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Bluehost Review:Affordable Web Hosting for Small Business Websites
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Bluehost Review: Affordable Web Hosting for Small Business
Websites
Philip A.
Bef ore I get into this post I just want to make it clear to you that
the purpose of my Bluehost review is to guide you in making an
educated decision and to give you a basic idea on what an
af f ordable and reliable web hosting service must of f er.
Perhaps you’re just planning to start your f irst website or maybe
you already have a couple of sites but you’re looking f or a
better alternative to your current hosting provider this review
post will get you one step closer in achieving your goals.
I also want to let you know that all my websites are hosted with
Bluehost ever since I created my f irst website about 1 and half
years ago. I currently have 3 niche content sites and 2 e-
commerce sites which together f orm the residual income
streams I managed to build and grow f or my self .
All the inf ormation I share in this post is based solely on my
past and present experience with Bluehost.
Who is Bluehost ?
Bluehost.com was f ounded back in 1996 by Matt Heaton, and
it’s steadily earned it’s place among the most popular web
hosting service companies. With over 850 new signups every
day the company surpassed the 1 million hosted websites mark early on in 2009.
Bluehost Benef it s
Bluehost of f ers it’s services f or the price of $3.95/month f or the 3 year plan and $5.95/month f or the 1 year
plan. T he benef its you get with each hosting account are:
Unlimited number of hosted domains
Free domain name
Unlimited add-on domains, parked domains and subdomains
Unlimited FT P transf ers
Unlimited disk storage
1 Click install WordPress, f orums, e-commerce, wiki sites, social bookmarking sites
Free CDN f rom CloudFlare
2. Unlimited email accounts
cPanel Account control panel
24/7 Chat, email and phone support
T hese are only some of the benef its that Bluehost provides to every hosting account. But let me take things
a step f urther and show you what you can do on your hosting account.
1 Click Inst allat ions
1 Click installs is something that most of the top web hosting services of f er.
But the dif f erence between Bluehost’s 1 click install and the others is that it uses the Simple Scripts service
instead of Fantastico.
Why is SimpleScripts better than the Fantastico installer?
Well, the f act is that SimpleScripts releases the required updates f or the CMS’s they of f er within the same
day they appear on the of f icial websites.
So let’s take f or example the WordPress CMS. It’s current version is 3.51. If WordPress.org were to release
the next update tomorrow you would see an alert message f rom SimpleScripts in your cPanel telling you that
a new update is available.
But WordPress isn’t the only CMS with 1 click install that SimpleScripts of f ers. In f act you can have 1 click
install forum websites, e-commerce sites, wiki sites, social networks, classified ads websites, RSS
websites(think Alltop.com).
You can check out all of these options in the Bluehost demo cPanel. You will f ind a link to SimpleScripts
under the Sof tware/Services tab down the page.
Bluehost Webmail
If you have a website than you def initely need to have an email address ‘@yourdomain.com’.
With Bluehost you can create unlimited email accounts and you also have the opportunity to setup an
autoresponder.
So, f or example if someone sends you an email to your personalized email you can setup an autoresponder
message to be delivered to the sender’s inbox telling them something, whatever you want.
I’m sure you’re f amiliar with receiving automated messages when submitting a support ticket f or a service
you use.
So that means you could create more custom email accounts like ‘inf o@yourdomain.com’,
‘support@yourdomain.com’, ‘contact@yourdomain.com’, each sending an auto-reply email.
Af ter you create a personalized email account with your domain name you can then f orward it to maybe your
Gmail account, your AOL email account or wherever you want. T his way you will have a personalized
business email address and still receive those emails in your personal email account.
Here is a detailed tutorial on how you setup your own Bluehost webmail.
Websit e Perf ormance
3. A lot of people think shared hosting servers have minimal perf ormance when it comes to website load times,
but that is not the case here.
When you signup f or a hosting account, in your Bluehost cPanel you have the opportunity to sign up f or
CloudFlare’s f ree CDN service.
Although it doesn’t compare with paid content delivery networks like MaxCDN or Amazon S3 it still provides a
decent increase in website load times.
Here is a speed test I perf ormed f or my website just the other day using the GT Metrics f ree website speed
test.
So as you can see my website loads pretty f ast, and as I said I have 5 websites that are hosted on this
hosting account.
If you don’t know how to conf igure your CloudFlare account, you can f ind detailed tutorials on how to setup
CloudFlare f or your Bluehost site right here.
Bluehost Login
A lot of hosting services provide you with a special URL you need to use in order to log into your cPanel, f or
example HostGator provides you with something like ‘http://gator1245.hostgator.com/cpanel’.
With all the services and accounts we use on the internet today it can sometimes be hard f or us to
remember all of these details(at least f or me it is).
On the other hand if you go to Bluehost’s home page you will see right there on the top right a big ‘Control
Panel Login’ button, which makes it very easy f or you to log into your cPanel.
4. Who Recommends Bluehost ?
Well you didn’t think I was the only person that recommended hosting your websites with Bluehost did you?
Here are some of the top CMS platf orms that recommend Bluehost to their users:
1. WordPress.org
2. Drupal.org
3. Pligg.com
Pligg is a f ree open source CMS just like WordPress, only instead of creating blogs with the Pligg CMS you
can create awesome social bookmarking websites. T hey too recommend Bluehost.
4. Z en Cart
5. Z en Cart is among the most popular open source e-commerce platf orms that suggests Bluehost to it’s
users. You have the ability to 1 click install Z en Cart on any website using the SimpleScripts installer f rom
your cPanel.
My Own Experience wit h Bluehost
As I said in the beginning I’ve been hosting all my websites with Bluehost f or about 1 and a half years.
I’m not saying the Bluehost is the perf ect hosting service, I don’t think that, but so f ar I’ve been f ortunate
enough to not have any bad experiences with their service. T he worst thing that happened to me so f ar was
my experience with the WordPress white screen of death af f ecting this blog, which had nothing to do with
my hosting provider, the cause of that being a WordPress theme I was using.
All the inf ormation I shared in this Bluehost review is based solely on my experience with what Bluehost
has to of f er and the f eatures I’ve been using so f ar f or my websites.
I’m 100% sure that there are other people who had bad experiences with their service but overall if you want
an af f ordable and reliable web hosting service especially f or small business websites I recommend that you
go with Bluehost.
Bef ore I end this post I just want to make sure that you are f ully aware of the f act that the links in my
Bluehost review post that point to Bluehost.com are my af f iliate links. If you decide to sign-up f or a hosting
account using my Bluehost af f iliate links I will receive a commission without any extra cost to you.
So if you felt that this post delivered useful information that has helped you in making an educated
decision regarding web hosting, I thank you and really appreciate you for using one of my affiliate
links when signing up.
I also want to hear your thoughts about your favorite web hosting provider. Are you already using Bluehost to
host your website? Did you go through any bad experiences with your current hosting service? Please share
this in the comments bellow. I’m sure the people reading this review will highly appreciate it.
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