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BlueHost Review

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Editor Rating
8.8
User Rating
BlueHost Review

Visit BlueHost here.

Hosting Plan Features

Disk Space: Unlimited
Data Transfer: Unlimited
Money Back Guarantee: Anytime
Domains Hosted: Unlimited
Domain Registration: Free
Price: $6.95
Control Panel: cPanel
Edit DNS Zone File: Yes

Joomla Features

Joomla Auto Install: Yes
Fantastico: Yes
Ion Cube Support: Yes

MySQL Features

MySQL Databases: 50
phpMyAdmin: Yes

Support Options

Email / Help Desk: Yes
Phone Support: Yes
Member Forum: Yes
Live Chat: Yes

Company Details

Company Headquarters: Provo, Utah
First Year in Business: 1996

Deals and Coupons

Use Coupon: www.bluehost.com

About BlueHost

BlueHost was founded in 1996 in Utah and is owned by Hosting Solutions Inc.  BlueHost primarily focuses on shared hosting plans and is considered one of the best in the industry. The company is known for its  industry-leading web hosting and support at dirt-cheap prices.

At Blue Host datacenters, they host over 460,000 websites on hundreds of state-of-the-art servers. Highly qualified full-time system administrators are employed to manage any technical issues that may arise.

Plans and Features

At a mere $6.95 per month, BlueHost currently offers what is probably the most feature-rich hosting plan in the entire industry. For starters, you get an absolutely free domain name upon registration. Then you have the mammoth 1.5TB of storage space combined with the staggering 15TB of monthly bandwidth. You’re also allowed to host unlimited websites, parked domains and subdomains on a single BlueHost account. You may create up to 2500 email addresses and set up unlimited vacation autoresponders. 1000 separate FTP accounts and 50 MySQL databases are also allotted to you.

For web developers, you’ll find support for all the major scripting languages including PHP 5, Perl 5, Python, Ruby / Ruby on Rails and a lot more. An attractive array of free pre-installed scripts are also offered to you including phpBB, phpNuke, Wordpress, b2evolution, tikiwiki, web auction software, mambo, joomla etc. You also get a totally free SSL certificate, and various shopping carts including OSCommerece, Agora, Cube Cart and Zen Cart.

The hosting is backed by an iron-clad 30 day money-back guarantee.

Hosting Environment

Account management at BlueHost is done through the standard cPanel 11 software. You can view a free demo of this on the BlueHost website. The cPanel will allow you to manage and configure your entire account including website files, email addresses, FTP accounts, statistics, databases etc. For the MySQL databases, you can find phpMyAdmin installed which facilitates easy administration through a GUI.

Joomla Features

Although Joomla comes pre-installed along with Mambo, you can utilize the Fantastico script readily available within your account to install Joomla manually if necessary.

Tech Support

BlueHost’s technical support staff has been acclaimed by many reviewers as being one of most qualified and well-trained support teams in the hosting business. They can be contacted through toll-free telephone 24/7 and they boast impressive response times. You can also reach them through email.

From the BlueHost website, you can access their Cerebrus helpdesk where you may open support tickets or go on to their FAQ knowledgebase where plenty of helpful articles are available to you.

Conclusion

While the support, the friendly treatment and the technical expertise are all impressive with BlueHost, what’s really amazing is their feature set which is completely unmatched by any other hosting provider at the time of this writing. This means that with BlueHost’s competitively priced shared hosting plan, you’re almost as good as having your own VPS and almost any type of website can be hosted in your account. In all honesty, BlueHost should definitely hold a lot of weight when choosing a host for your Joomla site.

Visit http://www.bluehost.com for more details.


User Reviews

Average user rating from: 7 user(s)

Overall rating: 
 
8.8
Site Speed & Uptime:
 
8.6   (7)
Control Panel Features:
 
9.3   (7)
Customer Support:
 
8.4   (7)
Price:
 
8.7   (7)
 
Ratings (the higher the better)
Site Speed & Uptime*
 
Control Panel Features*
 
Customer Support*
 
Price*
 
Overview
Pros and Cons
Comments*
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Multiple Account Suspensions after not honoring or

Overall rating: 
 
3.3
Site Speed & Uptime:
 
1.0
Control Panel Features:
 
5.0
Customer Support:
 
2.0
Price:
 
5.0
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Reviewed by Kenny
December 08, 2009
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Pros and Cons

Pros When it works, it works.

They answer the phone

Reasonably unexpensive
Cons I'm putting one star for uptime as Bluehost has not honored their TOS which I agreed to but rather changed it under a fog of "we can change at any time" type terms.

Half way through my yearly contract Bluehost changed my terms of service to limit the number of "files" on my account. Although I don't have even a few percent of the maximum disk space use, after this terms of service change my account has been suspended multiple times due to "excessive numbers of files". What happens is Joomla and other open source web apps create a bunch of temp files and in my case I've determine without warning bluehost has suspended my account. This is completely unexceptable hosting and questionably breach of contract on bluehost's side. If they're going to suspend an account after a TOS change, it would seem required to refund at minimum the pro-rated contract and more likely the full contract if they cannot meet their original agreement. Once i get this resolved I'm changing hosts and never coming back. BLUEHOST IS NOT REALLY JOOMLA FRIENDLY. If you're going to put up a static site with a few photos of your cat and dumb children, it would be a good host. Otherwise go somewhere else.

Review

Don't bother with bluehost. I'd rather go back to Netfirms at this point who is really bad. They pulled shady stuff trying to get more cash out of you but never tried changing their TOS really dumb like this.

 

Bluehost

Overall rating: 
 
10.0
Site Speed & Uptime:
 
10.0
Control Panel Features:
 
10.0
Customer Support:
 
10.0
Price:
 
10.0
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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful
Reviewed by Anonymous
September 30, 2009
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Review

Best hosting company I've ever seen hands down.

 

So far so Good....

Overall rating: 
 
9.5
Site Speed & Uptime:
 
10.0
Control Panel Features:
 
10.0
Customer Support:
 
10.0
Price:
 
8.0
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Reviewed by Gadabout
November 26, 2008
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Review

I've only been with BlueHost for two months now. I switched one of my websites over from Siteground (who are terrible by the way, don't ever use them) so that I could test BlueHost out. The setup was easy and fast. The admin management area is easy to figure out They transferred my domain no problem and it is included in my hosting. They use the usual CPanel and Fantastico which so far seem to work fine. And the customer support so far seems great. So far so good and zero complaints. I will return in a year to post another review after I've had more time with them. The only thing I would quibble about is that you can't have all your websites in one admin account. They require a separate admin account for each website you have, and that means you also can't have separate CPanel login that is separate from your admin account login, which is a problem as sometimes I have to give access to programmers to my CPanel, but don't want them to have access to my admin area for my website. I hope that they will change this in the future since other hosting companies do allow that one have all their websites under the same main admin account, each with its own CPanel access. But, everything else has, so far, been great.

 

Best around, but not perfect

Overall rating: 
 
8.8
Site Speed & Uptime:
 
9.0
Control Panel Features:
 
10.0
Customer Support:
 
8.0
Price:
 
8.0
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Reviewed by Jesse
November 23, 2008
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Review

Uptime is great, with lots of backend features. Customer support is good, but help seems to be selective. I've asked about ftp issues twice and they haven't responded. Other minor issues have been fixed immediately. A little costlier than others, but you get more for your money.

I've used quite a few hosts in the last two years, and bluehost is the best. Unlike some other well-known hosts, they don't constantly bombard you with annoying marketing. It's good hosting, pure and simple.

In regards to Joomla!, I've never had an issue with the hosting. Can't say the same for other hosts.

 

BlueHost is great

Overall rating: 
 
10.0
Site Speed & Uptime:
 
10.0
Control Panel Features:
 
10.0
Customer Support:
 
10.0
Price:
 
10.0
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Reviewed by clint
November 11, 2008
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Review

Great site. Easy to use. Very fast. It has everything.

 

I Love BlueHost

Overall rating: 
 
10.0
Site Speed & Uptime:
 
10.0
Control Panel Features:
 
10.0
Customer Support:
 
10.0
Price:
 
10.0
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Reviewed by Wendy B
April 29, 2008
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Review

BlueHost is currently my favorite shared hosting provider. I have had very small downtime issues (maybe 2 times per year for about 1 hour on 1 of 10 sites) but I think that's pretty good for shared.

They continually add new features (like SimpleScripts, Postini, etc...) and have updated their UI regularly. Their cPanel functions/scripts work very well. I have also had very good experience with their support.

I think the only minor (very minor) quibble I have with them is their CEO's (Matt Heaton) blog. It doesn't seem very professional although, in his defense, he says it is his "personal blog." He is obviously very bright, but I simply think the image should be a bit more corporate/professional. I would be embarrassed if a client stumbled upon it and said "THIS is who you are hosting our corporate site with."

Overall, I feel like BlueHost is committed to providing a continually better product. I feel like others (Lunar, for example) spend more effort on marketing than on the actual product.

 

Good Support for Joomla

Overall rating: 
 
9.8
Site Speed & Uptime:
 
10.0
Control Panel Features:
 
10.0
Customer Support:
 
9.0
Price:
 
10.0
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Reviewed by Stan Taylor
February 15, 2008
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Review

As a relatively inexperienced Joomla user, (I have installed 3 sites) I found BlueHost easy to use and full of features. I was able to get SEO working properly, which I could not do on another hosting company which a client chose. Pages load very quickly. It did take a while for support to reply to a question. I'm very happy with this company.

 
 

Learn more about BlueHost here.

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