Bluehost

Company Information

Founded: 1996
Headquarters: Provo, UT

Plans and Pricing

At first glance, Bluehost offers a flat fee for its singular service, regardless of the length of the plan. For only $6.95 per month, you can enjoy Bluehost web hosting for either 12 months, 24 months or 36 months. You should be aware, however, that each package is billed in one lump sum, so that you’ll be charged as follows:

You should also be aware that Bluehost’s whois privacy feature is automatically checked off on the checkout page, so you will be charged $9.95 for this service unless you uncheck the box. Once registered, you can also add anti-spam protection for $1 per email address per month.

Upon registration, users have the option to upgrade their hosting plan to a pro package which costs $14.95/month and includes a dedicated IP address, SSL certificate, 3 free domain names, and 10 free Postini email filters (which are powered by Google).

Bluehost also offers premium site building software which is available for purchase within the control panel. Options include Soholaunch which costs around $20/month for a single site and Trendy Site Builder, a Flash-based web builder that costs $4.92/month. concrete5 and liveSite, reputable free website builders, are also available.

Bluehost accepts Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express cards only.

Money Back Guarantee

Bluehost offers a 30 day full money back guarantee with no penalties or administrative fees. All contracts cancelled within the first 30 days will receive a full refund, and orders cancelled after the first 30 days will receive a refund pro-rated for the time remaining in the contract.

Features

Bluehost offers technical features and add-ons that are comparable to those offered by other top shared web hosting companies. Although some features such as FrontPage extensions and Google integrations aren’t listed on their features page, I found that most things I searched for were actually available and could be achieved with a bit of help from the knowledgebase or customer service.

Hosting Features:

• Unlimited disk space
• Unlimited domain hosting
• Free domain name
• Unlimited site transfer
• Unlimited parked domains
• Unlimited subdomains

Site Buiding Tools:

• cPanel control panel
• CGI-BIN
• CGI Library

Programming Tools:

• PHP 5
• Perl 5
• Ruby on Rails
• Python
• Javascript

Integrated Applications:

• WordPress
• Joomla
• Drupal
• b2evolution
• Tikiwiki
• Moodle
• Coppermine image galleries
• SSL servers
• OS Commerce shopping cart
• Zen shopping cart
• Message form
• Streaming video and audio support

Online Marketing Credits:

• $75 Google AdWords credit
• $25 Bing/Yahoo! advertising credits for US and Canadian customers

Ease of Use

One of the advantages that Bluehost touts directly on its home page is free instant setup. Not only was this claim accurate, but it was surprisingly refreshing as compared with some other top web hosts such as GoDaddy, where site setup can take up to 48 hours to propagate. Another significant advantage of Bluehost is a free demo version of their control panel which enables users and prospective users to see how the control panel works before beginning.

Registering for a Bluehost account was extremely straightforward, primarily because the company offers only a single plan and pricing structure which eliminates the need to debate between different plans or to calculate which pricing structure truly offers the best deal. Once registered, you’re prompted to a quick tutorial which can help answer any pressing questions that you may have. While I didn’t find this tutorial necessary, it was comforting to know that it was there.

Bluehost’s cPanel control panel is extremely well-organized, making it possible for even new webmasters to find what they need with relative ease. A help button on the top right corner of the cPanel ensures that assistance is never far away.

A look at Bluehost’s control panel

For my first sample task, I attempted to install a WordPress blog on my newly-created domain. Installing a WordPress blog is supposed to be easy, but Bluehost’s intuitive control panel makes it practically effortless. What I found specifically intriguing about Bluehost’s offering is that they offered the option not only to create a new WordPress blog but to import an existing blog extremely easily.