Review of BlueHost: Great Steady Web Host

BlueHost is a steady reliable, but uninspiring web host. Here’s what we found:

Experienced, established company
Very good uptime record
No-frills services
Reasonably good customer experience
Very fast
True limits of “unlimited” use vaguely expressed

Summary

Bluehost comes across as something that doesn’t inspire strong feelings one way or the other. They are a reliable host and have been business for a long time, and they have a great deal of happy customers. There is no hype and pomp on their website. I believe Bluehost to be a good and competent host.

Price: 90
Features: 88
Speed: 99
Uptime: 97
Reliability: 98
Customer support: 95
Customer experience: 90
TOTAL: 94

Detailed overview

Unlimited Stuff
  • Hosted Domains
  • Bandwidth
  • Disk space
True Limits
  • Not allowed to use disk space for online backups (for files unrelated to the website)
  • Like many other budget hosts, Bluehost is evasive in defining what exactly their “unlimited” policy means. After grilling the pre-sales support, and found out that their inode limit is 50.000, and CPU limit is 50%.
Free Stuff
  • Search engine submission
  • Free domain name
  • $25 Yahoo Credits
  • $50 Google Credits
Hosting platforms
  • Linux
Control panel
  • cPanel
Technical support 24/7 Phone, Email and Live
Contract term
  • Cheapest: 36 months / $6.95 / month
  • Most expensive: 12 months / $8.95 / month
Customer experience roundup Bluehost receives a mix bag of reviews. On the positive side, they offer simple hosting you can purchase and set up easily. On the downside there appears to be some support issues and somewhat limited features. All in all, Bluehost does not appear to cause a lot of emotional turmoil, rather they plod on in a steady manner.
Uptime
  • Claim: no claim
  • True: 99.802%
Features Most likely all you will need, but compared to many other hosts, somewhat limited.
Plans Bluehost only offers one plan. The price varies depending on the length of contract. Minimum contract term is 12 months.
Price
  • $6.95 / month / 36 months
  • $7.95 / month / 24 months
  • $8.95 / month / 12 months
Guarantees
  • 30 Day Money Back Guarantee
Technical quality Very Good
Email services Choice of 3 different mail solutions
Warnings
  • Vague limitations of overuse in TOS
  • No monthly plan
  • Linux hosting only