Distinct Quality

When I started getting interested in building out some properties online, I realized my basic web host wasn’t going to cut it. I was confined to 400mb of space and could only support a few domains without stepping up to a significantly more expensive hosting package. I switched over to BlueHost.com as my web host provider back in July 2007 and this comprises my 6 month review of their service.

My Needs

I run several web sites; 3 blogs, a few largish technical reference sites, an image gallery or two, this site (and the DistinctScan tool on the homepage and host a few blogs for friends. I used to use RealWebHost as my web host and they offered good service but just couldn’t compete with BlueHost.com’s ridiculously cheap hosting package and rich set of features.

I do most of my development work in Perl, but also have one site powered by some PHP code. I host 5 domains (bluehost allows unlimited domains). I haven’t taken advantage of their ad credits yet, but they offer $100 in free ad credits just for opening an account.

BlueHost Uptime

Uptime has been a small problem for me, but not enough to convince me to look elsewhere. I check my sites quite often and I rarely run into a downtime issue due to the host. I have run into issues where the host is briefly down during normal business hours though and, I realize, that is completely unacceptable for some so let that guide your decision.

BlueHost Tech Support

Tech support is great, my favorite feature is the live chat which they offer 24×7 as far as I can tell. You can try out the live chat on their home page before you even open an account which is pretty nice if you want to give their tech support a dry run. I’ve tried their phone support as well and, even though it was busy when I called the first few times, once I got through they were quick and helpful. Email support got two thumbs up too. These guys run a large operation and host a lot of sites, its clear they’ve built the process to get tech issues handled quickly and they seem to have a tech support staff that actually understands the services they provide and how to troubleshoot them.

BlueHost Features

I’m not going to go into too much in depth on their features since their website has all the gory details, but its a pretty sweet package for $6.95/month. For under $7 bucks you get:
- A free domain name
- 1.5TB of hosting space (thats right, Terabytes baby!)
- Support for unlimited domains
- 15TB of bandwith
- Support for PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails (RoR), etc
- A slew of great stuff on the control panel including:
— Traffic Analysis tools
— Fantastico (and all its glory)
— Wordpress
— Drupal
— CopperMine photo gallery
— TikiWiki
— Joomla
— Self-service wizard to install your own Perl modules from CPAN
— MySQL support
— PostGres support
— New domain registration wizard, domains are $10/year
— And a bunch of other stuff.

The outcome

BlueHost rocks. $6.95 a month, good uptime, massive features, crazy scalability, support for a boatload of languages, the ability to install my own perl modules without admin help, good tech support with great availability. I can’t really ask for much more than all of that.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 1:11 am and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.