Everything You Need to Know About Bluehost
If you are looking for a good web hosting company, you have probably heard of Bluehost. They are a popular and quickly growing web hosting company that is used by more than 2 million websites around the world. They offer many attractive features and very reasonable pricing. Before you choose a web host, however, you should carefully consider the company and whether it fits with your own plans. In this article, we’ll be taking a close look at Bluehost to help you decide if it’s right for you.
Bluehost Shared Web Hosting
Most websites use shared hosting, which is the cheapest option and satisfactory for most people and small businesses. We’ll be briefly looking at some of Bluehost’s other plans later on, but most of our focus will be on their shared hosting. While some web hosts split their shared hosting into several different plans, Bluehost focuses on providing a single plan with a wide variety of features.
Here are some of the benefits that come with their shared hosting plan.
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Unlimited Email Accounts, Websites, Storage and Domains
As mentioned, many web hosts have multiple plans to choose from at different price points. This can get confusing especially for new users. Since Bluehost offers virtually unlimited resources with their single plan, this saves you from having to compare plans. Having unlimited domains and websites is useful if you want to build multiple blogs or websites for either personal or business reasons.
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Free Domain Name
When you sign up for web hosting with Bluehost, you get a free domain name registration. This is worth anything from $10 to $15 a year.
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Site Builder With Templates
This allows anyone to easily build a website without the need for technical skills. Templates let you create a customized website quickly.
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Comprehensive Support
Bluehost offers 24/7 support by phone, live chat or through email. There is also a large knowledge base where you can find answers to many common questions.
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Automated Backups
This is an important feature that safeguards your data and websites in case of a system crash. If necessary, you can restore all of your data with just one click of your mouse. Backups are performed daily, weekly and monthly.
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Bonuses
Bluehost offers $200 in free offers when you sign up. This includes free advertising credits for Google and Facebook. By using these free advertising credits, you can start advertising with the respective websites and get traffic instantly.
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Money Back Guarantee
Bluehost offers a 30 money back guarantee on all of its hosting plans. Beyond this point, you can still cancel at any time and receive a prorated refund, as there are no contracts involved!
Pricing For Bluehost
Many people are attracted to Bluehost because of its low prices. Considering the features it provides with its basic shared hosting plan, it’s a little surprising that they charge less than so many competitors.
The regular pricing for Bluehost shared hosting is $7.99 per month. The company, however, runs frequent specials. Right now, for example, you can get hosting for as low as $3.95 per month when you sign up through partnering sites such as ThunderMailer.com! $3.95 per month is the lowest price possible from them! You won’t be able to find a better price elsewhere.
As with most web hosts, you can get a better deal by signing up for longer periods of time (e.g. 2 or 3 years rather than 1 year). Keep in mind that no matter how long you sign up for, you’re never locked in and can always cancel at any time.
Other Web Hosting Plans
Bluehost offers a variety of web hosting plans in addition to shared hosting. While shared hosting is perfectly adequate for most personal and even business sites, there are some cases where you may want access to more resources. Let’s take a look at some of the other hosting plans you can get from the same company.
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Pro Plan
This is a more advanced version of the basic shared hosting plan. While the basic plan has more than enough resources for the average website owner, the Pro plan adds certain capabilities, such as 5x extra server performance, a dedicated IP and an SSL certificate. This plan costs $18,95 per month and is especially great for high traffic sites.
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WordPress Hosting
This is a relatively new offering by Bluehost, which has always been known as a WordPress-friendly host. Now, however, you can get a plan that’s optimized for WordPress, which means faster running sites, greater security and specialized WordPress support.
This hosting plan is available for only $12.49 the first month and renews at $24.99 per month. If you have one or more WordPress sites and want to keep them as secure and well optimized as possible, this is a really good option!
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Reseller Hosting
If you want to get into the business of selling web hosting to clients, this is the plan for you. Many people who do things like web design like to offer their clients web hosting as part of the package. Bluehost offers several reseller plans. The most popular one costs $49.95 per month and offers 250 GB disk space and unlimited accounts.
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VPS Hosting
VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting offers greater power and flexibility than shared hosting at a lower price than dedicated servers. You can choose among several VPS hosting plans. Their most popular one, which is $29.99 for the first month and $59.99 after that, offers 2 CPU cores, 4GB available RAM, 2 IPs and 2TB bandwidth. This is a good choice for larger websites and online businesses that need additional storage and security.
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Dedicated Hosting
Having your own dedicated server provides you with the greatest degree of flexibility, performance and security. This is a good option for anyone who wants to have the maximum amount of control over their server settings. Plans start at $74.99 for the first month and $149.99 per month after that.
Consider a dedicate server if your website is big and has very high traffic.
How Does Bluehost Compare to Other Web Hosts?
There are hundreds (if not thousands) of choices when it comes to web hosting. Quality, experience and reliability in this industry varies quite a bit. There are several things you should know about Bluehost.
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Experience
Bluehost has been operating since 2003, making it one of the longer running web hosting companies around. They have been steadily improving and expanding their offerings over the years.
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Runs Its Own Data Center
Many web hosts outsource technology, but Bluehost has its own private data center. This helps the company maintain a stable and secure setup for the millions of websites it serves.
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Customer Friendly
Bluehost designs its services to be equally accessible to beginners and advanced website builders. From the simplicity of its shared hosting plan to its convenient site building tool, this is a company that many people use to build their first website. Their in-house customer support is also very knowledgeable, so it’s always easy to get help if you need it.
Tips:
Use their live chat for quick and on-the-spot help from support. -
Scalability
While Bluehost’s shared hosting is perfectly suitable for newbies, it also offers resources that allow you to scale up your website or business. For example, you can start with the shared hosting plan and upgrade to the Pro plan, WordPress hosting or VPS hosting as your site grows. This way you can stick with the same web host as your business expands, which is always simpler.
Notes:
ThunderMailer.com was hosted on iPage before we moved to Bluehost. Check our previous blog post on why we moved from iPage to Bluehost.
Why Bluehost is Good?
There are many reasons why Bluehost is so popular and continues to grow all the time. It’s combination of low prices, great customer service and user friendly features make it an excellent choice for website owners at all levels, from personal bloggers to large scale commercial sites.
The shared hoirsting plan is among the most reasonable and comprehensive you can find anywhere. Yet Bluehost also offers plenty of more advanced and specialized alternatives. This makes it a great choice for individuals and businesses of all kinds, no matter what type of website you plan to build.
For more about Bluehost web hosting, see http://www.bluehost.com