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.
Reviews 
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I Love BlueHost
Tuesday, 29 April 2008
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.