I have recently signed up with BlueHost after a lot of poor quality service from my now ex-host, 1&1 Internet and I have decided to write a review of the services they offer! Firstly because of complications of moving from one host of another, I have decided to separate my domain names and host so I can’t talk about their domain registration and handling processes in this review.
Let’s start with their extravagant claims, unlimited domain hosting, unlimited webspace, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited Email accounts. I have no reason to believe that unlimited domain hosting, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited Email accounts isn’t a true claim, I will update this blog entry if any of these claims turn out to be false. But what isn’t unlimited despite the headline claims is the number of files or database size, the total number of files allowed is 200,000 and all databases must not exceed 3GB in size, 2GB for a single database. For most these limits won’t be a problem, currently I have only 16,000 files and I have over 10 years worth of data across a number of websites and databases. These limits are written in the Terms of Service, but a little more upfront honesty would be nice, how many people actually read the often lengthy Terms of Service?
Now, we move onto my personal experiences; when I first signed up, it was not made obvious that I would be charged for the entire contract, two years in my case, in advance. I only found out that I was charged in full for two years after I had submitted my card details and it informed me that my card had been charged $94.80. So be aware of this; it’s still not a lot of money and I don’t need to pay any more money for the next 730 days, but it would have been nice to know that I was going to get hit with full cost for the next two years in advance! Also be aware that if you register a ‘free’ domain, it’s only free for one year, so you will be billed for the subsequent years. Not an issue for me; I have my domains with a separate registrar, which I recommend doing as should you not be happy with your host, moving your domains is as simple as changing the nameservers.
I had reason to call technical support two times on the first day, one was to get the IP address of the server as it was not immediately obvious what the server IP address was; the hostname they gave me in the FTP setup was yet to become available as the nameserver change had not propagated. I later found that the IP address is available if you expand the stats panel on the left after you log into cPanel. The second time was an odd issue with all second level directories not parsing php, which later I found out was caused by a .htaccess file that was used on my previous host to switch the server to php5 mode, it ran php4 by default. Both times, the staff were courteous and knowledgeable. Something else to be aware of; to get access to some of the cPanel features, you need to call up BlueHost and verify your account, you’ll need to call from the phone number registered with them and have the last four numbers of your credit card handy!
The speed of the servers is good, sub 250ms response times and the page downloads are quick, nearly all content appears instantly and php parsing has no noticeable slowdown, thusfar, given it’s only been a week there has been no downtime. There are some issues to be aware of; if you use HTML forms on your website using the php mail function, the $from variable needs to be valid Email address set-up in cPanel, so if you use the submitters Email address as the $from variable, it will almost certainly not work, it will come from username@servername.bluehost.com instead. BlueHost does not offer the ability to create catchall Email addresses (eg. anything@domain.com) to limit spam, which is fair enough in my opinion, and keeps overall server performance up!
Overall, apart from the minor deceptions in their homepage advertising, the service is solid and their technical support people are knowledgeable and courteous. Server performance, thusfar has been good, the control panel interface is generally self explanatory and changes are almost instant. I would definitely recommend BlueHost for most people, but be aware that if you are a power-user that will have 100,000s of files on the server, I’d look elsewhere because of the hard file limit!