Bluehost

Bluehost has been my main hosting provider for my clients over the last few years. They are reliable, offer good customer support and give a lot of features for a good price. 

I find customer support is where most hosting providers fall short. Bluehost does a pretty good job but there is room for improvement.

As a web designer, Bluehost has given me the best overall experience. I've tried a few of the other large providers and while they where good I found Bluehost to be better IMO.

I have been using Blue Host for the past 4 years and have had an overall excellent experience.  I have rarely had an an issue and when I did it was solved pretty quickly by calling into Blue Host customer service.

Prices are still good when compared to what we paid in 2012 and the features you get with a shared hosting package meets or exceeds other providers. The problem now days seems to be trying to reach a tech support technician. We had an issue with downtime of our email accounts. A fairly major problem since if your email is down its not like the ones sent to your addresses are stored until everything is working again. It took us over 30 minutes to get a hold of someone and almost 45 minutes after that before the problem was solved. This is not good if your business relies on emails like ours does.

Besides the email issue the web hosting has been fine with no downtime that we are aware of.

Bluehost has a lot of nice features and a good price... at least for the first year but the problem is my web server is really slow. I don't know if Bluehost has too many customers on 1 server or that someone is just monopolizing all the resources but my server and my wordpress site is ALWAYS slow. What good is a cheap price and a website if it delivers content at a crawl. When I try to save an article in Wordpress it can take up to a minute. 

I called tech support about it and they blamed my site and plugins which I have very few. It is the same setup I had on GoDaddy and it was plenty fast enough. I now wish I had not switch hosting providers just for the price.

I have heard some people have problems with their hosting plans being auto renewed after they canceled. I hope this doesn't happen to me as I plan on canceling as soon as I can.

I moved my website to Bluehost.com from another web host I was not happy with. It started out fine for the first few months but then problems started to happen. I got a big boost in traffic from Google and then the next day my site goes down. I found out that Bluehost had deactivated my account due to 

"site causing performance problems"

I received no warnings. Now a happy exciting time with more traffic for my websites turns into panic as I wait for support to open so I can call and get my account reactivated.

Talking with tech support the NEXT DAY they said the plugins I used with Wordpress are taking to much processor time and I need to either get those fix or upgrade my account at Bluehost with a better hosting plan. Well, thousands of people use the same wordpress plugins that I do so I know it is not them. Basically I am forced to pay Bluehost more money for a service I already paid 2 years for.

In the end I pay as I can't have my site down while I find another hosting company and wait to get my site and domain transferred. After my 2 year contract is up I plan to move hosting companies again unless Bluehost really pulls up their socks in the customer service department.