BlueHost

This is the first time I’ve commented here and I must say you give genuine, and quality information for bloggers! Great job.

Bluehost is good technically but has a few drawbacks.

They are based in Utah so they have some rather strict rules regarding content. Your site cannot contain any skin, as in anything that would offend a mormon. No boobs, butts, bare backs, sexy legs, nothing. They label it as porn and kill your site. I spoke to their abuse dept. to get this first hand. Several colleagues have had this happen to them.

Also, I have heard several people saying they had to delete profanity on their site or face deletion too.

I used Bluehost for three years with about 30 gig of pictures on my site.
I used their database to make my own short URL, and one day they removed it and told me this was not allowed. This after about three years of use.

I lost all my links on many sites.

I was not a happy traveler. They would not listen to reason and restore my database.

I moved to midphase with about a weeks work just to get my website up again.

Of course all the links posted were dead

Do I have a kind word about Bluehost–NO.

The problem with hosts like bluehost is that their servers are often times slow due the the overcrowding.

I’ve had excellent support from bluehost. Also, when I reached their site through a Google Search, then front page prices were cheaper than going straight to their site … I secured rates at $3.65 / month … prepaid for 5 years at that rate.

Good Luck with your selection.

Neodan,

Sorry if I really did “spam my link” … I certainly did not mean to spam.

This link is to my personal site; it has very little traffic … and has nothing to do with selling anything at all

~~~

Aside from that, I am grateful for the information that it’s not unlimited storage space … As a photographer, I have uploaded lots of original sized Nikon D1 images … and have had no complaints or warnings …. but then again, I’ve only been with them since October of last year.

kind regards,

I have two non-profit orgs with their sites hosted on a BH shared plan and I’m not looking back. But I also think results vary according to needs:

• There’s the content enforcement issue – already mentioned.
• If the big chunk of your audience is in the left half of the US, their location helps in low response time.
• If your traffic is moderate, you’ll be fine with their traffic limits. If you’re picking up consistently above that, start looking for an upgrade.
• The more you do on your end to make the site efficient (good caching settings, streamlined consolidated CSS and JS, etc.) the less trouble you’ll have.
• You can even use a CDN to offload, to postpone the upgrade jump.
• Another thing BH has a zero tolerance policy for is filesharing. Just don’t do it.
• I like to speak to real human beings, preferably sharing the same language as I do, as that makes interaction all the more efficient; BH does that, and I’ve never ran into an impolite or arrogant engineer to help me out.
• Price-wise I think they’re in the very decent category.
• Most important of all though: it really depends on what you want. In “my” two cases they’re more a serious, business-like CMS than a flashy hot stuff blog; streamlining for performance is much easier to do in my cases.
• They do offer a lot of storage space, but if your game is a massive repository of video files with lots of simultaneous streams, look for a CDN or look simply elsewhere.
• If you’re into mass-mailing your thousands of subscribers, look elsewhere. They’re allergic to mass email sent from their own servers. You have to have a stellar track record with them – and a demonstrably legit case – to get a more flexible email sending regime. Oddly enough I see this as a plus.
• The more you do on your end to keep spammers and bots out and tighten traffic (good caching, again…) the more they’ll accommodate you, too. But: content restrictions and filesharing and generally “risque” applications remain cut off.

As I said: I’m a happy customer of BH, but I think my sites fit very well in their “target” market.

Oh, about one-click installations: yeah, they have it. I’ve tried it and it works. The thing is, with their server permission settings there’s never been a plugin or theme or upgrade that went wrong. It’s the one hosting provider for WP where I least have trouble with permissions and still have a safe default setup (i.e. with 755/644 perms) while updates and new themes / plugins / installs work like a charm.

I recommend them as a solid option – but then again, several of them on the WP hosting page that are up there, as far as I’m concerned, for the lower-to-midrange traffic WP sites.