Overview:

BlueHost, founded in 1996, is one of the older hosting providers that we have reviewed. Do not be fooled by that date however, as it was not until 2003 that Bluehost stepped into the marketplace as a major competitor. In 2003, BlueHost began offering their feature-packed hosting plan which has allowed them to gain thousands of clients over the past few years.

As BlueHost has gained customers, they have done well with handling customer service and sales questions both by e-mail and through their toll-free phone number. Though the phone number is only available 6 days per week, it is far better that what some of the competition currently offer. Of course should they not be available by phone or you just prefer e-mail, their ticket-based troubleshooting system is up to the task.

BlueHost's attention to meeting needs of an ever changing customer base as well as their skillful attention to customer support has earned them some well deserved respect in the hosting community.

Overall Value:

BlueHost offers a many great features for a great price. Only a few other hosting providers offer packages that can compete with 10 GB disk space, 250 GB bandwidth, 6 domains hosted, and SSH access allowed. The price is made even better when we consider that BlueHost is one of the few companies that offer good technical support over the phone.

Performance:

When evaluating the performance of BlueHost's servers, we had the luxury of being able to test on 3 servers. Our tests showed that they still have some older server's which sometimes have trouble with high server load. When speaking to their technical support staff we were told that sites on old servers good be moved if necessary at no cost.

Reliability:

We have had some issues on our test servers with very short term down-time. However this is generally a result of an unplanned critical patches for Linux.

Ease of Administration:

BlueHost offers cPanel 10 for web-based account administration which has become standard for administering hosting accounts. To aide users, they offer a very detailed online knowledgebase on their webpage. Furthermore, they allow users to administer their accounts using SSH.

Known Problems:

If your website generates a lot of e-mail (more than 500 per hour) you will need to get special permission from their administrator. They will not host sites that produce large amounts of e-mail (bad for mailing lists and phpBB forums)

Other Hosting Plans:

BlueHost does not offer any other hosting plans.

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