Bluehost is considered one of the best hosts in the industry. They provide affordable hosting plans with a lot of features. Located in Provo, Utah, Bluehost is owned by Hosting Solutions, Inc. and was founded in 1996.
They have almost 15 years of hosting experience. They host over 1,000,000 domains on many state-of-the-art servers. They have a great support staff that works tirelessly for you. Support is available via Phone, email or chat 24 hours a day.
Bluehost Plans & Features
Bluehost has one plan that covers most of their features. For $6.95 per month you get all the features you would expect with a shared hosting plan. However, if you need additional resources, like a SSL certificate or dedicated IP Bluehost does have upgrades for your account.
The plan comes with a free domain name, unlimited disk space and monthly bandwidth (data transfer). This plan allows you to host unlimited parked and/or subdomains. It comes with 2500 email addresses and you can set up unlimited autoresponders. with 1000 FTP accounts and 100 MySQL databases, setting up Joomla is very simple and easy to maintain.
Hosting Environment
Managing your Bluehost account is easy. From any of your domains, just add ‘/cpanel’ after the ‘.com’ for instance http://yourdomain.com/cpanel.
cPanel 11 is the backend software that gives you access to all of the scripts, languages, statistics and more. You can manage your Databases under MySQL Databases or PHPMyAdmin.
Recent Bluehost Server Improvements (posted April 16, 2010)
The Server Improvements at Bluehost protect against overrun processes. By keeping processes minimal on all sites, the overall server remains consistently fast.
- Memory Protection - Limits users from using more memory than they’re allotted.
- CPU Processor Protection - This keeps any user from using more than than available CPU Processor. This protects everyone on a shared server from being slowed down.
- Bandwidth Compression - Data transfer from your server are now compressed which increases speed by 10 to 25%.
- Process Protection - No one will be able to create a run away process that slows down the server. This particular helpful users running mysql based websites such as Joomla.
Joomla Features
The Joomla environment with Bluehost is superb. It is easily installed using one-click installers Simplescripts.
Tech Support
BlueHost’s technical support staff is one of the best reviewed support teams in the business. They are known as highly-qualified and technical experts. They can be contacted toll-free telephone 24/7 with impressive response times. You can also reach them through email. From the BlueHost website, you can access their helpdesk where you can open a support ticket or go on to their FAQ knowledgebase. They have lots of helpful information and even video tutorials.
- Phone: 888-401-4678 or 801-765-9400
- Email: support {at} bluehost.com
Conclusion
The technical support and help desk expertise is a huge plus. Bluehost also has many great features and also goes to great lengths to keep their shared servers running fast with attention to detail within the server processes.
Choosing Bluehost as s Joomla site is a great idea. Especially if you are looking for affordable shared hosting with great technical support.