Our Review of: Bluehost

Overview:

Bluehost, a well known web hosting favorite, located in Jacksonville, Florida has been in the web hosting business since 1996 and currently hosts a whopping 2,000,000+ domain names. They excel in providing low cost web hosting, with many features only found with larger, more expensive hosting companies. Many features of which you will never need to use, but it's nice to know that nearly any widely used script is available if you do need it.

As noted above, they're a large host, that has the experience and know-how to make sure things run smoothly. That expertise, combined with outstanding technical support and being veterans in the web hosting industry makes them the solid top pick on our list.

Pros:

• One of the oldest web hosting companies.
• They own their datacenter and are 100% US based.
• Nearly every hosting application you could ever want.

Cons:

• Have heard of a few gripes with tech support.

Features & Specials:

Bluehost has unheard of hosting deals with the perfect plans for any small to medium sized business, or personal web site. We currently feature their most popular hosting plan, but for the price and what it offers, it can't be beat. In addition to a huge storage and transfer limit, it offers a free domain name for life, free/instant account setup, free domain privacy registration and 24-hour toll-free support, with a 30-second support wait time average.

Account features offered are too numerous to list, but a few that really stood out and are most significant are Flash support, message forum, live chat, web auction software, along with a host of e-commerce shopping cart plugins. Their free site builder also is a great feature, which makes building a web site a breeze. Bluehost also lets you host unlimited domains on each account, great for clients with extra domain names.

Last but not least, for a limited time, new accounts also get free web site search engine submission and free $75 advertising credits at Google and $50 credits at Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Reliability & Speed:

Bluehost's top notch datacenters, which they really do own and operate, featuring world-class equipment and industry leading network connections, enables them to have a super reliability and speed rating. They include a 50,000 sq. ft. headquarters and 2 secondary datacenters, totaling over 20,000 sq. ft. of datacenter space. From their high performance equipment, biometric entry security, total UPS power backup and 24/7 monitoring, Bluehost always has your site's uptime in mind.

They also utilize mirrored storage backups, which helps ensure that your data is never lost due to equipment failure. Mirrored backups basically keep a near realtime second copy of your files on another hard disk, which gives their file storage system great redundancy in case of a main hard drive failure. This would be similar to a Raid type backup system, widely used to protect against accidental file loss.

Support:

Bluehost offers great customer service and support, with usually less than 30-second hold times, via english speaking support. As a matter of fact, their support staff is located in Jacksonville, FL, at their main headquarters. Their friendly staff are always there to help with most any problems that might arise. You can reach them several ways, either by 24/7 free support chat online, which is our favorite, by 24/7 toll-free phone, or e-mail.

They also offer an extensive help desk section, with FAQs, advanced online trouble ticket system and more. They also offer a customer message forum, to get answers from other members.

Average Support Wait Times:

Chat Wait Time 9 seconds

Phone Wait Time 30 seconds

Control Panel:

Bluehost utilizes the famous cPanel control panel interface, which makes it easy to manage all aspects of your hosting account. cPanel makes managing your account a breeze, with a simple navigational platform and detailed usage instructions. A few notable easy-to-use functions include the ability to configure e-mail accounts, domain management, website statistics, script implementation and database administration. They have also made a few tweaks to their control panel, which makes it even easier to operate than regular cPanel accounts.

What sets them apart?

Summary:

We picked Bluehost as the #1 rated web host, because of their great price, account feature addons and excellent tech support. Not to mention, their long standing status as veterans in the web hosting industry, operating their own datacenter, in operation since 1996.

With all the above now said, we think you'll agree that Bluehost has one of the best web hosting offers out there. Check out an absolute top contender in the discount web hosting arena today.

Bluehost Ratings ChartScore: 9.8%