6.Bluehost

Overview:

BlueHost has been around since 1996 and established themselves as a reliable and long-standing force in the world of web hosting. BlueHost takes their technology very serious, doing as much in-house as possible to avoid reliance on outside companies and maintaining extra-resilient backup and redundant servers. While their prices aren’t that different from most other hosting companies, the features you get are quite impressive when you break it down. They currently host more than 1.6 million domain names.

Hosting Features:

TECHIE FEATURES
Unlimited Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
Unlimited Domains
Unlimited FTP Accounts
Unlimited MySQL Databases
cPanel Control Panel
POP3, Web Mail, Alias, Mail Forwarding, Mailing Lists, IMAP
99.9% Uptime


Hosting Plans:

BlueHost has everything you need to host a small- to medium-sized website all built into one simple plan. The amazing thing about BlueHost’s plan is that almost everything is included at an unlimited capacity. You’ll get unlimited bandwidth, domain hosting, email accounts, FTP accounts and MySQL databases. You even get a free domain name registered for a year. It’s really a lot for a small amount. While there are obviously going to be some caps for extremely popular websites or massive installations, BlueHost has a good track record of truly providing unlimited usage to moderate-sized websites.

Value for Money:

BlueHost is great for companies that have lots of small domains that they want to access and manage under a single account. With unlimited domains under a single account, you can manage even a large fleet of domains all from a one hosting provider. BlueHost’s single plan offers far more than most small-scale websites would ever need. Setup and primary domain registration is included in the basic price. The basic plan has a few add-ons that give you extra features. The most noticeable is the Pro package which includes extra resource access for spies in memory and space usage, SiteBackup Pro, dedicated IP address, SSL certificate and domain name privacy. You can also add some of these extras individually for a small yearly fee.

Customer Support:

BlueHost has a very good customer support reputation. Although there are some reports of outages and lost data, the support team has always been helpful and, most of the time, successful in helping users recover from these issues. There are also reports of accounts being throttled when huge spikes in usage occur. The fact that the pro plan includes “more” resources for things that are advertised as unlimited begs the question of just how unlimited the basic account really is.

Reliability:

BlueHost has a good track record for maintaining their uptime. Their dislike for reliance on third party companies means that they’ll never be waiting on another company to fix a problem. Everything is done in-house. That being said, there are some reports of outages and lost data. This is, however, a small fraction of users compared to their overall, mostly satisfied user base.

Ease of Use

BlueHost’s customized version of cPanel is very easy to use and intuitive. You won’t have trouble adjusting from another hosting company’s systems to BlueHost. In fact, you will find that the changes make things a lot easier. Installing WordPress, Joomla or any other CMS system is quick and easy as well. The signup process is painless and transparent. Just be sure you understand what things will be autobilled to your credit card.

Bottom Line:

BlueHost certainly is doing something right since they’ve been in business for over 15 years and retained so many customers. While the claims of unlimited resources are a bit dubious, most users never come close to any undefined caps that obviously exist in the system. BlueHost’s excellent customer support and commitment to uptime make them a great choice for the web master on a budget.

Prince : $3.95