Bluehost Review

Bluehost Hosting

Bluehost has been in the hosting business since 1996. They are considered the oldest hosting provider. Imagine back in 1996 where internet is still a myth to most of us, Bluehost has already existed. You can imagine how strong the foundation Bluehost has until now.

Let’s check out how their web hosting looks like.

Bluehost Features

Bluehost has only one hosting plan and this hosting plan has very promising features. I believe that Bluehost emphasizes in focusing to provide the best. Perhaps that is the reason why 1 million of domain-owners trust them.

The plan comes with unlimited storages, unlimited data transfer and unlimited add on domains. So rest assured that all your websites can be hosted under one hosting account. With large number of programs supported by Bluehost, subscribers can use almost every software and language to build their website like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, CGI-BIN, Perl, SSI, SSH and Python, just to name a few. Also to let subscribers fully utilize their unlimited storage and bandwidth, Bluehost hosting supports video and audio streaming too. Therefore it will not be a problem if you were to build a multimedia website with flash and videos contents.

Email & Database Features

In term of other features, Bluehost is unquestionable as well. For email, subscribers can create up to 2,500 email accounts. Wow..Imagine the things you can do with 2,500 email account at a time? If you are thinking of spamming with emails, there’s no way you can do it as Bluehost has very strict policy on spam. Thus you better think of some other things to do like keeping contact with your customer group using newsletter, product updating from time to time and etc. Bluehost does have software like forwarders and autoresponders in helping that out. In term of database you can create up to 100 MySQL and 100 PostgreSQL. Bluehost has phpMyAdmin for you to manage your database too.

Performance

For being the top web hosting in the world, Bluehost does perform. They have achieved 99% uptime based on historical data, which is an impressive result.

However, recently there are many negative news and review popping up shooting on Bluehost hosting. The news and complaints point out that Bluehost is dropping in term of performance. They oversell their hosting plan that causes overload in the server. Web server starts to be unstable and downtime is often reported.

Well, I myself do host with Bluehost as well and regarding all the negative news, I have to admit that their performance is really dropping. Often time it is not difficult to see their server CPU is loaded up to 80-90%. This has caused slow response for my websites. As a webmaster myself, I do worry about my website uptime with such situations. However despite of my worries, it is undeniable that Bluehost does still maintain a good uptime though with the heavy loading. The uptime is still more than 98% and this sounds to be a good result. But seriously, to me their not-so-stable hosting condition does affect their rating. Hopefully Bluehost sort this out as soon as possible.

Customer Support

Customer support is the key of good service besides of the product itself. Being the top hosting providers needless to say Bluehost has a very huge support team working 24/7 to satisfy their customers. However, when anything grows big especially servicing company, things get messy. Bluehost though have a very complete support system (live chat, forum, ticket system, tutorial, phone and email) they have missed out something important, which is friendly staffing.

I do not mean that the supports are rude. In fact the support in Bluehost is very helpful and knowledgeable. However by don’t know what reasons, the feeling I get from the support is not-so-friendly. I wonder whether their support is too busy handling a lot of cases at a time that they have no extra energy for a smile. That is why I say when a servicing company grows big; things will not be so easy.

Please do not get me wrong, the support in Bluehost does solve my issues all this while in the shortest time possible. Just that I feel they can be even better if they show a bit more friendliness. (When a company grows huge, customers like me tend to request more from them agree?)

Conclusions: Is Bluehost Recommended?

Honestly this is a difficult question. Bluehost is definitely a good host with their performance and features. Also Bluehost is the most popular hosting brand in the world with more than 1 million domains hosting with them. This illustrates how well their quality is. However, they have grown too big that they start to fail customers from different aspects. Some from the customer support aspect; while some from the heavy server-load aspect. Both can be big issues to certain people.

For the sake of conclusions, I would suggest that if you are someone who believes in experiences, Bluehost does worth your try seeing their 13 years rich of hosting experiences. After all they do still maintain an impressive uptime don’t they?

Bluehost: Deal or No Deal?

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