Jun 27th, 2009
Bluehost Reviews : Better Wordpress Hosting
I’ve had more shared web hosting plans than some people have had hot dinners. I’ve endured the pleasures and pain of cheap web hosting and discarded tons of web hosting providers over the years. Then again I’ve also worked for quite a few. A backroom guy, stoking the boilers to keep the steam powered servers running! However in any conversation on web hosting, its not long before one in particular crops up – and thats BlueHost.
Now recently I’ve heard some moaning about BlueHost and how terrible they have been performing of late. This has come as news to me as I think they are pretty good and helpful. I’ve got a ton of Wordpress sites with them, hosted on .com domains. I’m not looking for 100% uptime as the blogs are largely article blogs, for SEO purposes, but Bluehost manage to provide it and give my UK domains much needed exposure to traffic “on the other side of the pond.” So I’ve stuck with good old BlueHost over the years and therefore have no difficulty recommending them for a number of reasons.
For one thing, Wordpress works out-of-the-box with BlueHost. Bluehost utilise a cool tool called SimpleScripts which allows you to update your blog much easier and quicker than the automatic upgrade of Fantastico. This is important as a new version of Wordpress seems to come out almost every week, and its important to keep up to date. Then again you could also consider a Wordpress auto-update plugin to keep your blog updated.
Wordpress worksbetter with some web hosts than others. This is because hosting companies set things up differently to each other. Default permissions on files and directories is one thing, such as setting write permissions on the .htaccess file so you can create search engine friendly URL’s called “permalinks.” If your existing web host restricts the ability of your files to be rewritten, can you have issues “chmod’ing” or changing file permissions, and “chmod” isn’t always intuitive for those users not coming from a Unix background. Needless to say Bluehosts have got this covered.
SimpleScripts, is a third-party service created by a former employee of BlueHosts. This is a terrific little service which every hosting company should use. It is of course provided free by Bluehost. It is basically a script vault, super installer and upgrader for popular scripts and applications, such as WordPress, bbPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento and a ton of others. SimpleScripts also liase very closely with open source projects such as WordPress to get the latest versions delivered automatically to Bluehost servers and are often much faster in doing this than the better known rival, Fantastico.
You also get a Free Domain with BlueHost, however I always like to keep my domains seperate to the web host. If you are on a tight budget this is worth considering. Also BlueHost are recommended by WordPress.org. Now there could be a bit of mutual back scratching going on here, but endoresements from organisations like Wordpress are not easy to come by so its worth taking note of. Bluehost are however highly esponsive to the needs of all their customers and are quick to update their servers and keep up to date with software releases and current developments.
The million dollar problem is.. how good is BlueHosts support? Well to be frank I’ve not had to call on them that often. But in a word, its excellent! BlueHost have adopted a novel approach to technical support. They actually seem to want to help you! Ticket response times are amongst the fastest in the industry and notably in this increasingly global economy, they all speak very good English. This is a plus point, if you are from the US or UK. If you have you ever tried to explain a technical issue to non native English speakers its not always easy.
