Update (9-15-2010): Just as a reference, I haven’t tested bluehost since 2008. Since the single problem I had with them can’t be replicated easily without artificially stressing their servers (which would be unfair not just to bluehost, but also to anyone else who just happened to be on my server with me), I probably won’t be retesting them, so take this review for what it’s worth. Last I checked, they weren’t bad.
bluehost is one of those one-size-fits-all shared hosting companies like PowWeb, offering a single option for people wanting to use their services. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend bluehost for a single reason, which wasn’t even fully their fault, as you can read below.
The Positives: To be certain, there are some good things about bluehost, and you won’t necessarily be disappointed. They are reasonably priced and have no set-up fees, which often surprise customers of other services. They have cPanel, which provides very easy control over your site(s), with one-click installations, via Fantastico De Luxe, of most of the popular site platforms out there, like blogging, forums, ecommerce, etc. They have a free drag and drop site creator, free FTP right from your panel, unlimited domains and storage and 100 MySQL databases. They have 24/7 customer service available, though from my experiences, you can’t get too technical with them.
The Negatives: I don’t have a site on bluehost for you to test. I used to, and then I got thrown off because my site was getting too many visits every day. Now, that’s going to happen at any shared host, and I could see it coming. You don’t really get unlimited bandwidth anywhere, and you particularly don’t get it from a shared host no matter what they claim. The trick is that you are only getting so much use out of the server you are on, and as soon as you start building up significant site traffic, you run out of space no matter how much of your “unlimited” bandwidth you have used. So my problem wasn’t that I was thrown off. I should have put that site somewhere else to begin with. My problem was how they handled it.
First of all, instead of sending me a warning, they just shut the site down and put up an ugly message that said the site owner should contact the “abuse department,” which probably sent all sorts of strange thoughts through my readers’ heads. I then tried repeatedly to get them to admit to what the problem was. They claimed they had no idea what I was talking about and suggested that my site was simply inefficient. It wasn’t. It was just busy. Had they contacted me and told me that my site was slowing their server down and that I would be given 30 days to move it, that would have been completely understandable. They are a one-trick pony with no scalability. If your site becomes extremely popular, you have to move. But they didn’t handle it that way. They handled it in the worst way possible, simply shutting my site down with no notice, putting an ugly sign up that all my visitors saw and refusing to tell me what the problem was.
And, of course, long before they kicked me off, the site was insufferably slow.
The Bottom Line:The vast majority of website owners will never experience this problem with bluehost because they will never receive significant traffic. That’s just a sad truth. The problem is that most people who set up websites are shooting for significant traffic whether they will ever get it or not. It is okay to start with an inexpensive shared hosting company like bluehost that has no scalability, but you have to be prepared to move if you do succeed. And in the case of bluehost, you have to be prepared to move in a hurry.
