About Bluehost
BlueHost, considered on of the best in the industry, focuses on shared hosting at fair prices while providing excellent technical and customer support. They were founded in 1996, owned by Hosting Solutions, Inc and headquartered in Provo, Utah.
Bluehost datacenters host over one million domains on hundreds of state-of-the-art servers. Highly qualified full-time system administrators are on staff to help with any technical issues. Support is available via Phone, email or chat 24 hours a day.
Bluehost Plans & Features
Bluehost is unique because they offer only one hosting plan. The price is $6.95 per month and has all the features you expect to find in shared hosting. Should you need additional resources, such as an SSL certificate or dedicated IP Bluehost offers upgrades to your account.
The plan comes with a free domain name, unlimited diskspace and monthly bandwidth (data transfer). You’re allowed to host unlimited websites, parked domains and subdomains with this plan. You may create up to 2500 email addresses and set up unlimited vacation autoresponders. 1000 separate FTP accounts and 100 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.
Hosting Environment
Account management at BlueHost is done through the cPanel 11 software. You can view a free demo of this on the BlueHost website.
cPanel allows 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.
Recent Bluehost Server Improvements (posted April 16, 2010)
These improvements guard against runaway processes and other events that could slow all the sites on a shared server. By stopping server slowing events, all sites/accounts on the server remain consistently fast.
- Memory Protection - a single user or program are not allowed to use a large amount of sever memory, which prevents all sites on the server slowing down
- CPU Processor Protection - the processor is protected so that a single runaway site can not take all of the CPU resources. This safeguard improves the server consistency and speed for customers.
- Bandwidth Compression - Data transfer from the server can now be compressed which allows your site to load 10 to 25% faster.
- Process Protection - A can no longer spawn a runaway process causing the processors or cores to slow down. This is very helpful for those running mysql based websites such as Joomla.
Joomla Features
Joomla runs very well in the Bluehost Environment. It can be intalled automatically using Simplescripts or Fantastico.
IonCube -- if one of your extensions requires the ionCube loaders, Bluehost has them installed in all accounts by default.
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.
- Phone: 888-401-4678 or 801-765-9400
- Email: support at bluehost.com
Conclusion
While the support, the friendly treatment and the technical expertise are all impressive with BlueHost, what really stands out is Bluehost's attention to detail when it comes to keeping the servers fast in a shared hosting enviroment.
BlueHost should definitely hold a lot of weight when choosing a host for your Joomla site.


