Bluehost Provides Good Quality, Inexpensive Web Hosting

November 12, 2006

I’ve been using Bluehost for over 6 months. They provide high quality web site hosting. It’s also inexpensive web hosting. Bluehost is not the cheapest web hosting, but aside from one hiccup where my post on 5 Things You Shouldn’t Spend Money On When Starting a Business hit the front page of Digg, the service has run quite smoothly.

No web hosting service is perfect.

Let’s tackle some of the negative points first.

  • You will wait on the phone when you call for sales or technical support. They’ve been working to improve wait times, and the worst was about 10 minutes, which is still acceptable. I’m not sure any professional web hosting company can totally eliminate wait times.
  • More important, I’ve questioned their technical know-how on 2 occasions. It wasn’t something definitive where I could say, “These guys don’t know what they’re talking about,” it was more an uncertain feeling I was left with after having my question answered. One of those questions was whether I could transfer a .tv domain to Bluehost. The sales person said “yes” but I’m still not 100% sure. They don’t register .tv domain names, so I’m not sure if you can transfer it and then renew it from elsewhere.

Neither of these points surprised me when I signed up with Bluehost. Sales people at web hosting companies aren’t necessarily the most technically savvy, and waiting in line on the phone is a reality for many businesses. I do wish they’d tone down the “on hold” music!

I think there are more positives than negatives with Bluehost. These aren’t necessarily unique to them, but they’re still worthwhile.

  • You can host 6 domains on 1 account for the base price. That’s pretty good. If you’ve got multiple websites you don’t need multiple accounts. And, if you need more than 6 domains you can buy them in groups of 5 for less than a new hosting account. I run all of Grasshopper New Media’s websites at Bluehost (or will be soon!) and so I’ve purchased 1 hosting account + 5 additional domains (so far.)
  • Automatic installation of many software applications, including blogging software, forums, etc. I use WordPress for the most part; the auto-install is easy and helpful.
  • An active CEO (Matt Heaton) who blogs. He emails customers regularly, openly admitting problems and focusing on customer needs. It makes me feel like he does care (which isn’t always the case for web hosting providers.) Note: I did email Matt Heaton directly about something and never heard back, which soured my view just a touch…(people: answer your emails!)

Web hosting is one of the hardest things to pick. There’s an absurd number of web hosting providers, and plenty of positive and negative reviews on most of them. It’s a minefield of technical details, promotions and shoddy customer support.

For the price ($6.95/month), Bluehost is meeting my needs. I think it’s a great choice for people hosting a small-medium sized website or business blog.

[tags]web hosting, cheap web hosting, inexpensive web hosting, great web hosting, matt heaton, bluehost[/tags]

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Comments
  • Wade
    BlueHost is no doubt the best deal out there for reliable hosting. My site transfers close to 30gb/month in various media, and I can think of 1 time when the site wasn't available. Didn't even have time to wait the hold time on the phone for it to be back up.

    This article also omits a few important details that I think people looking for hosting would like to know about. The hosting control panel uses CPanel (known to have a few problems, but overall solid) and puts the website owner in control of everything. There is also ssh available for those who like to manage their webspace through the command line.

    Now, you should also know that if you choose them for your hosting company, you should know a little about hosts/networks/server applications...and bring your patience if anything goes wrong on the host/server application level. For a problem who's error message indicated an easy fix, it took 2 tech support engineers (1 phone guy, 1 senior tech), a server admin (senior judging by his email sig), an email to the general manager, 2 phone tickets, and 2 web CRM tickets before some level 1 help desk dude with a clue recognized the error message in the ticket (and perhaps my extensive description of the error message and the fix) before it finally got fixed.

    Even with the customer service/technical issues, I still would recommend BlueHost to all.
  • Wade - thanks for the info. It's interesting that you mention CPanel. Just last Matt Heaton, CEO of Bluehost, sent out an email to customers saying that CPanel was the reason many people were having performance issues / issues related to email not working properly. Bluehost was working on trying to resolve the issue.

    I definitely like CPanel from an easy of use perspective.

    I'm glad you also had a somewhat negative experience with them; it helps balance things nicely as we present reviews / thoughts about the company. I know when Instigator Blog was hit by Digg and I called support they claimed it wasn't because of too much traffic...but it was, because nothing else had changed. They did work with me on the phone right there to fix the problem, which was good work in my books.
  • Matt Heaton is one of my role models, as im also a young web host, i read his blog pretty often when ever there is a new post and there's always something new to learn from him
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