BlueHost Web Hosting Package

Bluehost server uptime for the first week of the month: 99.789%.

Is Bluehost server reliable?

From my user experience (I’ve been hosting with Bluehost for the past 4 years) and according to tons of other websites tracking on Bluehost server response – yeah, Bluehost hosting is very reliable. As you can see from the image below, 99.8% server uptime is quite a record and I salute folks at Bluehost for achieving this.

Bluehost hosting uptime tracked by WebHostingGeeks. If you wish to learn more about Bluehost server performance in the past, you can read my post here and here. Or, you can learn how to check Bluehost server status yourself.

What’s Bluehost customer’s say about Bluehost hosting service? Check out Bluehost customer’s feedbacks I received as well as user’s comment I found from the other hosting websites.

Tibbst from Dallas, TX: Satisfied Customer for 2yrs

I’ve used a few hosting providers and researched a lot. BlueHost may not be #1 on many reviews, but it’s been on the top 5 or 10 ever since I found them, at least, while others come and go. I monitor my service for 3 organizations with Nagios, and I reconfig’d Nagios with 1min granularity.

I get 99.7% uptime. I thought that was pretty good for the price, but leadership for one of the orgs had us switch to a new provider due to my data. After switching, we got 99.3%. We’re switching again. BTW, .3% downtime is rarely noticable.

Mail has a few outages, but also barely noticeable (sorry don’t have %s). The “customer” support is great. I make my way through the queue pretty fast, if there is any. Tech support usually can’t provide me specific details for recurring issues (detected by Nagios, usually), because I think the actual admins work for another company (maybe BlueHost resells?) But, I’ve had many excellent experiences w/ tech support, otherwise. I would highly recommend BlueHost.

Marci Briggs rate Bluehost 93/100

I have selected Bluehost as my hosting provider for my advertisement site and it has worked well for me. They also use cpanel, which is the most popular and highly user friendly control panel for many users. That is another factor which prompted me to use Bluehost. For just $6.95, we will get the hosting plan for one month along with unlimited bandwidth usage and unlimited storage space.

Bluehost has been a loyal and true service provider of mine and they have sophisticated mechanisms to ensure smooth functioning and they use the widely chosen cpanel.

Awards won by Bluehost

Bluehost won numerous awards since they started their business back in year 2005. A quick glance on the recent ones include:

• Most Reliable Web Hosting by WebHostingYes.com
• Top Pick Host 2008 by TopPickHost.com
• Best Blog Hosting 2008 by WebHostingClue.com
• Editor’s Choice 2008 of BestoftheWebHosts.com
• Best Support 2008 of Top-10-Web-Hosting.com

Is Bluehost good or bar?

Well I bet half of you guys might read thousands of good words on Bluehost but still feeling unsure about their service quality. Web reviews, after all, are often full with biased reviews and one have to be very aware of catch-22 behind every marketing talk.

To learn whether Bluehost is a good (or bad) hosting, the best way is to try it yourself! Signup Bluehost here, 30 days free trial period.

As what we had previously discussed about Bluehost Refund Policy, shoppers are advised to take advantage on Bluehost refund policies and try Bluehost hosting services for free!

How Bluehost customers are charged?

Bluehost offers one set of hosting features and you have five options for the payment terms – 3, 6, 12, 24, and the new 36 months payment terms. All hosting accounts are required to be paid upfront. For 3 and 6 months hosting plan, a one-time setup fees of $30 are charged; whereas setup fees for 12, 24, and 36 months are waived.

To order Bluehost, click here (special promo: $6.95/mo)!

Refunds at Bluehost

Bluehost’s trial period is set as 30 days. All Bluehost hosting account can be fully refund in the first 30 days without questions. The setup fees and domain registration, however, is non refundable. An extra $10 will be charged on the free domain you get from Bluehost; while in case you’re buying the 3/6 months hosting plan, the $30 setup fees are not refundable.

Refunds after the first 30 days trial period

One thing that impressed me is that Bluehost is willing to refund their customers even it’s after the trial period. From what I’ve learn with their Helpdesk, all Bluehost accounts canceled after 30 Days of service qualify for a prorated refund at the monthly rate.

Example of prorated refund

Two Year 24 Month Account is $7.95 a Month x 24 months = $190.80 paid at sign up. If you cancel two months into it then you would be reimbursed at the $7.95 a month rate for a period of 22 months. Your prorated refund would be $7.95 x 22 = $174.90.

Take advantage of Bluehost refund policy!

Don’t be foolish by those who advise you to try for one or two months before getting long term with your hosting company. The advice simply sounds ridiculous with Bluehost and I’ll show you why.

Maths for Bluehost 3 months plan refund

Imagine that you go with Bluehost 3 months hosting plan. The cost you pay will be $69.85 ($9.95/mo x 3 + $30 setup fees + $10 domain registration). Say that you’re unhappy with Bluehost and decide to ask for a refund within the first 30 days, the refund you’ll get back: a domain registered under your name and $9.95 x 3 = $29.85. Loses = $40 ($69.85 – $40).

If you refund after the trial period, say the day 31st, your refund amount will be $9.95 x 2 = $19.9. Loses = $49.95.

Maths for Bluehost 24 months plan refund

Now if you read my post and go for Bluehost’s 24 months plan. The dollars you pay upfront will be $190.80 (Official price $7.95 x 24, domain fees and setup fees waived). If you refund within the first 30 days, here’s what you will get: a domain registered under your name and $180.80 ($7.95 x 24 – $10 domain registration). Money lost = $10.

Now what if you refund your 24 months plan after trial period, say again, day 31st after your purchase? Here’s how much you can refund under Bluehost pro-rated refund policy: $172.85 (7.95 x 23 – $10 domain registration). Money lost = $17.95.

Conclusion: Go for Bluehost 24 months term!

Note that the money lost in 3 months hosting plan are 300% more than a 24 months hosting plan – regardless how long you waited before you cancel your Bluehost account. My advise to all of you is to take advantage of Bluehost pro rated refund policy.

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.