Bluehost Unbiased Review

Bluehost had been in the business for quite some times and I am sure you had heard about them. In fact, I had knew them for long and have been hosting websites (including this one) on Bluehost. Of course, being well-known is different from being a good web host. The question to ask is Bluehost good? If you're hosting your website for the very first time, should you go with Bluehost?

Well to get stratight to the point, here's my takes on the question, based on my very own experience and personal preferences.

What's good about Bluehost?

As a long term customers with BlueHost (I’ve been using BlueHost web hosting services since year 2004), I think the top reason you should stick with BlueHost is because of their determination to stay top in their game. They are perfect in almost every aspect in my opinion - from pricing to customer support to hosting plan features, I just have no complaint on them. Needless to say, their recent promotion with unlimited disk storage/bandwidth/addon domains with just $6.95/mo is just great.

What's bad about Bluehost:

Basically none from what I see - there's nothing I can complain about Bluehost thru out the years with them. Some might worried about Bluehost being overselling due to its "unlimited" promotion but that did not bothers me so far. All my websites are doing just fine with Bluehost and I had never experience any unstable moment with their servers.

So, is Bluehost recommended?

Without doubt, YES! I had been recommending Bluehost to my friends and families for years and I'm gonna do it the same at here to you. Bluehost is recommended, regardless you're a first time or experienced webmaster; hosting a mom&pop or cooperation websites; running advance web application or just simple static HTML pages - their hosting plan just have the necessary features covered and it fits 90% of the web usages. Now in case you need more info, do check out my detail review on Bluehost hosting features at here.

Bluehost Promotion Link: $6.95/mo!


More readings on Bluehost:

phpBB at Bluehost

Interested to put up your own forum online? Well if so, consider using phpBB.

phpBB homepage

About phpBB

phpBB is an affordable (and yet professional supported) community forum solution. There are thousands of forums have vBulletin as it fits almost any size of online community. Since its creation in 2000, phpBB has become the most widely used Open Source forum solution. Like its predecessors, phpBB 3.0 “Olympus” has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in minutes.

Why setup a forum for your website?

As you might already knew, making your site a hub for information is important to win repeating visitors. Setting up a forum also It’s also a highly effective way of improving your service to customers or users of your website.

phpBB at Bluehost

At Bluehost, you can get phpBB via auto installation at Fantastico and SimpleScripts. The version offered at current time of writing is v3.0.4. Check out print screen below – it’s the phpBB installation page at SimpleScripts.

phpBB homepage


Coppermine Gallery at Bluehost

Considering hosting a photo gallery website at Bluehost? Try out Coppermine Photo Gallery.

Coppermine is an Image Gallery system. Users get a wide image gallery features including categories and albums, thumbnails and intermediate size pics, search feature, new and random pictures, user management, user comments, e-cards feature, and slideshow viewer.

Example of Coppermine Gallery

Coppermine Gallery

The system has been tested to work well on IIS, Apache 1.3.24 onwards to the latest Apache 2, on Linux, UNIX, OSX, and Win32 systems thus you don’t need to worry about software compatible issue.

Download Coppermine to your local computer.

Installing Coppermine at Bluehost

Coppermine installation at Bluehost

At Bluehost, Coppermine script can be installed easily with both Fantastico and SimpleScripts.

Considering Bluehost coppermine hosting? Bluehost shared hosting $6.95 per month is with cpanel and mysql database, and with unlimited domain hosting, unlimited storage space and unlimited transfer per month. This unlimited hosting plan is very suitable if you want to host your photo gallery website, and not sure of how much traffic you will require.

Bluehost hosting is coppermine script compatible and ready, you can setup coppermine very quickly and easily and then host your own photo gallery website that look like screen capture below.


Free or paid hosting?

What is free web hosting?

Free web hosting simply means web server space that’s available to you at no cost. Free hosting comes in many format but usually your website will be hosted on a subdomain – something like xyz.freehost.com.

Advantages and disadvantages of free web hosting

Free web hosting poses both pros and cons. The best part of free web hosting is, well, F-R-E-E. Unlike old times, free hosting nowadays come with loads of advance features (PHP, CGI, MySQL, and even unlimited email forwarding) – which is more than enough for standard websites. If you are looking for a zero-cost hosting solutions then a free web host is your choice. Free hosting services are often used for personal, non-profit organization, newbies and students’ websites. If you aren’t planning to make money from your web site, free hosting is the perfect solution.

On the other hand, most (but not all) free web hosting providers will clutter your websites with advertisements. Also, free web host is not a long term solution for those who are serious with their website as the turnover rate in this business is very fast. Also, it’s unbelievable to get 24/7 customer support when it comes to free hosting (the supports, after all, comes free).

What about paid hosting?

The option with paid hosting is not bad at all. Although you’ll need to pay for the hosting, the hosting price is not that high when compare with the features you are getting. Take Bluehost for example, users get unlimited disk storage, bandwidth, 24/7 live chat supports, as well as addon domain capacity for just $6.95/mo. Also, paid hosting allows you to get features (like Fantastico, multi domain hosting, and stats reporting) that you can’t get with free web hosting.

Free or paid hosting?

Before you decide between free or paid web hosting, you must be very clear with the basic requirements.

What type of website are you hosting? Is server reliability an important issue to you? Do you have enough budget for a paid shared hosting? Do you need extra guidance in webmastering? Will you need a lot of technical supports when it comes to web hosting? Do you need detail web statistics reporting system at your web host? Do you need extra scripts supports like ASP.net, MySQL, Java scripts, TomCat, or Ruby on Rails? It will be easier for you to decide which type of hosting is more suitable for you once these basic questions are answered.


How to avoid canonical issue at Bluehost

What’s canonicalization?

In Matt Cutt’s words, Canonicalization is…

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.

For instance, a human will consider these are the same URLs for a website: www.dummywebsite.com, dummywebsite.com, and dummywebsite.com/index.html. Technically, or in search engine’s eyes, there URLs are all different. A web server could return different content for each URL thus these URLs are all indexed separately in Google’s database. Such situation had caused problems to webmasters as Google impose penalty for duplicated content and having the same content showed up on www.dummywebsite.com, dummywebsite.com, and dummywebsite.com/index.html will certainly trigger the ban.

This was a pretty huge issue in the past and it sparks lots of debates and arguments. Websites with both WWW (www.dummywebsite.com) and non-WWW (dummywebsite.com) version get penalized by Google.

Nowadays, the issue can be solved easily with the usage of Google Webmaster Tools (you get to select which version of the website is preferred) or with the usage of rel=”canonical” tags. There are pretty much info covered at Google official guidelines: What is a canonical page? Why specify a canonical page? and I’m not going to drill deep on that.

Avoid canonical issue from your .htaccess file

301 Redirect at Bluehost hosting

What I want to discuss here is things to be done at your end to avoid such problem.

The non-WWW and WWW pages can be a huge treat to your website ranking and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Besides stating which version (WWW or non-WWW) to be indexed at Google, you can actually standardized your website URL with a few lines of .htaccess code.

301 Redirect at Bluehost

One good part about Bluehost is that the hosting company allows modification of .htaccess file (a server configuration file located at root folder by default). This makes our life easier when it comes to avoiding Google duplication (or canonical) penalty.

What you can do at your end to avoid this hassle is to 301 redirect your non-WWW web pages to WWW counterparts.

One good thing about hosting with Bluehost is that Bluehost users are allowed to access (create/modify/delete) the .htaccess files at root. Hence, redirecting all non-www web pages to www counterpart is easy.

To do so, simply add the following lines to your ,htaccess file (replace fakesite.com with your website URL):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.fakesite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.fakesite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The codes above will direct all your non-WWW URL to the WWW version thus it will not cause any duplication issue for your website. To test, simply type in the non-www URL of your website to your Internet browser and see your web URL being redirect to the www.


Recent server status at Bluehost

Bluehost server performance

My Bluehost hosting had a few significant outages in the past two months and server status was not looking good during that time.

Fortunately, things are improving slowly by now.

If you check Bluehost (from my account) recent server status you’ll see some alert on the server load as well as disk storage usage. The server load is still normally high (>1) during peak hours but I don’t find any obvious slow response time anymore. In fact, although the red/yellow indications look ugly, the figures are actually improving from the previous readings.

From my previous contacts with my Bluehost supports, I was told that their engineers are working on the high server usage issue – I guess they are not bull-shiting on me. Hopefully things will turn better in next month – I’ll keep you posted.

Right now, I don’t see any other big issue with Bluehost hosting thus they are still recommended in my book. In case you are looking for a cheap but yet reliable hosting, have a look on Bluehost.