Editors BlueHost Review

Our Detailed BlueHost Review & Analysis

Readers of this site know we’re not big fans of CPanel (a usability challenged hosting control panel), so when we started getting requests to review Bluehost we almost took a pass … if you’ve seen one CPanel host you’ve seen them all right? Well, apparently it’s not that simple.

Bluehost popped up on the radar a few years ago, promoting a single hosting plan at an excellent price. What’s interesting with Bluehost is that they’ve gone from zero to hosting over 570,000 domain names in just a couple of years. In terms of growth they’re one of the fastest growing hosts around.

Like we said, they’ve got one plan and one plan only. For $6.95 a month you get Unlimited gigs of diskspace, Unlimited gigs of bandwidth and a ridiculously high number of e-mail addresses (2,500). These specs and pricing are an excellent value, and about 5x higher than what they were a year ago (and probably about 10x lower than what they’ll be a year from now).

Signup

Bluehost’s website is well … very blue. It’s clean, simple and gets you through the signup process fast. About 10 minutes after we signed up we were greeted with an e-mail detailing our account information. We got a telephone call shortly thereafter from a Bluehost representative to verify the order. This all happened on a Saturday afternoon, which means they’ve got staff working on weekends (a good thing).

Control Panel

Of course the first thing you do after you’ve signed up with any hosting company is login to the control panel to manage your account (set up a database, install a few apps, create 2,500 e-mail accounts … the usual). Bluehost uses CPanel 10 to power their hosting platform. CPanel was a deal breaker when we reviewed Lunarpages a year ago so before we even got started this time around we figured we would crash and burn.

CPanel is your best friend and your worst enemy. It’s jam packed with almost every hosting feature you could ever dream of, but using it to accomplish something is like trying to drive blindfolded. Its tools are poorly designed, difficult to use and presented in a very random fashion. At first glance it looks like Bluehost is simply running a stock version of the control panel, however we quickly noticed they’ve added a few features to make life with CPanel almost tolerable.



Bluehost has improved the CPanel homepage interface by organizing the icons into logical groups.


The most noticeable improvement is purely cosmetic. You can tame the beast by using an alternate control panel layout. This quickly became the first link we clicked whenever we logged in and should be the default layout every time you log in. Other improvements include an integrated billing profile manager, a direct link to the support center, a website creation tool, an additional webmail client and a domain manager.

All this makes CPanel at Bluehost tolerable, but it doesn’t make it good. If you’re looking for a web host to build your first website, or if you’ve used a different hosting control panel in the past then you’ll probably find CPanel’s rough edges a little too hard to swallow. Otherwise if you’ve been there and done that then Bluehost’s customizations will probably do you good.

Features

One feature that really separates Bluehost from the other CPanel hosts is Ruby on Rails support. For those who don’t know, Rails is an up and coming programming framework that makes online application development easy (well … if you’re a developer anyways). It’s good to see Bluehost on the leading edge in this regard. The only caveat here is that you’re required to provide photo ID before you can dig in. No joke, shell access is only granted if you send in a mug shot.

Bluehost has a feature that allows you to host unlimited domain names on single account. The idea here is that you can create unlimited different websites and host them all for one low price (the cost of the hosting plan). The implementation of this is pretty clunky compared to other hosts, but in the end it works. First you use the Domain Manager (one of Bluehost’s CPanel improvements) to register a new domain for free Once it’s registered you need to manually add the domain to the account using CPanel’s built in Domain Addon utility. A two-step process. Things get a little more tedious when you’re trying to use a domain name registered elsewhere. You cannot add it until you’ve switched nameservers which means that if there’s a website hosted (that you’re trying to transfer) there will be downtime. Almost all other hosts allow you to add a domain without switching nameservers first so you can move your website content over ahead of time.

The ins and outs of hosting multiple websites with a single account gave us a good excuse to test out Bluehosts’s technical support. Features and pricing aside, good technical support is probably the most important thing to look for in a web hosting company, as you will eventually hit a roadblock no matter how much experience you’ve had.

The good news is Bluehost offers plenty of support options. Their first line of support is the Support Center knowledgebase. This is an online searchable list of documents and help guides that cover everything from domains to databases. This is also the weakest link in their support arsenal. The existing documents could use a re-write and they really need to add more.

Their second line of support is a web-based e-mail ticket system. Bluehost offers 24/7 support through this system and it works well. You can easily submit a support request via the website and login anytime to view your open and closed tickets. The best part is when you get an answer (usually within a couple of hours) it’s also e-mailed to you. We really liked this.

Their third line of support is toll-free telephone support from 6AM to 10:00PM Mountain Time. Most hosting companies only offer a local number and add insult to injury by making you pay long distance to get answers fast. With Bluehost we never waited more than 5 minutes and actually spoke with friendly, knowledgeable support technicians. This is a big plus.

Finally, Bluehost recently started a message forum. It’s only been a couple of months but there are already over a thousand posts, mostly Bluehost customers helping Bluehost customers. We like this as well.

Platform

Of course the most common topic of discussion on the message forum revolves around resource usage, uptime and downtime. Bluehost’s shared hosting platform works by packing about 250 customers (or up to 1,000 domain names) onto a single server (they have a lot of servers). As such you share resources with other customers. “Shared Hosting��? is based on the idea that the average website doesn’t really use 30GB of space or 2,500 e-mail accounts. In fact the average website uses only a fraction of that amount.

Trouble only begins if you (or another customer on your server) has a poorly coded website that sucks up a lot of processing power. This could cause other websites on the server to run slowly. Keep in mind these issues are not unique to Bluehost and like all shared hosting companies they usually never surface at all.

We tested Bluehost for over 3 months and not once did our website go dark. That said, there were times (about 3 instances) when things felt sluggish for 20 to 30 minutes at a time - our webpages loaded slowly or the control panel was unresponsive. But all in all Bluehost’s platform is stable, considering how many new customers they get a day it has to be.

Final Thoughts

Bluehost surprised us. They have a well-priced, fully loaded hosting plan backed by excellent customer support. Their founder and CEO, Matt Heaton, actually speaks - answering questions in the message forum and posting interesting articles about the company on his blog. Really their only weakness is CPanel itself, which lacks usability. When it's all said and done Bluehost is pretty good, however they need to add a bit more polish before we would call them great.

Pros
- Toll-free support
- Excellent overall value, price

Cons
- Photo ID required for advanced features

Visit Bluehost.com

BlueHost Site Screenshot (http://www.bluehost.com)

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