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Click here to learn more about this hosting provider
Owner: Hosting Solutions Inc.
Date Started: 1996
Based At: Utah
Phone Number: 1-888-401-4678
Type of Plans Offered: Shared Web Hosting
Support Offered: Phone and Email Ticket System
 BlueHost was founded in 1996 and is known for their quality web hosting plans with a lot of great features! They use Cpanel with all their plans but also feature support for such emerging languages as Ruby on Rails. They focus on just shared web hosting.
Views: 2379
Lack Of Support, Rude & Unexperienced St
Written by
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 , on 30-12-2008 04:02
I run a free organization about gaming and am with bluehost for the last 6 months and from the start well i jumped abord because of al their offers which is at a low price. They even gave me a free domain name which is tg2bd.com.
Bluehost's servers are not too good or too bad, they are "OK" speed, the Customer Support and The Way The Staff Treets you, its way Below avarage. They are Rude, short and un expreienced people. Their ticket system sucks as a lot of times your required to mention your password / credit card details for varification. Theis Service is not secure as some one was able to hack into my account to fraudly transfer my domain. Which I am still in the recovery process and because of bluehosts slow and lack of support its taking some time to recover.
They also have a email cap that wont let you send more then 100emails per 1 hrs, that is bad if you run any online community or forum.
Included is the 1500Gb space, and some other reviewers have stated that when you start to go above 10-20Gb's they start to pick on you and suspend your account as they truly dont want you to use the 1500GB. (I am yet to exprience this)
even their same sompany Fastdomains offer the same stuff for half the price.. so its kinda scam.
Overall, I am looking forward to suing them and moving away from these people to a BETTER hosting provider after my contract ends next year. So Overall...for the prices bluehost is "OK" for beginers to start off with or maybe you can do better with less prices... besides...what more can we get for 200bucks aye  , but still they dont deliver the support they agree they would...
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Lack of support
Written by Krunch, on 09-03-2007 16:46
As a host, Bluehost is OK for reliability and speed for the most part. Their lack of support, which included rude, short answers forced me to leave them. I often waited 5 or more days for trouble ticket replies. They remind me of those nightmarish local ISPs that start out great, then get greedy by overselling their capacity and everything tanks eventually. The straw that broke the camel's back was when they indicated that if I did not re-new with them, my domain would be placed in limbo and I would have to either buy it at auction or pay $80 to retrieve it.
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Bad experiences.
Written by nonphixion, on 09-03-2007 16:42
I started out with Bluehost about 1.5 years ago moving my site at the time rather rapidly as our host sponsors were taken over by another company. Before I proceed it would help to explain what I run. I have 2 sites (and 2 bluehost accounts respectively), they have minimalistic websites and are really built around the forum package vBulletin (again, for both sites). Below I will list all the challenges and experiences I've had with Bluehost.
E-Mail Limit
No where on their website will it tell you that there is a limit of 100 emails per hour, no where. For a good 3 months I was sending monthly emails via both sites to c. 7000-8000 members, only a 100 of each batch ever made it (if even that, pm notification emails, registration emails etc can all be deducted, so say 90). vBulletin doesn't tell you that it's encountering issues as it also thinks all is ok, their email system doesn't start bouncing emails after a 100, they just disappear making you think they are sent.
At that point I was rather upset and contacted Customer Service, they were able to up it to 500 per hour based on a valid reason. If you want to send a 1000 per hour, the monthly costs change to $19.95. Ouch.
Customer Service (or lack thereof)
Let me start out by saying there are a wide array of ways to contact them, live chat being one of those cool things recently added. Although this is nice, the people behind are either lazy or badly trained. Sample of bad experiences:
* Change E-Mail to 500/hour - As you read above, emails are capped. I asked for both my sites to be upped to 500 with valid reasons, and they confirmed the action had been done. Come to find out, on one site it was still at a 100. So me going through the hassle of setting up cron jobs for dispatching emails was useless on one site. There is no field in cpanel where you can observe this value, so once again, I had wasted my time. One rep was rude enough to point out that I'd be hurting everyone else's performance, this as a reply to why the email cap is not listed on the website. Rather weak.
* Changing some cnames - You can't perform cnames but bluehost can for you, fair enough. I asked for two to be changed and the first propogated after a day but for the second I had to go back to them four times to tell them it hadn't been done yet, each time they had confirmed it was ok. The last guy who finally was able to get it right (this is nothing complex) didn't apologize on behalf of other users.
* Simple Question - Not being the greatest webmaster wiz around I once had to ask how to access SSH. I was told to google putty and the rep then just ended the session. Great.
Server Load
If you sign up to Bluehost, pray to god you get a good box (i.e. box00.bluehost.com, where 00 is the number of the box). My larger site thankfully is running on a good box where server load is rather low, however my other is crapping it's pants with not even 15% of traffic the first has. I've checked with other vbulletin admins and they agree, bad server, not bad setup. So you just have to be lucky!
Downtime
It's unexpected, it's frequent and even the reps won't have a clue about it when it's happening. You'll however get this lengthy apology a few days later. I don't live off my website, but if you do, say you're a wedding photographer, look somewhere else. It ranges from minutes to 5-10 hour blocks over the course of a few days (i.e. summer '06)
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This concludes my experience, I am still there because my contract is rather lengthy (one year) so I'm just waiting it out before going somewhere else. My initial mistakes were not to ask enough pre-sales questions and trusting some online reviews too much. Don't follow in my footsteps , do your homework on hosts and just hope you get a good one.
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Good Host
Written by amygdela, on 09-03-2007 16:40
My friend hosts a forum from Bluehost and it always was online, but sometimes a bit slow. his url is unudub.com. He hosts his whole mp3 collection he produced on their servers and Bluehost never complained...
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Not too bad.
Written by Dormouse, on 09-03-2007 16:39
My site(s) on bluehost run OK. I've not made much use of support, but that has been OK too. There have been problems in the last 12 months, though without much affect on me. Sometimes the sites run fairly slow, though generally faster now than they were a few months ago. However, if your site makes too much use of CPU/RAM, your site will be suspended, which applicable to all shared hosting environment.
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