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BlueHost Review: Web Hosting |
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| Free domain registration is a plus, but it's a pricier version of Hostmonster. | ||||||||||||||||
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If BlueHost looks suspiciously close to Hostmonster in terms of its cost and offerings, there's a good reason for that. BlueHost is an alternate branding of Hostmonster's services (or vice-versa), with only slight differences in their offerings. How close are the web hosts? According to the whois data for the two sites, they're next-door neighbors. So, what's the difference? Is there a BlueHost advantage?
Pricing BlueHost is a bit more expensive at $5.95 per month for a 2-year plan, versus Hostmonster's $3.95 per month for a 2-year plan. Registration, setup and domain privacy (which we recommend for most users) is free. Features SimpleScripts substitutes for the popular Fantastico scripts that you find with other web hosts. These are the scripts that allow you to install extensions such as blogging platforms, wikis, forums, guestbooks, and shopping carts. The implementation is nice, and we found everything easy to install. You get plenty of shopping cart options with BlueHost's SimpleScripts, including some less common options like OpenCart and Magento. Most of the SimpleScripts are free, but a few carry additional charges. Bluehost had been offering customers its own Pagewizard sitebuilder, but it's being fazed out. There are two options for site building now: Concrete5 and Soholaunch. Concrete5 is the free option, and while it's serviceable and nice looking, it feels clunky and a bit counterintuitive in practice. It's too bad they did away with with Pagewizard. Performance Unlike Hostmonster, BlueHost shows some fairly poor performance related to uptime. Because of that we've lowered its overall rating a bit. See the chart below for details. For uptime, higher percentages are better. For all others, lower numbers indicate better performance. BlueHost Web Hosting test data:
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| Cheapest Price: | $5.95/mo |
| Storage/Data Transfer: | Unlimited |
| Money-Back Guarantee: | 30 days |
| Domain: | Free for life |
| Support: | Email, Phone, Chat |
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