outstanding customer service is to your long-term success. BlueHost web hosting company has 24 hours a day, 7 days a week telephone support.

That being said, when we attempted to contact them about a few complex issues that we were experiencing, we were not happy with the responses that we received. While that could have just been an abnormality on their part, none the less, we thought we should let you know.

Price Value

BlueHost web hosting is certainly not the least expensive alternative that is available today. But, they are one of the few firms in this industry that has an entire complex of buildings and back up operations in place to ensure maximum protection of your most sensitive data.

They have one 50,000 square foot building that they utilize as their principle web hosting location. In addition, they have two other data centers that they use to make sure all of your information is fully protected at all times. At each of these sites, they also employee diesel generators just in case of an emergency, and they lose electrical power.

Because of all of these over lapping lawyers of safeguards, they are able to make certain that your website will be up at least 99.9% of the time. Of course, these efforts on their part are very expensive, and one of the principle reasons that their fees are a little bit more than some of the other firms in this industry.

Ease of Use & Quality

BlueHost web hosting does posses one of the least complicated websites to navigate. If this happens to be the first website that you will be building, this could turn out to be especially significant. That is, unless you do not mind calling customer service every five minutes asking them where do you find something, or how do you do this or that.