Bluehost Web Hosting Reviews
- 10 Positive User Ratings
- 2 Negative User Ratings- : 7.7
- : 6.6
- : 7.9
- : 6.8
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In 2009 Bluehost Uptime measured at: 99.815 %. To see detailed Bluhost uptime statistics click here.Web Hosting Provider: Bluehost.
Company info: Bluehost.com has been in business since 1996. They offer packages to individuals as well as businesses. One feature particularly stands out- unlimited domains in one account.
Features highlights: Bluehost offers their suers very easy interface, you can access your website from basically any computer. No need of third party FTP client. Fantasctico is loaded with site management software, publishing and blog software. Two differet types of shopping cart. Awstats and Webalizer statistics.
Basic Web Hosting Plan includes:
- UNLIMITED Hosting Space (New!)
- UNLIMITED of Transfer (New!)
-Host UNLIMITED Doamins
- 2,500 POP/Imap Email Accounts
- Unlimited Domains In One Account!
- SSH, SSL, FTO, Stats
- CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL
- 2000/2002/2003 Front Page Extensions
- Free Domain
- Free Site Builder (New)
- 24/7 Support
Price: from $6.95/month
Visit this provider: Bluehost.com
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16 Responses to “Bluehost Web Hosting Reviews”
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For a long time I was looking for a good web host to host my Wordpres website. Blue host was a great find for me. It was easy to install WordPress using their Fantastico script through c-Panel. Their server uptime is excellent. I have been hosting for last six months and my site was not down a single time. Customer support is great. I prefer to contact them on the phone and never have to wait. When it comes to price, there are less expensive web hosting providers out there, but still it the value that Bluehost provides is excellent, you can host up to 6 domains in one account. I would highly recommend Bluehost to anyone.
Thumb up for Blue Host. I found this provider very reliable. From a technical point it is great have access to .htaccess file. Fantastico scripts and Blue Host are perfect “mariage”- easy to install such CMS as Joomla or if you are a blogger you can install your very own WordPress under 5 minutes.
We use bluehost for a few small sites. Questionable SEO, keeping them sequestered over there.
The only complaint that I can recall is that they would require positive id to get shell access. Never heard of anyone doing that before.
Otherwise, for the money, it’s a good service.
@Crazy Penguin
I think blue host FasyCGI are in place now to solve similar problems to what you describe in your review.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your review.
Since this blog is hosted by BlueHost I suppose I need to review it to set an example.
I have been with BlueHost for 3+years and overall am quiet satisfied with the service they provide.
The recent introduction of SimpleScripts makes very easy to keep up to date number of blogging and content management platforms.
If I were to recommend this web host to anyone I would say a definite YES!
For an entry level shared server, I’d say Bluehost has to be the best. I have been using them for 6 months and have had no issues. I have called tech support a few times just to ask some questions and all times the calls were answered quickly and the help I received was great. If you are just starting out on the web, Bluehost is great. Later on, as I add more sites and get more involved I will be moving to a dedicated server with each domain on its own IP<—- for SEO purposes. However, for now, Bluehost serves all my needs fine- Having Cpanel included alone is worth the $$.
I use Blue Host and I am perfectly happy. Of course I am new to this stuff so I don’t have much to compare to.
Despite the fact that I had no web experience when I started I have been able to produce a decent website via a wordpress blog. They Use C Panel which apparently is common for web hosting. I was able to figure out how to use many of the fearues of CPanel on my own and there are many others which I haven’t needed or learned yet.
Part of CPanel is Fantasico which will automatically install stuff like wordpress or Joomla without any technical knowledge – that was a blessing for me.
I rated the features a 9 because it looks like they have a lot of advanced stuff that I may want someday whey I understand it : )
I rated the support a little lower because I had to search the net for some help. I wold have liked a better tutorial and explanations of what everything is.
Overall as a newbie I am happy.
I have been with BH a week and found the support for new, non-technical people very poor. Their basic initial tutorial is OK but it stop short of telling you how to publish and I found no continuation.
Their Live Chat? I was on with Susan for an hour. She was medium patient with me, but kept thinking I should no more than I do.
At a little past an hour she cut me off still stranded. And I think she put me on a “Don’t bother with this guy” list.
When I went back on a few hours later, I got someone who was very formal (sir?) and unhelpful from the beginning. Kept telling me I had to learn to publish on my own.
I have stayed with them because they are supposed to be so good – but not because I have goodwill to them.
I’m sorry to say Bluehost, you’re customer support is a liability. And you’re really going to continue losing accounts with such incapable staff.
I just talked with Susan and not only was she incapable of communicating very well, which really damaged the ‘quality’ image about BlueHost i had in mind, she was also rude. So that said, Blue Host, you’ve really damaged your reputation in my mind, and I’ve been a customer with a few accounts for more than a few years now. Guess I might have to move to Dreamhost or somewhere else.
If you can’t treat your customers right, you’re not doing the right thing.
I can only sadly agree with Steve’s comment above, “I have stayed with them because they are supposed to be so good – but not because I have goodwill to them.”
I just started using BlueHost about a month ago. Did a lot of homework since I’ve signed up and here’s what I found:
1. Tutorials can be better – not very easy to follow up.
2. The one time I contacted CS via email, the response was quick.
3. Great for smaller sites where tons of traffic is not expected.
4. You do not want to have too many domains hosted on the same server – SEO issues.
5. If your blog grows and traffic increases, bluehost takes down your site to accommodate others. This can last from 1 to 2 hours at a time. Buehost does not grow with your blog.
6. CPanel – once you figure out how to use it – is spectacular!
I have been with LunarPages and Bluehost for last two years. While I like the Lunarpages, Bluehost offers more in their cPanel. Have recommended Bluehost int he past to friends and family. Good web host.
My sites started to hang with a lot of 500 errors. I switched to the the fastcgi option, and all is working. However xml-sitemaps is not working (in browser mode). It’ll only work if I remove the fastcgi option.
Otherwise, it seems to be working OK.
I was new to web design and wasn’t sure about which hosts to use for freelance clients. A co worker recommended bluehost, and after eventually having too many problems with my previous hosting provider which was routhost, I switched to bluehost. Bluehost has been very reliable and has good support, so now I always recommend them for new clients.
I only recently (read: less than a week ago) signed up with Bluehost, but so far it’s been an unexpectedly smooth hosting experience. I’ve been with a lot of hosts, some good, some fair, and some terrible. Nearly all of them start out great and only go downhill from there — usually it’s just a question of how much time will elapse before I move on.
With that said, doing a review this early into my Bluehost account lifespan may be fatuous. However, I thought it worthwhile to post my experience, particularly with the transition and setup, as they were a cut above what I was expecting.
First of all, the price couldn’t be beat. I had already put Bluehost on my list, but the July 4th weekend promotion of $3.95/month (prepaid for 12 months) was too good to pass up. Account setup was, to my surprise, instantaneous and automated. I got right into the control panel and set up all of my databases and email accounts within moments of creating my account.
(Later, Bluehost personally called me at my billing phone number to verify that I had indeed submitted the order. This was unexpected, but a nice touch.)
Compared to the other cPanel-based hosts I’ve been with, I find that Bluehost has perhaps the most attractive and easy-to-navigate cPanel skin. They also offer little features within the usual cPanel tools that I wasn’t expecting. For example, Bluehost lets you specify multiple conditions on an email filter (with the option to set “OR” or “AND” operators). I also like how the knowledge base, account controls, etc. are all integrated into the cPanel with a single unified login and tab-based navigation. Makes it easy to see everything in one place.
As for performance, it’s been excellent so far. Page loads are faster than my previous host, and WordPress’ integrated self-upgrade features are blazing fast and work without incident. suPHP is used to bolster security and makes it unnecessary to go around CHMODding everything.
I also run a private MediaWiki system, which not only works flawlessly on Bluehost, but also performs much better than it did on my last host.
As a disclaimer, I should mention that I have very low-traffic sites which I mainly use either for personal testing, work projects or as informational resources for my group of friends. I have three domains pointing to different sites on one Bluehost account, and each averages less than 1 GB of bandwidth per month.
The only thing I read about Bluehost, features-wise, that gave me pause was the 50,000 file limit that’s currently imposed. I’d not heard of a host actually limiting the number of physical files on your web space. This is made somewhat more concerning by the fact that there’s no easy way, through your cPanel for example, to see how many files you have. Based on my backups, I have about 12,000, so I should be safe. But on principle I dislike having limits set on things that are inconvenient to measure.
Overall, I’m very pleased with Bluehost — with the caveat that this is a very preliminary review, based on only a few days of experience.
I received an email from Bluehost support two weeks ago requesting that I reduce my file size count to under 50,000 in one week. Email follows:
Dear Tommy:
“It has come to our attention that your site is using an excessive number of files stored on your BlueHost.Com account. This is causing performance problems on your website as well as for other customers that are on this server. It can cause our servers to crash and cause additional downtime.
Our research shows that server performance degrades when accounts have over 50,000 files. In order to ensure optimal performance for your account and the others in your shared hosting environment, we request that you reduce the number of files on your account to under 50,000 by 07/28/2009.”
I spent three hours weeding out some places they reccommended might be some places I wasn’t aware of like old logs and spam email boxes etc. I went from around 300,000 files to around 200,000 files which I thought would show good faith on my part as this was a request and not a warning etc, just a request. So a week goes by….. nothing. Afternoon of August 4, 2009 I return from lunch and check my email which oddly was my last email received which read…….
“Dear Tommy:
Your web hosting account for clubt.com has been deactivated (reason: excessive file count).
Although your web site has been disabled, your data may still be available for up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted.
If you feel this deactivation is in error, please contact customer support as soon as possible.
Thank you,
BlueHost.Com Support
http://www.bluehost.com
For support go to http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/
Toll-Free: (888) 401-4678″
Sure enough I check my 4 web sites we have at Bluehost, all have a account suspended notice on a white background, making all 4 businesses appear that they had gone out of business and all email accounts down as well. I called Bluehost support and asked what was going on, they told me I had been suspended and the only way to get my web sited back up was to get my total file count to below 50,000. My current file count was 214,000. They were asking me to delete 75% of my website to get back online! For those that do not understand file counts and inode counts, every email, page, picture etc takes up one inode on linux servers. One of our companies is a DJ company. We take photos at our events and use a program to put them into thumbnail catalogs. If we start with 100 photos we might end up with close to 1,000 inodes when the program is done with it’s thumbnail views etc. 50,000 for us is a very small number of files.
Anyways, here’s my argument. When I signed on with Bluehost, they were happy to take my business advertising unlimited transfer, unlimited storage space etc. I thought, this is fantastic, we can keep our photo sets online for students to enjoy for a long time. I even made sure to mention this to the support rep when I signed up to be certain that unlimited storage was unlimited storage. When I signed up we had well over 50,000 files and simply grew. There was never any mention of this limitation whatsoever until I received the email on 7-21-09, otherwise I would have went elsewhere in 2006. Our site is so big it takes days to move via ftp (site is about 15 gigs). What i’m asking here is that shared hosting companies be a little more honest with people. If they’re advertising unlimited storage it should not be restricted by file count or inode counts. They shoudl have an asteric next to the unlimited with a link taking you to the legal section where it clearly explains their file count, then I’d have no argument. I think you’ll find it interesting reading that in their terms and conditions page http://www.bluehost.com/cgi/info/terms.html
there is absolutely no mention of file count or inode count restrictions. These people are just really bad business people that just kicked a good paying customer with a legitimate business to the curb. We do not reccommend Bluehost to anyone anymore as they falsely advertise their product!! We have moved to Media Temple where their customer service has been fantastic over the past week of moving files in desperation to get our businesses back online after Bluehost turned a “request” into something entirely different. Read the fine print before you sign on the dotted line. If the fine print doesn’t answer your questions then get customer reviews on products before you commit, you’ll often be surprised to what you find.
When we started with our website we used LunarPages and were quiet satisfied with their service. However when we decided to start selling more products online we needed to add a dedicated IP along with a decent SSL certificate. Unfortunately with LunarPage we need to “bring” our own SSL otherwise we would end up with what is know as shared SSL certificate.
Bluehost allowed us to purchase and manage both the Dedicate IP and SSL certificate from one account. Which much better- once your account is up for renewal Dedicate IP and SSL are renewed at the same time. It was also very easy to move our website to Bluehost- it was up and running again 48 hours after we left LunarPages.
We love blue host. Allows us to run a rather robust online store at about $18 per month.
We realize that sometime in the future we might need a dedicated host as our website grows. I only wish Bluehost would start offering dedicated hosting solutions.
Based on our experience, I gave the Bluehost all 10s.