BlueHost Review – How Reliable is BlueHost as a Shared Host?

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lueHost is a very, and I mean very popular name in the web hosting space — if it's not the most popular shared hosting company on Earth. But, as is the case with many other fields other than web hosting, the most popular option isn't necessarily the best one in terms of quality. Is this true for BlueHost as well? After reviewing InMotion Hosting, I decided to find that out in this unforgiving BlueHost review.

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Table of Contents
Introduction to BlueHost
The BlueHost Advantages
Speed - Testing Load Times
Uptime Stats
Price – BlueHost's Shared Plans Compared
Support

Concluding this BlueHost Review
Introduction to BlueHost
​BlueHost first started operating in 1996, primarily offering shared hosting services. It was founded by Matt Heaton, who was the CEO from 1996-2011. In 2010, amidst much controversy and speculation, EIG (Endurance International Group) acquired BlueHost. Since 2011, Dan Handy operates as the CEO of the company.

BlueHost specializes in shared hosting to this date, but they’ve now started offering additional types of hosting like VPS, dedicated servers, and managed WordPress hosting. BlueHost claims to host over 2 million websites worldwide, making them one of the top hosting companies on the basis of hosted sites volume.​

The BlueHost Advantages
BlueHost have been around in the shared hosting game since more than 20 years since they were originally founded in 1996. Not only have they managed to stick around all these years while becoming one of the most well-known shared hosts worldwide, they've also successfully managed to keep their quality of service consistent through all these years, while overcoming a few minor hiccups along the way, like aggressive CPU-throttling and the likes.

BlueHost is your typical budget-friendly web host that offers a standard cPanel and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup for people who’re not looking for too many features. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what all features that they have on offer:

Free domain (for 1 year) along with your shared hosting plan.
Feature-packed cPanel – integrated with CloudFlare, Page Speed Grader, Google Apps and a lot of other tools. Their custom user interface looks a lot better than the regular cPanel default skin.
Premium anti-spam solutions built right in cPanel.

Free, unlimited email accounts for the top-end plan. Email storage is within your total account storage. There are some limits as to how many emails in an hour you can send, so if your site is demanding in terms of sending emails, use some third party solutions like EmailOctopus.
Automatic daily backups for all your website data, and stored files.
Highly configured servers. Regular hardware upgrades. Replacement parts always ready for quick replacement in case of failed hardware.

​24×7 Live Chat & Phone Support. The latter, especially, isn’t offered by most shared hosts out there.
Hassle-free scalability allows you to upgrade your plan to a VPS or a dedicated server without having to face the hassles of moving your website.
Account isolation technology isolates accounts having websites that consume too much resources, to ensure that the overall performance of the server doesn’t degrade and affect all customer sites on that server.

Decent level of customization for a shared hosting plan – including SSH (Secured Shell Access), Server Side Includes, PHP.ini and .htaccess modification support.
Multiple user-access control mechanism to assign multiples users and restrict their access to specific sections of the same hosting account (like one account may access only the billing section).
Built-in CDN (Content Delivery Network) support with CloudFlare integration. Hassle free setup ensures that all your static resources load faster from CloudFlare’s worldwide CDN network.
Unique IPs, SSL, and SiteLock protection are some optional features that are handy to have.
30-day Money-back Guaranty

Other features which I probably haven't noticed yet.
Check out the FULL list of BlueHost's s




In my testing, I've found BlueHost's servers to be fairly fast. It's certainly not the fastest among all shared hosts, neither does it manage to make the test site load under 500ms unlike InMotion Hosting, but at that entry-level price point, the performance is more than you'd expect. Not only the total page load time, the initial server response time (<300 ms on average) was pretty impressive for a shared host, too.

It seems like BlueHost have upgraded their server hardware greatly and thereby improving performance for the end-user. This is good to know, considering they were at one point in the past accused of overselling and overcrowding their servers.