Bluehost Review

Full review

Bluehost was founded in 1996 and this makes it one of the longest-standing website hosts in the business. The Bluehost aim is to provide both business and consumer solutions for a low basic price. We looked at the features included in the website hosting package to see whether these aims are met.

Hosting

The Bluehost system offers one plan for website hosting, which contains a full set of technical features. The one-size-fits-all idea is a good one if you are satisfied with the amount of features you get, and Bluehost does well to provide a good deal for your money. With Bluehost you get unlimited disk storage, unlimited file transfer, FTP access, support for programming and scripts, and a number of different links to social networking scripts, blog page creation, image libraries, message forums, and poll and survey software. The variety of scripting support is one of the advantages of this hosting plan, and you can also manually add your own scripts using a number of different languages.

If you haven’t already created your website you can use the free drag-and-drop site builder tool included with the hosting package. Ecommerce is provided for with support for a number of different shopping carts. Add video streaming and audio.

Websites are hosted on dual quad processor servers with the additional support of a diesel backup power generator, UPS power backup, and mirrored storage backups. Servers are monitored all day and night by technical staff. The operating system is Linux. You’ll find internet connectivity is good, and the bandwidth is fit for purpose. We didn’t find any negative reviews about the reliability and uptime of the websites and we don’t think you’ll have a problem with the limited amount of downtime experienced with the Bluehost system.

Domains

One of the good things about a Bluehost hosting plan is you can have an unlimited amount of domains linked to your account, and an unlimited amount of sub-domains. You also get a free domain for one year and international domains are supported. The domains and hosting package is currently offered at a price of $3.95 per month, which is lower than the regular rate.

Email

As with many good quality hosting plans you get email with your Bluehost package. There are three different web-based email solutions to choose from and the plans come with unlimited secure email support. In addition, Bluehost provides unlimited forwarding email accounts so you don’t have to worry about finding your own email solution as everything is included in one package.

Marketing & reporting

There’s not a lot to report about the marketing/ statistics features in the Bluehost plan – there are a number of offers on the board for marketing tools, including $100 in Google advertising credit, and a statistics package but other providers do offer a more specialized reporting and marketing service linked into their hosting plans.

Ease of use

The Bluehost control panel is your mission control when it comes to controlling your domains, your websites and your configurations. The control panel is easy to use and provides simple navigation. You can configure the control panel to meet your needs and you won’t have any trouble finding your way around the different options. The web page creation tools are also easy to use and you have script support built in if you need it.

Help & support

The Bluehost solution offers a large amount of articles and information on the Helpdesk site, which will assist you in solving any technical problems or answering any questions you may have. Browse the Knowledgebase, visit the user forum, look at the "Get Started" articles and watch some video tutorials. For a more direct answer to queries the Bluehost team operates a support ticket service with the aim of a 24-hour response time to tickets. Live chat is available 24-hours a day and you can call to speak to an operator. The support options are good and provide a range of opportunities to communicate with technical personnel and to solve problems with your web hosting program.

Overall

The Bluehost web hosting plan tuned out to be comprehensive, easy to use and with a good selection of additional features. The unlimited data storage and transfer is highly useful and we didn’t experience any problems with the technical side of the service or the security.