BlueHost Web Hosting Package

Most webmasters own more than one domain/website.

However, we do not need multiple hosting for those domains.

Most hosting plan available online enable webmaster to host multiple domain on a same hosting account – Bluehost for example, allows their clients to host unlimited addon domain on one single hosting account.

We’ll see how to add an ‘addon domain’ at Bluehost in this post. But first, we have to be very clear on the difference between an ‘addon domain’ and a ‘subdomain’.

Addon Domain vs Subdomain

What’s an ‘addon domain’?

An ‘addon domain’ is a new domain that’s added on top of your main domain.

For example if you purchase Bluehost hosting package now to host your website abcd.com; abcd.com is your main domain. 6 months later you decided to register another domain name with GoDaddy, say efgh.com, and wanted to host it on the same Bluehost account, then efgh.com is the ‘addon domain’ that’s added on top of abcd.com.

Setting up an ‘addon domain’ will not create you another cPanel (web hosting manager) at Bluehost. However, it will creates a sub directory in your main web hosting directory and the addon domain website will have it’s very own index files as well as cgi bin folder.

What’s a ‘subdomain’?

Quoting from Wikipedia, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain. For example, “mail.example.com” and “calendar.example.com” are subdomains of the “example.com” domain, which in turn is a subdomain of the “com” top-level domain.

A very important point to keep in mind is that unlike addon domian, subdomains are free of charge at Bluehost. It can be created at will for any domain you already hosted with Bluehost. Like for our previous example, you can create a subdomain named ‘efgh.abcd.com’ without paying any registration or annual maintenance fees.

How to add an “addon domain” at Bluehost?

Go to the ‘Domain’ section and click ‘Addon Domains’ on your Bluehost cPanel page.

Note that you can as well register a new domain name, park a domain, add a subdomain, setup a redirect for your domain on the same section. But for our discussion, we’ll limit the topic within the addon domain.

You’ll be requested to login to Bluehost Domain Manager after that. Once you’re in, you’ll come to a setup page where you’ll need to keyin all the necessary info about your addon domain.

The input fields, like the domain name, the location of your website folder, and so on are pretty basics and I am sure you can handle it without my guidance.

However, one thing to be sure is that you MUST have your domain name server pointing to Bluehost’s server before you adding any addon domain in your hosting account. This is crucial for Bluehost to verify your ownership of the domain and Bluehost will not process your request (of adding an addon domain) without it.

Nowadays not only blogging are popular among individual Internet users.

With the help of cheap web hosting and open source, even forums owned by individual webmaster are getting more and more active.

Topics like computer, entertainment, science, technology, automobile and politics are brought into forum for open discussion among surfers and enthusiasts.

Are you interested in starting your own forum?

Hosting a successful forum is not as hard as it used to be – at least from the technical point of view, it’s very much achievable for individual webmaster to launch and maintain their own forums.

There are a lot of factors which making a forum to be well known and successful but we are here to focus on the key factor, which will be the web hosting.

This is why many web hosting companies were being set up to provide different services to people. It is a bit difficult for us to select which one will be the best in term of cost and features given. Details study and analysis on them are essential for make everything perfect!

Following are some of the key points which maybe helpful for you to make your choice:

Web Space

Web space is the storage capacity provided by web hosting company for you to store data in the internet. When we study on this point, of cause the bigger web space supplied, the more easier and flexible for us to manage and store our data.

Out of so many web hosting companies in the world, there are plenty of suppliers which can offering mass web space with affordable price. Bluehost, for example, provide unlimited hosting capacity (and bandwidth and addon domains) in their shared hosting plan. Such features allow website owners more flexibility in handling their forums.

Free web application software

Your choice with Bluehost allow you to host with adequate MySQL , DBs and phpMyAdmin. Further more, Bluehost latest featured on Simple Scripts allow webmasters to install forum software in just a few clicks. These are useful features as it minimize the technical knowledge requirement for hosting and managing a discussion board.

In fact, I believe that the reason behind forum hosting has turned much popular compare to before is because of the development of these open-sourced forum software.

Here’s a view on the forum scripts available at Bluehost.

Server uptime

It’s basic requirement for a web host to offer reliable hosting server. You do not want your forum member’s connection to the server cut off middle in a heated discussion, don’t you?

There are quite a log of web hosting companies claim that they are offering 99% uptime, but be careful – some of these are nothing more than marketing gimmic and they just can’t deliver such much of uptimeservice.

Server uptime, in fact, is the main reason why am I suggesting Bluehost. In case you followed my previous post about Bluehost server status, you should be aware that Bluehost provide respectable server uptime thru out the years I’m with them.

Support

Almost every web hosting company does come with supports or more know as after sales services. As similar to the point 5, this can checked through forums too.

The better the supports provided the fewer headaches you will face. Thus, you can spend more time to develop your forum.

So is Bluehost recommended for forum hosting?

Well, the straight and direct answer is yes.

Listed above are just some of the opinions which may help you to select a web hosting company – which I would recommend Bluehost based on the listed requirements.

Interested to learn more on what Bluehost has to offer? Check out my detail reviews on Bluehost hosting features.

According to the official website, Bluehost offers two versions of MySQL – MySQL 4 Servers and MySQL 5 Servers.

However, there are plenty of servers at Bluehost and these servers are sometimes, different. It’s either one of these MySQL version running on your host, but never both. You can check the version of your Bluehost account by scrolling down and checking on the left sidebar. For my case, the MySQL version running on my Bluehost account is the 5.0.45-community-log version.

How do you check the MySQL version at your server?

When you login to your Bluehost account, you will notice a sidebar at the left. Scroll down a little and you’ll get a line reads ‘MySQL Version’. That’s where you can check what version of MySQL is running on your web server.

For your references, here’s how I check mine:

Website backup is a must for every website, the backup process should be done regularly weekly, or monthly to avoid accidental data losses.

At Bluehost, using the backups feature allows you to download (to your computer) a zipped copy of either you entire site (your home directory, databases, email forwarders configuration, email filters configuration) or one of the previously mentioned parts of your site. These are not automatically scheduled backups. Automatically scheduled backups need to be enabled by the server owner / administrator.

Backup at Bluehost: Getting started

Login to your Bluehost hosting account. Scroll down and look for the ‘Backups’ icon under category ‘file’.

Click in ‘Backups’ and you’ll come to a page where you can back up the website of yours, or just the public_html and email filter.

Regardless of how many website you’re hosting at Bluehost, you can get them zip into a file and download it to your local PC – thus making the backup process fast and easy for all websites.

Yes, it’s very much possible to host a popular forum on Bluehost, even if you’re just using their shared hosting account. In fact, there’s no reason why you should go ‘dedicated’ (server) when you first start your forum.

Bluehost already have all the features you need for hosting a forum and I don’t see why, for a startup forum needs the whole server dedicated as its host. Instead, save some money for promotional expenses. You can have unlimited bandwidth and disk storage at Bluehost – so what’re you waiting for? Go flood your website with unlimited traffics.

Okay, back to Bluehost. Bluehost offers forum script like vbulletin or phbb2. Hosting a forum with these scipts is simple. The installation (via Fantastico or Simple Scripts) is almost instant, the forum maintenance can be all done with web application. In fact I used to have a forum running on Bluehost (using vBulletin) and everything goes so well, expect that I can get enough members to make the forum useful.

Installing a forum at Bluehost

So here’s how you can install a forum at your website.

Get to Fantastico or Simple Script based on your own preference. There’re two forum scripts with Fantastico, which is phpBB and SMF; and three forum scripts available with Simple Scripts, which isphpBB, PunBB, and BBPress.

Take phpBB on Fantastico as our example, to select installation for phpbb forum, simply click on the installation link and Fantastico will guide you through the installation process. Fill up a few details like Forum names and URL; the installation process should be completed within seconds.

Simple as that.