Bluehost review – BlueHost sucks? Is this true?

Just like Hostgator, Bluehost was launched in 2002 and is still among the leading web hosting providers. Bluehost is a bit less popular than Hostgator but it doesn’t mean that it is lower quality web hosting provider. Bluehost is not that popular because they offer only shared hosting plans and reseller accounts but they are missing VPS and dedicated servers, at least at the time I wrote this review.

This was the first hosting I chose when I started my online ventures and I still use it for few of my sites but I am slowly moving to VPS and dedicated servers as these websites are growing and shared hosting is not the best option for large and heavily trafficked website. Bluehost advertises that they offer unlimited bandwidth but in reality you will notice that your website becomes slower when you have a lot of users on your website at the same time. This isn’t just for Bluehost but for all shared hosting providers, but you are paying them less than $5 a month so you have no reason to complain about it if your website gets over 10,00o page views a day.

I chose Bluehost because of lot of positive reviews on webmaster forums and other websites and I don’t regret my decision because it offers great price/quality ratio and it all what matters if you are looking for shared hosting. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for websites with over 10,000 page views a day and for websites that needs a lot CPU resources and server performance because shared web hosting has its limits. Personal blogs, small websites, portfolio or other such websites will run well with Bluehost. I have tested it with WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop, vBulletin and other platforms and didn’t notice any problems.

BlueHost Pricing

Prices are a bit higher that for Hostgator but you can get some special discount codes and find other promotions to get the best deal. Right now you can get unlimited hosting account at Bluehost for $4,95 a month but I guess there are some coupon codes to get down this price to half. Personally I paid $35 for first year with coupon code so most likely you will be able to get similar price.

Price gets higher after first year because you can’t use coupon codes anymore or at least I couldn’t when I last time had to pay for my hosting. The same thing is for most shared hosting providers, first years comes a lot cheaper than second and third year because first year is used to convince you to use their service and most likely you will stick around for longer. It takes some time to transfer domains and websites to another domain registrar and web hosting provider so you will end up using the same hosting for longer than just one year. This is why web hosting providers does everything to convince new customers to singup with their services.

Bluehost offers reseller account but I haven’t personally used it but I am sure that it is as good as its shared web hosting plans.  Cheapest reseller web hosting comes for $19.95/month and it will be enough to host around 100 medium sized websites for your clients. If you offer web development and web design services then web hosting is great addition to your service. You will get long term relationships with your clients so you will be able to remind them for your services now and then. This is the best thing you can do to maintain relationships with your clients and I recommend such approach if you are thinking in long term.

Bluehost Performance

Bluehost advertisers their shared web hosting as unlimited but the truth is that it has its limits just like any shared hosting. However these limits are not strictly limited by bandwidth, disk space, number of domains, number of users or other but you will find these limits eventually. At least I did. I was hosting technology blog with Bluehost for ages but it received only around 60,000 page views a month which is OK for shared web hosting. I decided to hire writers for this blog and did some promotions and within 3 months my website started to receive 10,000 page views a day and I noticed a massive slowness during evenings when I got most visitors to my blog. I monitored my blog for few days and realized that shared web hosting is too small for such technology blog and I moved it to Rack Space Cloud Servers.

Most of you will never get 10,000 page views a day for your blogs and websites so you can use shared web hosting because it is much cheaper than my current Cloud Server from Rack Space.

The problem with Bluehost was that they are limiting CPU usage and more visitors means higher demand. Shared hosting is built in a way that you can’t reach too high bandwidth usage because you are limited to CPU resources but it is not written anywhere in the Bluehost website or at least I couldn’t find anything like that.

To make matters worse, web hosting account gets suspended if you are using too much resources during one hour. This is due to the fact that they try to protect other website on the same hosting. Hosting can be suspended because of hackers, faulty scripts and plugins that uses too much CPU resources. I got my website suspended a couple of times because I misconfigured W3 Total Cache plugin and when I received too many visitors it caused server to crash. Since your website is hosted with thousands of other website, shared hosting providers will suspend such accounts to protect other website on the same server.

Bluehost Control Panel

Bluehost also uses cPanel for their shared hosting accounts. It means that you will get the same users experience you can find on Hostgator, Bluehost, WebHostingHub and other shared hosting providers. Bluehost has Simple Script installer so you can install dozen of most popular scripts with few clicks. This includes, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, bbPress, Magento and many others.

Bluehost reseller account comes with WHM hosting manager so you can limit disk space, bandwidth, number of databases, domains and other metrics via simple web interface. No programming knowledge is required because you can get done everything via this simple interface.

Overall Bluehost Control Panel is no different from other hosting providers. It has customized cPanel design and functionality but if you have used any cPanel version then you will easily adopt to this.

Affiliate Program

Bluehost pays $65.00 per referral which is reasonable amount. Not the market leading but still among the best payout in the market. I recommend to use their affiliate program because it so easy to sell good service and Bluehost really is one such service. Some other hosting providers pays up to $125 for referral but most of these services are not really reliable and users will end up asking for refund and you will lose your affiliate commission.

Bluehost offers various banners and referral link options so most likely you will be able to find one that suits your needs. If not you can build custom links and banners and use them on your campaigns. Few friends of mine are making a lot from Bluehost and other hosting affiliate programs but you need to have some unique approach because of really high competition in this niche. Make sure you know what you are doing before you jump into hosting business because many players in this niche has millions in funding and a lot of developers behind their backs.

Bluehost Reliability

I have used Bluehost for years and I have noticed only few downtimes but I always got explanation what went front and how long does it took for them to solve this problem. No web hosting providers guarantees 100% uptime but Bluehost is one of the closest to this magic number. I don’t know how they have achieved this uptime but I guess they have nearly perfect system in place.

Few times my websites have been down but it turned out that I misconfigured some scripts so my website just crashed. Few times the same thing happened when I was using the wrong DNS records and again that was my fault instead of Bluehost’s.

No web hosting can run without downtime but Bluehost won’t disappoint you if you re looking for reliable shared web hosting for small and medium sized websites.

Support

Bluehost support usually responds within few hours which is OK for shared web hosting providers. Support usually are very knowledgeable and can solve any complex problem. They have 3-tier support and in most cases when I had to contact them the guys from 3rd tier was able to solve my problems. My problems were related to web hosting configuration in general because some of my scripts needed some very specific settings and luckily Bluehost allowed me to run these scripts.

Haven’t had any cases when support refused to help or said that it is impossible. They did this one extra step to please customer so I can recommend their support. You won’t be disappointed if you will chose Bluehost.

The Good

• Support
• Reliability
• Cares about customers
• Free domain

The Bad

• Not unlimited web hosting
• Price for second year/term is not as appealing as for the first year
• CPU resources are limited
• No VPS and dedicated servers for scalability

Overall

Bluehost is among the leading shared web hosting providers and it achieved this because of great support and reliability. I recommend this web hosting for small businesses, personal websites, blogs, online portfolio and many other similar websites that doesn’t exceed 10,000 page views a day. Price could be a but more appealing but you can get coupon code to get it for much cheaper price.

Bluehost won’t disappoint you because it is great shared hosting providers and unless you are looking for VPS or dedicated server this is the right bet. Nice price/quality ratio which is most important factor for rating shared web hosting.

You can express your opinion about Bluehost on comment section below. Are you satisfied with it and what you would like to see improved or changed?