Bluehost Reviews

Advantages

Founded in 2003, Bluehost is one of the leading web hosting providers in the world. Bluehost is best known for its two options of hosting plans: shared hosting and reseller hosting. Bluehost maintains a variety of different shared and reseller hosting packages and specializes in domain registrations. Bluehost also prides itself in offering superb customer support services and claims to have a call-waiting duration of 30 seconds or less. If you’re looking for over 1,000 in-house solutions from an experienced and specialized team, this is the company to consider.

In addition, Bluehost’s services are not outsourced from another company; they have their own data centers, fiber connections and custom Linux kernel that runs on custom-built servers. The company only offers Linux hosting and the price of its hosting varies, depending on the contract selected. For those who want to set up their emails and domains, Bluehost provides all of the necessary standardized Linux provisions, including cPanel. Besides their cost-effective shared hosting plan, the company also offers reseller hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting and dedicated servers.

Bluehost also offers 24×7 email/live chat support, server backups, a money-back guarantee and MySQL, as well as SSH support (Secure Shell).
Bluehost Hosting Plans
Bluehost offers three different options for shared hosting plans with increasing ranges of disc space (from 100GB to unlimited) and bandwidth (from 1TB to unlimited). Bluehost’s Plus shared hosting plan is its most popular and includes unlimited amounts of space and bandwidth, along with a Global CDN and 1 SpamExpert, while its Business Pro plan includes an additional SpamExpert, 1 SSL, 1 Dedicated IP, 1 Domain Privacy and SiteBackup Pro.

The company also provides 4 choices of VPS hosting packages:

• The Standard: The standard package provides 30GB of SAN disc space, 1TB of bandwidth and 2GB of RAM.
• The Enhanced: The enhanced package includes 240GB of SAN, 1TB of bandwidth and 4GB of RAM.
• The Premium: This plan provides 120GB of SAN, 3TB of bandwidth and 6GB of RAM.
• The Ultimate: This plan offers 240GB of SAN, 4TB of bandwidth and 8GB of RAM.

For those interested in dedicated hosting, Bluehost can afford customers a Standard package with 1TB of mirrored storage, 5TB of bandwidth, 4GB RAM and 4×2.5 GHz CPU, an Elevated package with approximately double of each of those resources, or a Premium package with 1TB of mirrored storage, 16GB of RAM, and 15TB of bandwidth. Bluehost notes that its Elevated package is its most popular of the three.. All dedicated hosting plans include money-back guarantees.

For those specifically interested in hosting a WordPress site, Bluehost offers WordPress hosting plans that provide resources and features optimized for the WordPress content management system. Bluehost offers Blogger, Professional, Business and Enterprise hosting plans that can support between 100 million and an unlimited number of site visits per month, management of up to 30 WordPress sites, and up to 8GB of RAM. All WordPress plans utilize an enhanced cPanel control panel and run on customized VPS technology.
Bluehost Features
Bluehost shared hosting packages include unlimited domain hosting, unlimited GB of site transfers, FTP Access, Secure Shell (SSH) Access, site statistics, hotlink protection, a cPanel Account Control Panel, 8 server side scripts, and operates on a Linux platform. Bluehost can also make specific advanced accommodations for the streaming of audio and video files.

Additionally, Bluehost VPS hosting packages feature 1 included domain name, up to 2 IP addresses (available in every VPS package with the exception of the company’s standard package), and the use of up to 4 core processing units. VPS plans from Bluehost also rely on open source technology, such as KVM and OpenStack, and offer customers additional advanced features that can be added to VPS plans. These features include the ability to manage multiple servers at once—or add on a dedicated or shared hosting plan to an account for consolidated management—as well as customizable control access and full root access to the VPS server.

Dedicated hosting packages from Bluehost each include 1 domain name and between 3 and 5 IP addresses (depending upon whether customers select the Standard or Premium plan). All data on Bluehost dedicated plans rely on RAID storage, which provides a higher level of data protection than what is often found from other dedicated hosting plans.

Customers of Bluehost dedicated hosting will also benefit from:

• Immediate increases in available storage
• Instant provisioning
• Comprehensive control of the server with root access from the cPanel control panel

Dedicated plans can also manage multiple servers, and can be operated as either managed or unmanaged plans. These servers will also allow for customization of .htaccess files and cron jobs, and offer support for web-based managers, data files, and server-side includes.
Bluehost Data Center Location and Acceleration
Bluehost servers are located in a state-of-the-art data center in Wasatch, Utah, where servers are secured with diesel power backups for consistent service in the case of a local power outage. While not much additional information is known about this data center, we do know that the servers housed in Bluehost’s data center are built by the company itself, and are managed by approximately 700 employees.

Bluehost hosting plans have been able to deliver fast service to customers as a result of a number of speed acceleration strategies. In its shared plans, this includes the opportunity to purchase use of a Global CloudFlare CDN (content delivery network) on its Plus and Business Pro package, which can be activated instantly without the need for any administrative adjustments. Further, the advanced KVM hypervisor used on VPS plans offers customers exceptionally-fast speeds, while the company’s custom-constructed dedicated servers that also rely on open-source technologies can also afford users the speed they’re looking for.
Bluehost Protection and Installation
The Bluehost Pro shared web hosting plan comes with 2 SpamExperts, an SSL certificate, SiteBackup Pro and 1 domain privacy, while all shared hosting plans have the opportunity for monthly, weekly, or even daily site backups. Shared hosting plans are also protected by technology that designates resources to isolated systems when resources are overused on a website.

Customers of both the Bluehost VPS and dedicated plans may elect to implement additional protective features like SSL certificates, domain privacy, Postini spam protection, Site Backup Pro to recover files, and SiteLock to protect against malware attacks and viruses. WordPress hosting plans can be made further secure with SiteLock CDN and SiteLock Pro, and its most advanced hosting plan comes with WAF Pro, SiteLock Enterprise, SiteLock Backup Pro, and Positive Wildcard SSL.

The installation of any Bluehost plan will likely be an easy experience for even the most novice of users thanks to the company’s dependence on the user-friendly cPanel control panel, 24/7 live customer support and the opportunity to take advantage of managed dedicated hosting. All Bluehost hosting plans (even shared hosting) allow for the installation of customized software, an opportunity not offered by every shared hosting company. Customers can also purchase migration services, as well as individual Quickstart training in website deployment from a Bluehost technician.
Bluehost Email
With the exception of Bluehost’s Starter shared hosting package, customers of any Bluehost plan will receive access to an unlimited number of email accounts; the Starter plan only allows for 100 accounts. Bluehost webmail affords users the opportunity to access their Bluehost webmail account from any location and webmail can be accessed through a direct link or the cPanel itself.

Bluehost also supports 3 different popular web-based email solutions: RoundCube, Horde and SquirrelMail. All email accounts from Bluehost support POP3 and IMAP, and can be uniquely synced with Google Apps for Work, Gmail accounts, and Google Drive to a customer’s individual domain name.
Is Bluehost Good?
Bluehost typically maintains a strong reputation with reviews that are higher than average. Given the hosting company’s years of experience in the business, they’ve been able to garner a solid following of customers, thanks in large part to their commitment to fast uptimes and an array of web tools for users.

Bluehost’s commitment to building their own servers makes this company ideal for the dedicated hosting customer looking for quality performance and a company that will be able to resolve any technical issues expediently. Bluehost’s reputation for competitively low-priced shared hosting plans also makes this provider a good choice for the customer seeking a resource-rich shared plan at a minimal cost.