BlueHost

BlueHost is okay and offers Fantastico to install WordPress.

This is the first time I’ve commented here and I must say you give genuine, and quality information for bloggers! Great job.

I use Hostgator but BlueHost is very good too.

Bluehost is good technically but has a few drawbacks.

They are based in Utah so they have some rather strict rules regarding content. Your site cannot contain any skin, as in anything that would offend a mormon. No boobs, butts, bare backs, sexy legs, nothing. They label it as porn and kill your site. I spoke to their abuse dept. to get this first hand. Several colleagues have had this happen to them.

Also, I have heard several people saying they had to delete profanity on their site or face deletion too.

Hmmm. One time, something went wrong with my blog and I couldn’t access both my site or dashboard. Unfortunately, it happened the night before Christmas and Bluehost went on vacation. Sigh. So much for 24/7 service. Other than that, everything is swell. ??

I used Bluehost for three years with about 30 gig of pictures on my site.
I used their database to make my own short URL, and one day they removed it and told me this was not allowed. This after about three years of use.

I lost all my links on many sites.

I was not a happy traveler. They would not listen to reason and restore my database.

I moved to midphase with about a weeks work just to get my website up again.

Of course all the links posted were dead

Do I have a kind word about Bluehost–NO.

I’ve had my site with blue host for awhile and they are pretty good. Response times are nice and they do indeed have one click installs. Here is my site so you can get an idea of reaction time:

https://www.bloodylexicon.com

The problem with hosts like bluehost is that their servers are often times slow due the the overcrowding.

Although all my sites use GoDaddy for hosting, I was an affiliate of BlueHost and I’ve never heard a bad thing about them.

I’ve had excellent support from bluehost. Also, when I reached their site through a Google Search, then front page prices were cheaper than going straight to their site … I secured rates at $3.65 / month … prepaid for 5 years at that rate.

Good Luck with your selection.

Rich, was it necessary to spam your link?

Bluehost lies about your actual diskspace and bandwidth. Read their TOS there is no such thing as unlimited storage. Does your computer have unlimited storage? I think not.

Neodan,

Sorry if I really did “spam my link” … I certainly did not mean to spam.

This link is to my personal site; it has very little traffic … and has nothing to do with selling anything at all

~~~

Aside from that, I am grateful for the information that it’s not unlimited storage space … As a photographer, I have uploaded lots of original sized Nikon D1 images … and have had no complaints or warnings …. but then again, I’ve only been with them since October of last year.

kind regards,

Bluehost is good for small sites, I prefer using rackspace or media temple for commercial sites.

I have two non-profit orgs with their sites hosted on a BH shared plan and I’m not looking back. But I also think results vary according to needs:

• There’s the content enforcement issue – already mentioned.
• If the big chunk of your audience is in the left half of the US, their location helps in low response time.
• If your traffic is moderate, you’ll be fine with their traffic limits. If you’re picking up consistently above that, start looking for an upgrade.
• The more you do on your end to make the site efficient (good caching settings, streamlined consolidated CSS and JS, etc.) the less trouble you’ll have.
• You can even use a CDN to offload, to postpone the upgrade jump.
• Another thing BH has a zero tolerance policy for is filesharing. Just don’t do it.
• I like to speak to real human beings, preferably sharing the same language as I do, as that makes interaction all the more efficient; BH does that, and I’ve never ran into an impolite or arrogant engineer to help me out.
• Price-wise I think they’re in the very decent category.
• Most important of all though: it really depends on what you want. In “my” two cases they’re more a serious, business-like CMS than a flashy hot stuff blog; streamlining for performance is much easier to do in my cases.
• They do offer a lot of storage space, but if your game is a massive repository of video files with lots of simultaneous streams, look for a CDN or look simply elsewhere.
• If you’re into mass-mailing your thousands of subscribers, look elsewhere. They’re allergic to mass email sent from their own servers. You have to have a stellar track record with them – and a demonstrably legit case – to get a more flexible email sending regime. Oddly enough I see this as a plus.
• The more you do on your end to keep spammers and bots out and tighten traffic (good caching, again…) the more they’ll accommodate you, too. But: content restrictions and filesharing and generally “risque” applications remain cut off.

As I said: I’m a happy customer of BH, but I think my sites fit very well in their “target” market.

Oh, about one-click installations: yeah, they have it. I’ve tried it and it works. The thing is, with their server permission settings there’s never been a plugin or theme or upgrade that went wrong. It’s the one hosting provider for WP where I least have trouble with permissions and still have a safe default setup (i.e. with 755/644 perms) while updates and new themes / plugins / installs work like a charm.

I recommend them as a solid option – but then again, several of them on the WP hosting page that are up there, as far as I’m concerned, for the lower-to-midrange traffic WP sites.

Just to add my two cents…

I’m a user of BlueHost and overall I’m quite happy with them. Their one-click install (now using simplescripts) is quite nice.. handles updates pretty well too. They’re also one of the few top webhosting services that offer Postgres databases.

Probably my biggest problem with bluehost though is if you violate their terms of service in anyway, they immediately shutdown all your sites. It’d be nice if they gave you a grace period, even if just 24hours.

For example, I had stored some files on there as a backup, not realize (though I admittedly I should have) that it violated there ToS. Well when they found it, they just shut me out. I had to call them up for them to give me ssh access to clear the problem.

If I was doing something more severe, I guess I could understand it. But I thought this was rather extreme. Especially since I was hosting about 5 websites through them and they just disabled all of them without any notice whatsoever.