To guarantee that we received no special treatment while conducting this Bluehost review, we purchased our Bluehost review account directly from the Bluehost website. At no stage did we inform Bluehost that we were conducting a review, so we are reasonably sure that we were treated the same as any ordinary Bluehost customer.
About BlueHost
Bluehost was founded in 1996, making them one of the oldest web hosting providers still operating. The fact that they have managed to survive in the often cut-throat web hosting business says a lot about the quality of services that they provide. Many lesser companies have come and gone in the years that Bluehost has been providing quality solutions to web-masters.
As you would expect from a company that has been in business for as long as Bluehost, their network infrastructure is first-class. The Bluehost data center is equipped with modern quad processor servers, mirrored storage backups, UPS / diesel backup power generator and 24/7 monitoring by trained technical staff. Internet connectivity is provided by an impressive OC-48 backbone connection, providing in excess of 2 Gbit / second bandwidth.
Plan Features and Pricing
Lately, it is becoming increasingly common for web hosting providers to simplify their product range and offer a single 'one-size fits all' web hosting plan and this is the path that Bluehost has chosen with their 'Platinum Pak' plan. Having only the one web hosting plan to choose from does make a prospective customer's task in choosing a plan particularly easy, but there is always the potential problem that the single plan on offer will not provide the features you are looking for in a web hosting package. Fortunately, the plan that Bluehost has put together has more than enough features to satisfy even the most demanding customer.
The Bluehost Platinum Pak plan offers 1500GB of disk storage space, 15000GB of data transfer / bandwidth and a full set of features for the all inclusive price of $6.95 per month.
It is worth noting that Bluehost allows you to host an unlimited number of full domains and an unlimited number of sub-domains under the one account.
The table below highlights some of the major features that come as standard with the Bluehost Platinum Pak plan. Of-course, for an exhaustive list of plan features, you should visit the Bluehost web site.
Key features of Bluehost Platinum Pak web hosting plan (as reviewed)
1500GB disk storage space
15000GB per month data transfer / bandwidth
Unlimited domains (and sub-domains) hosted under the one account
One free domain name registration included with account
Free domain WHOIS privacy
1000 FTP accounts (with anonymous FTP support)
2500 POP3 or IMAP e-mail accounts
Unlimited forwarding e-mail addresses
Spam-Assassin e-mail filtering
Easy to use cPanel based control panel
50 MySQL or Postgre SQL databases
Frontpage 2000/2002/2003 extensions
PHP4, PHP5, Perl 5, Python, CGI and Ruby / Ruby on Rails script support
SSI - Server Side Includes fully supported
Fantastico script support
.htaccess and CRON access
Shell access via SSH
Shared Server
Our Bluehost account was placed on a shared server containing two quad-core Intel Xeon E5320 1.86Ghz CPUs (for a total of 8 cores), 4GB of RAM and three 750GB volumes. The server was running the CentOS 64bit Linux distribution. These specifications are very impressive for shared hosting in this price range.
During our testing, the average server load on our server was measured as 1.5 or less and we did not experience any server slowdowns due to excessive CPU load. Our test site remained fast and responsive, even during peak usage periods.
Control Panel
It came as no surprise that Bluehost, in common with most web hosting providers these days, supplies the industry standard cPanel for administration of your web-sites. cPanel is popular with good reason, as it very easy to navigate and provides access to all the configuration options you could wish for.
In addition to the normal configuration options, the Bluehost panel offers a web-based file manager and easy to use Page-Wizard, allowing reasonably professional looking web-pages to be created with a minimum of fuss. Fantastico script support is also available via the panel (more information below).
Scripting Support
As mentioned above, Bluehost provide Fantastico script support via the Bluehost panel. This allows the easy installation and upgrade of dozens of useful software packages, including packages for blogging, forums, content management systems, picture galleries, online surveys and polls etc. Fantastico has built an admirable reputation among users and by making it available, Bluehost has added enormous value to their already excellent hosting plan.
For those that prefer to install their scripts manually, Bluehost offers a large variety of industry standard scripting languages, including PHP4, PHP5, PERL5, Python, Ruby / Ruby on Rails and of-course, CGI.
Custom php.ini settings are supported, as are Apache .htaccess files and CRON jobs for executing scripts at regular intervals.
Reliability
Massive storage space, bandwidth and plan features are of no use if your chosen web host lacks basic network reliability. Nothing sours a relationship with a web host faster than frequent downtime. Of-course, some planned downtime is unavoidable, for things like network upgrades and maintenance, but a good host will keep such outages to a minimum and provide adequate warning to their customers.
Thankfully, we can report that our Bluehost test site experienced excellent reliability. We only detected one short 30-minute outage during our 3-month monitoring period. While we would have preferred no downtime at all, the 30 minutes represents only a very small percentage of the total, and our overall uptime during the 3 months was in excess of the 'magic' 99.9% that is often quoted by other web hosts.
Technical Support
Bluehost give customers a number of choices when it comes to technical support. Firstly, there is the superb on-line help-center, where you can browse or search a large knowledgebase of articles on a diverse range of subjects; this is often the quickest and easiest way to solve a problem. The help-center also provides the ability to open a support ticket directly to Bluehost support staff. We opened a number of support tickets during our test period and found the replies to be both prompt and accurate.
For those that prefer receiving their technical support from a 'real live human', Bluehost provide a 24 hour / 7 day technical support phone number. Bluehost also supply a separate technical support number for those customers outside of the United States.
Conclusion
Overall, our experience with Bluehost was pleasant and uneventful. Their network proved to be solid and reliable (except for one small incident) and Bluehost technical support was first-rate. The plan we reviewed supplies 1500GB of space and 15000GB of data transfer at a very affordable price.
If you are in the market for a new web host, in our opinion Bluehost warrants your serious consideration. In-fact, we were so impressed by the overall service provided by Bluehost that we recently moved this site to our Bluehost account.
