Bluehost

I use Bluehost for a blog I have about my comic collection. It is a Wordpress blog using their cloud service. Bluehost is in a nutshell a good web hosting service. My website is always fast and I have never noticed it being down in the past year or so I have been with Bluehost.

I have had a few issues one being with Apache mod_security which was being a little aggressive and disabling one of my Wordpress plugins from working. It took a while to get Bluehost to respond to my request to why my plugin wasn't working and even longer for them to fix the problem. The other time I dealt with customer service was also slow as well and took a few days to fix the issue. 

This is my first hosting provider I have ever used and I was pretty nervous being a newbie to the whole thing of hosting a Wordpress website.

I have Apache setup on my Windows 10 machine as a test and was able to get everything working, I was hoping it would be as easy on Blue Host using their Control Panel and it was. I already had my .com domain name so I signed up for a shared hosting account and within literally a few minutes I had my account created and I was looking around control panel. Things seem easy enough. I uploaded via FTP my WordPress website I was working on and didn't quite get things working right. I chatted with Blue Host customer service and was told I needed to point my domain to my server. Of course I had forgotten this. After a quick chat they told me what I needed to do (my domain was with Namecheap) and voila everything was working.

It was much easier than I thought at the time and in the 4 months my site has been online I have had zero problems with Blue Host itself. I 've had lots of issues with Wordpress but that is a CMS issue and not a hosting one.

Over the years I have had 3 different hosting providers. I left the last 2 mainly for downtime issues and really bad customer service. I think most web hosts suffer from bad customer support as they have such low prices now and shove so many accounts onto one server that the limited number of customer representatives a company can afford is not nearly enough to cover everyone's problems in a timely matter.

So far with my Wordpress website on BlueHost, I have had no downtime and the performance has been excellent. I have a large number of complex plugins installed and I was worried it would slow down the response time of the website. So far it has not and my visitors which number about 4000 everyday have not complained. In my tests I am finding from 1 to 2 seconds until the page completely loads which is really good for a shared server.

As with other hosts BlueHosts response to my 2 tickets I have submitted has been slow. Not nearly as bad as other hosting companies and they do answer with detailed answers that have solved my problems.

On the few occasions I needed BLuehost tech support the online chat has been the most helpful. It is faster that using the phone and the techs seem to know what they are doing. While the wait times could be improved for chat support they are much better than phones support. I would recommend using them if your issue isn't that big.

Other than that the features Bluehost offers is standard for the industry and so is the price. I like the unlimited domains, bandwidth and storage as I host 4 websites on this account with one of them serving up images. I moved to Bluehost 3 months ago from GoDaddy and so far the experience has been much better.  I found Godaddy nickled and dimed you for every upgrade.

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.