BlueHost Company Overview
BlueHost is one of the oldest web hosting providers and was founded in 1996. Surviving the tough competition in this industry for such a long time tells a lot about the quality of provided services. The strong reputation BlueHost.com built up in this time, made them one of the big players, hosting already more than 1 million domains and setting up 20,000 new customer's hosting accounts per month.
BlueHost provides high standard, but low-cost web hosting solutions. Customer service is available 24/7 through a toll-free telephone number and by a tracked-tickets-system. When we contected support with an invented issue, they were responsive, friendly and competent. The issue was solved within minutes.
Offering highly reliable hosting, BlueHost's technical infrastructure is impressing. There is only one single hosting plan to choose, including a free domain name, unlimited storage space and unlimited bandwidth at $6.95 / month. It is hard for competing hosting providers to beat that. The signup steps are easy. If a customer decides to transfer an existing domain from another hosting provider, Blue Host supports this procedure. Many of our staff members hosted at Bluehost already in the beginning of 2000, so most of us have multiple long-term experiences with this provider.
Price Value
More and more web hosting providers simplify their hosting plan offerings, by only providing one single hosting plan with exceptional values. BlueHost went this way many years ago already. The so called Platinum Plan provides customers with a free domain name, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited eMail accounts (also web based), 50 mySQL Databases, FTP, PHP, Ruby on Rails (RoR), CGI, cPanel, Fantastico Scripts, unlimited add-on domains, many ecommerce applications, and much more. The price for this hosting package is $6.95 / month - a normal price compared to other hosting companies and bearing in mind all of this functionality.
This hosting plan satisfies even the most demanding customers. The price is not the highest in the industry, but neither the cheapest - we see it quiet in the middle field compared to Bluehost's competitors.
Reliability and Performance
BlueHost has an impressing, up-to-date infrastructure. The data center is 24/7 operated and monitored by competent staff and equipped with quad core Opteron processor servers and RAID units with mirrored backup storage devices. This infrastructure is very reliable and the servers have a higher processing power than most of the competition's machines. To asure uninterrupted service in case of a power outage, there are sufficient UPS and Diesel backup power generator capabilities. The data center is connected to the internet by a powerful OC-48 optical fiber backbone, providing a maximum possible bandwith of 2 Gbit/second.
We tracked Blue Hosts uptime through monitoring tools for 3 months and there indeed was only one short downtime for maintanance, wich was announced before however. That meens, the often-quoted "99.9% uptime" was achieved.
We think BlueHost grants a very high realiability and a high performance through their superior technical infrastructure.
Features and Control Panel
The Cpanel control panel, BlueHost uses, is popular for many good reasons. The navigation is intuitively understood and used. The large and logical icons help to perform desired changes with ease. Blue Host integrated a web based file management software to transfer and manage data without an installed FTP client from within the control panel. There is a Page-Wizard, helping customers to create a reasonable website with a minimum of learning and work. Fantastico script support is installed as well, that helps webmasters with the installation of forums, blogs, community systems and other useful applications in a comfortable and fast way. Furthermore, BlueHost's hosting plan supports custom php.ini settings, including Apache .htaccess files and the creation of own CRON jobs for the time-triggered execution of scripts.
The control panel (Cpanel) BlueHost uses fulfills all necessary functions as a software for managing hosting accounts.
Support
When we called with a self-made support issue, Bluehost's help center reacted in a timely manner. The support person was friendly, competent and responsive. Phone support is available 24/7/365 and the call is toll free. We also tested the support ticket system and opened another problem case. The answer was given in a timely manner as well and included an accurate and helpful advice what to do to solve the issue.
Bluehost offers a variety of possibilities when it comes to technical support. Mostly, the fastest way to solve one's issue is to browse the existing knowledgebase oneself. Although this seems uncomfortable, we found out at many times, it was easier and faster than contacting a support person with every hosting provider we experienced. The available knowledgebase at Blue Host is huge and provides beginners to experts with a lot of background information to solve one's issues.
Our test showed that Bluehost's support is of good quality. Although we already experienced even faster and better support at other hosting companies, we were satisfied. It can be said, that Bluehost's support level corresponds to their high rankings in the other categories.
Conclusion
Our overall experience with Bluehost was very satisfying.
There were no strange events or unexpected occurences. Their service proved to be of high performance and reliable. Technical support was responsive and solved our issues within minutes.
The price is reasonable for a hosting plan with unlimited storage and bandwidth and many, many features.
In fact, researching and compiling this review, Bluehost impressed us so much, that we plan to host our next project there.
We consider BlueHost to be a premier web hosting provider at a reasonable price. In our opinion, BlueHost is high quality, stable and trustworthy.
recommended: 12 
not recommended: 2 
