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Friday, October 17, 2008

Bluehost Review

By Puripong Koomsin

For those who are in touch with the webhosting world, the name Bluehost might ring a few bells. This company is one of the oldest web hosting services out there. For this sole fact, Bluehost has strived to change and increase its services to attract new customers and keep the old.

The Plan

The first change that they made, which is perhaps the most important, is its cheap and easy plan. It's based on a Linux control panel, which is in this writer's opinion, the best control panel ever. For a two-year contract, you have to pay a reasonable $6.95 per month. For a yearly contract however, you need to fork over an extra $1.

The Features

Its features are astounding for the price it is offering. The level of customization available for this host is a site administrator's wet dream. Users can modify PHP (.htaccess, Custom PHP.INI Files) and has Shell access/SSH, which is a boon for advanced users. You have unlimited number of domain, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited space. It has a top-of -the -line protection mechanism for DDOS and a power backup service. For file transfers, they require users to send a photo of themselves and their driver's license to their headquarters. That shows you how serious they are about security.

This host also proffers an easy and user friendly control panel. Users will get to know their site's important statistics by just glancing through one page. Its features and associated services are categorized and given symbols to facilitate users. As if that's not enough, a search function is available to ease the search for a specific feature. You can check out a demo login at the Bluehost website to get a taste.

The Performance

Performance-wise, this host stands above others. A test account showed an average of 99.5% for nine months. This is not exactly up to par to their advertisement which states 99.9% uptime, but you have to admit that 99.5% is quite impressive. Another interesting note is that downtime decreases the longer the account is used. From February to September, downtime decreased from 471 minutes to 1 minute. The message is clear, the longer you stay with Bluehost, the better their service will be.

The Help

Despite all those sterling positives that have been promoted, Bluehost does lack in one thing, its support. Although it does has a 24/7 toll free service, its online help was a bit of a letdown. Like any other service, it does have an online chat room and an email help service. But, response time is not the fastest around and this might not bode well with the users. If you need help and you rather not call, you are better off reading the FAQ articles.

The Verdict

However, one downside is not enough to contend with this host's incredible features and cheap prices. This service has received mostly good reviews from users all over the world, some which use Bluehost to maintain quite popular sites. This host is suitable for both casual and professional site administrators. It is especially useful to those who want a cheap host and a short contract period.


If you enjoy reading this, you may enjoy to read more about Web Hosting Reviews and read BlueHost Reviews

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