Charles, a work colleague of mine sent around an email today asking for recommendations for a webhost for his daughter’s swimming club. I’ve been hosting with ServerGrid for some time and I’m reasonably happy with the service I get. However if I was looking around for a new host for a single website, I would probably go with BlueHost. I’ve heard some great things about them from friends who are hosting with them; so I thought I’d have a look at their service and see what they offer.
They have a standard price of $6.95 a month for their service, so very little to get confused about there. However, you may ask, what features does this offer? And this is where BlueHost stands out compared to other hosting providers. The list of features is extremely rich and is too vast to list, but here’s some salient ones:
- Unlimited Domains
- 300Gb Disk Space
- 3000Gb Data Transfer
- A free domain name included in the price
- Practically unlimited number of email addresses, with spam filtering and webmail
- MySQL and PostgreSQL
- PHP, Python, Ruby (on Rails), Perl
- Loads of packages you can deploy at the touch of a button, including WordPress, PHPNuke, Mambo, Joomla, Tikiwiki, phpBB, OSCommerce and loads more
The last one is a killer feature for people who don’t have the experience (or aren’t inclined) to install, tweak and play around with different apps. I’ve seen people struggle with getting WordPress installed, so the one-click deployment makes things so much easier. Plus there’s no effort to try out new software in the knowledge that you can just scrub the whole thing if you don’t like it.
I think I would go ahead and recommend BlueHost. Anyone out there using them?
I am SO HAPPY with Bluehost! When I was looking into buying my own domain, I called a friend who I knew had his own site, and I emailed another friend who designs and installs blogs, and they both recommended Bluehost.
My favorite feature is the LiveChat. I have used it twice and the people on the other end were always very professional as well as friendly. I have also called their offices and coincidentally, got the same person on the phone that I had recently chatted with!
And yeah, I love having 2500 email addresses. It makes it pretty darn hard for those spammers to find me!
I use them and love them!
They do have a lot of nice tools that are especially helpful for beginners, but there’s too much downtime for my taste. My sites probably average 3-5 hours of downtime per week, and it always seems to be around busy times.
I’m currently shopping around for a new host.
I use bluehost, too, and I love them. Plus I hear they are local to Utah, so it’s nice for me to support a local business. 🙂
I just started using Bluehost for my very first wordpress blog. Being a tech noob, I was worried about installing wordpress, but turns out that it’s just one touch of a button.
So convenient!
I am on bluehost and I run 4 blogs and one message board with a total of five domains. Seeing these stats I was curious why I had a limit of 6 domains. Well, turns out I was not automatically upgraded to the new features. I just put in a support ticket today so hopefully my account will be upgraded soon.