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BlueHost Reviewed by BestHostsDirectory.Com

Professional Web Hosting by BlueHost
Rating: 4/5 4 stars hosting Date: Feb 09 2011

Pricing & Getting Started with BlueHost

BlueHost advertise prices of $6.95 per month and you can get this price for both their two and three years plan. If you want to subscribe for one year only the price goes one dollar up.

BlueHost Signup Process

Additionally, note that there are two features selected by default. Those upgrades are “SiteLock Domain Security” and “Premium Backup Service”. The first one is just a “seal” that you get to put on your website from the third-party company SiteLock which costs $10 monthly if you buy it directly from the Sitelock company and $12 yearly if you choose to get it from BlueHost. The premium backup service provides you with the ability to restore yor website from the daily, weakly and monthly backups BlueHost make for your account. In conclusion, we advise you to take a close look at the BlueHost terms of use agreement and their promotions in order to avoid being charged for features that you don’t need. Rather than that, they have a good billing and pricing policy.

Technical Support

BlueHost provide phone, chat and e-mail support to their customers. Although they have a part in their website named Helpdesk it is just a form for sending e-mails. We have performed the standard test – installed a WordPress application and broke the database connection(setting a wrong DB password).

Unfortunately, because the e-mail is sent via the ticket form, the response time cannot be tracked most accurately. However, Bluehost stated that the last waiting time was 2 hours which is about as much as we measured. This waiting time is significantly higher than the top three companies listed on our website. In addition, the response we received was at best unsatisfactory:

I have set your theme to default and disabled plugins, that did not fix the white screen where it normally would.
Have you upgraded your wordpress recently?

After our reply that we have not updated the application, we received an obviously templated answer:

WordPress is one of the most versatile scripts around. However due to 3rd party scripts, plugins, and themes, WordPress can occasionally have problems. These problems usually break the php process and a white page is shown with no error. The causes of this white screen are varied. Here are Top reasons and possible solutions.

Broken theme

  • Log into cPanel
  • Click Phmyadmin
  • Locate correct WordPress Database
  • Browse table wp_options
  • Go to page 2 change – the template and style sheet, type in: default.

Incompatible Plugin

  • In File Manager
  • Go toWP-Content, look for “plugins” Folder to “plugins_old”.
  • Create new empty folder called “plugins”.
  • This will disable all the WordPress plugins.
  • Log into WordPress and verify site is working.
  • Enable plug-ins one at a time to see which one was causing the issues.

Memory_limit maxed.

  • Increase the memory_limit in the php.ini. 64M should be good.

Note : Please make that you are running the most recent version of Worpdress.

Please let us know if you still have problems after checking these things.

It is strange that none of the suggested solutions was even close to resolving the real issue. A broken database connection is the easiest case that a support team member could face and it should be resolved in minutes. Unfortunately, BlueHost performed far worse on this test than the competition.

Conclusion

BlueHost offer good shared web hosting. Their prices are not the lowest in the industry but aren’t expensive too. The one thing that prevents them from entering the top 3 hosting providers on our website is their technical support. There is a lot of work they should do to reach their competition in professional expertise and response time.

BlueHost has received the “Top 10 Best Hosts Award 2010″

In 2010 the Best Hosts Directory has once again selected the best hosts and BlueHost is one of the top performing hosts that we have reviewed and compared. BlueHost is one of the leading web hosting providers. It operates since 1996 and hosts over 600,000 sites. With BlueHost a webmaster can depend on high customer service, quality equipment, maximum guaranteed uptime and highly functional tools for administration.