Product Review: Blue Host Web Hosting

About the company: Bluehost has been providing hosting solutions to thousands of business and personal web sites since 1996. Our internet hosting package helps businesses and individuals get high-powered service at a fraction of the cost.

The big pitch: $6.95 p/month web hosting, with free set-up, no hidden fees, and a free domain included.

Finding the right host is like finding the right girl – you can just never tell whether you have the right package until you try it out in person. Thankfully, there are hosting service companies out there that have attained a high level of reputation, while also charging reasonable prices and offering decent packages that will suit most any business. Bluehost is one of those companies.

The standard Bluehost package at the time of writing is a 4gb hosting space upon which you can host up to six domains, receiving 2500 POP/Imap email accounts, 100gb per month of transfer bandwidth, Secure Socket Layering (SSL), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), server stats, CGI, PHP, MySQL, and support for 2000, 2002, and 2003 Microsoft Front Page extensions.

Now, if all of that technospeak is a little confusing to you, we understand – take it from us when we say this is a decent package, for a very nice price, which has enough extra features that you can grow into the account as you get more and more familiar with running a website as a business.

Bluehost also offers new clients a content package, promotional package (search engine submissions etc), a free eCommerce/shopping cart system, free blogs, IRC chat, messageboards, and all of that comes with real life actual toll-free customer support.

They support international domain names, email autoresponders and forwarding, up to 20 subdomains, up to 1000 FTP accounts, web-based email, server side includes, customizable error pages, form–mail scripts, survey/polls, web auctions, Flash support, Real Audio support… Seriously, the more you read about Bluehost’s set-up, the more obvious it becomes that they believe in offering you everything you could ever want, even if you’ll never use it.

Their system uses high performance Xeon servers and a customized Apache web server, and the network is not only hooked up to a UPS Power back-up AND a Diesel back-up generator, but they also have mirrored storage backups and 24/7 network monitoring by trained staff.

Clearly, this is a hosting set-up that leaves nothing to chance, delivers a good-sized account package, and won’t be asking you to ‘upgrade’ your account to get features that should be standard.

If you’re tired of AOL-like systems like GoDaddy that are aimed at the bottom end of the market, and you’re sick of being continually nickel and dimed for features by company’s who offer cheap accounts but cost you plenty on the backend, then Bluehost is for you .

And if you have no idea what the hell we’ve been talking about for the last ten paragraphs but you’re looking for a good, cheap, realiable place to put your new website, then Bluehost is for you .

The Product Trends rating: A big, fat five stars. We have no issue at all with the way Bluehost does business, and in fact we wish others would follow their example. Very inexpensive, very good.

To try Bluehost for yourself, click the image below:

posted by Oz @ 11:46 AM