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Reliable,
Affordable Business Hosting from Bluehost.com.
The most impressive feature of BlueHost is that for only
$6.95 per month you can host up to 6 domains on one
account. The first domain name you get free, and you have
to register the others, but you can do this through their
cPanel control panel. Another good thing: the domains are
ready to use almost immediately you set them up. One slight
annoyance: I started FTP'ing my stuff to one of the domains
before they had finished setting it up, so my homepage got
suddenly replaced by their default index.html. No problem:
I just re-FTP'ed it.
BlueHost began in 1996 as a web hosting company. They
do not quote an uptime guarantee on their web site, except
to say "maximum guaranteed uptime" (does that mean 100%?).
They provide very good toll-free phone support 15 hours a
day Mon-Sat, and 9 hours on Sunday: not 24/7 as many
hosting companies do. They also operate a ticket system:
sometimes they were answered promptly, sometimes not. I
found it best to submit a ticket with all the details, then
to phone when the lines became available.
BlueHost provides just one web hosting plan, Unix
based, at $6.95 per month, setup free. You get 4GB disk
space and 100GB monthly bandwidth, and 2500 POP email
accounts. It provides FrontPage 2000/2002/2003 extensions.
For e-commerce, OSCommerce and Agora shopping carts are
provided. For programming and scripting, you get CGI, PHP
and Perl. You are allowed 50 MySQL databases, and 50
PostgreSQL databases: phpMyAdmin interface.
Other features include multiple domain hosting, as
already described, Fantastico script library, and Unix
shell access. BlueHost have recently added a web site
builder.
BlueHost's backbone uses an OC48 connection. The data
center is near Salt Lake City, Utah, which uses high
performance Xeon servers. |
