Bluehost Hosting Review
Bluehost was launched in 2002, along with its main competitor, Hostgator. Bluehost is still a leading Web hosting provider. Bluehost is not as popular as Hostgator, but it's not a reflection of their quality of service. Bluehost is not as popular as they focus on selling shared web hosting.
Bluehost was the first hosting company I tried when launching my online business and I still use it for some of sites. However, I am slowly changing to VPS and dedicated servers as some of my websites are getting too big for shared hosting. Shared hosting is not the best solution for high traffic websites. Bluehost claims their shared hosting has unlimited bandwidth, but you will notice a marked decline in your loading times when you have many users on at the same time. Bluehost isn't the only culprit when it comes to throttling so called unlimited bandwidth, and all shared hosting providers do this. If you have over 10k page views a day you may have to spend more than 5 bucks a month and upgrade.
I went with Bluehost as it had a lot of great reviews on forums and other websites. I'm happy with my choice as it's a great price to quality offer and that's the primary factor when choosing a shared host. However, if your website has over 10,000 page views a day or has high CPU needs then shared hosting is not for you. Blogs, hobby websites or portfolios type websites will perform well on Bluehost shared hosting. I have tried out several plugins and services without any problems, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Vbulletin, Prestashop and a few others.
Pricing
Compared to Hostgator the prices are a bit higher, but you can check our link for possible discounted prices or other promotions. Currently you can get a shared hosting package for $3.95 a month, but there are some coupon codes that could get you a reduced rate. I ended up paying about $30 for the first year with a coupon code, and you should be able to get a similar rate if you look around.
Prices increase after the first year as you can't use a coupon code again to renew your subscription. This is the case with most hosting companies, the first year is the cheapest and they try to sell you on staying with them. They know it's a hassle to change providers as most people usually move their domain as well. This is the main reason they will offer such good starting rates.
Bluehost Hosting Performance
Bluehost claims the shared hosting plans have unlimited bandwidth, but the truth is there are limits just like any hosting plan. You have to consider several factors when considering shared hosting, not just just bandwidth. Other critical items you should pay close attention to include disk space, average number of concurrent users, number of domains and database size. I ran a blog on shared hosting which was running very smooth, at about 70k page views a month. After some advertising page views increased to about 10k a day, and I noticed a significant slow down for page loads. I quickly realized I had to upgrade to a cloud server.
Most people will not see really high traffic, so shared hosting is ideal as it's cheap and works well for certain sites. The issue with Bluehost is that they limit CPU usage, more visitors you get the more CPU power you'll need. Shared hosting is designed in this fashion as the servers resources are partitioned out into small pieces. Bluehost does not disclose this fact so it is a learning curve that many amateur webmasters have to learn the hard way.
The biggest problem is that Bluehost will suspend your hosting account if it uses too many resources during a one hour block. This is automatically done to protect other people's hosting that is on the same server. Hosting can be suspended for a number of reasons, including faulty plugins or scripts that use too many resources. My hosting was suspended because I didn't configure a plugin correctly and it caused my server to crash.
Bluehost Control Panel
Bluehost uses cPanel to manage their shared hosting. cPanel is used by most shared hosting providers, including Hostgator. Bluehost supports Simple Script installer, so popular scripts can be installed quickly. Some of the more popular scripts supported include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, bbPress, phpBB, Magento and many more.
Overall Bluehost cPanel is the same offered in other hosting providers. You can constomize the cPanel theme and layout to your liking.
Bluehost Reliability
I've been hosting websites with Bluehost for years and only noticed a few downtimes. Every time there was an outage I was quickly notified of the reason why and a predicted time frame to resolve the issue. There is no host that offers 100% uptime, but Bluehost comes close to it.
Support
Bluehost's support staff usually responds within a few hours, and based on my experience they have been very knowledgeable. They have three-tier support and have yet to let me down. Some of my scripts required very specific settings and Bluehost was kind enough to help me set them up.
I haven't had any situation where support staff has either refused to help or claim something was not possible. They always went an extra step to ensure I was happy.
Good
Free domain
Reliability
Support
Customer Care
Bad
Limited CPU resources
Best price only in the first year
Not unlimited web hosting
Conclusion
Bluehost is still a contender within the shared hosting field. The primary reason for their success is due to great reliability and support. I do recommend their hosting for small blogs, small businesses, portfolios and personal websites that don't exceed 10k page views a day. Price is competitive and can be cheaper during the first year if you find a coupon.
Bluehost won't let you down because it's a great shared hosting provider. Check out the comment section for more reviews. Please leave a comment about your own experiences.
Disclosure: the reviews here are unbiased, be it good or bad. But if you do buy something the linked company pays us a commission. This helps keep the site ad free, thanks.
