For those who are looking at a web-hosting service, make sure that the company chosen is already providing what they are claiming to offer to their other customers.

Below are some examples of the types of guaranteed services that web-hosting companies offer their customers when they know that these services are impossible to guarantee.

100% Uptime
It is impossible to offer 100% up time 24/7 to customers. Even the most expensive, best quality machines are prone to fail some of the time. If the web host loses even a few seconds of uptime then it is fair to say that they cannot provide their customers with 100% up time. If a web-hosting company is offering this service, check to see if they will refund or compensate the customer if they do have any down time.

Foolproof Anti-virus
With viruses popping up all of the time and the people creating the viruses getting better at creating trouble, it is untruthful to say that any type of anti-virus is fool proof. It is impossible to be up to date with all of the definitions all of the time. Even the best anti-virus services fail to catch a virus at times. This doesn’t mean that the anti-virus service the web host has in place is not good, all it means is that nobody is perfect and there is no such thing as foolproof.

Anti-spam that never fails
Anti-spam is a great service, sometimes. All anti-spam services have their negative points. They are known to block emails that are wanted and let in the ones that are spam. Good anti-spam services allow the user to ‘allow or deny’ emails into their email box. But it is misleading to say that anti-spam services never fail.

Unlimited disk space
There is no way that a web-hosting service can promise unlimited disk space. Even the biggest data center has limitations and size restrictions. The point being put across to customers may be that the disk space being offered is ample enough for any website, however, unlimited space is misleading.

Unlimited Email Accounts
By definition, any control panel has to have a defined number of email account allowed.
This number may be very high, lets say a thousand. You will probably never use a thousand email accounts for your business and it would be crazy to try to handle that many. However, high as the number of email accounts may be, it’s still not unlimited.

While all of these services are necessary, it is important to remember that, although outrageous promises made by some web-hosting companies can be very attractive, customers should make sure that the web-hosting company can deliver what they are promising before signing up for them.

The biggest disadvantage to average cheap webhosts is the fact that they will commonly offer less disk space and bandwidth than other hosts. The trick is to find a webhost that is established enough to have extra disk space and bandwidth available. This means that the no-name hosts that don’t have reputation will likely be less appealing than the mainstream hosts.

Sometimes it isn’t about what one needs in a web host, so much as it is what they don’t need from a host. Some hosting companies will offer different services, programs, and tools that veteran webmasters won’t need. These often cost much more money in the long run, and are usually unnecessary. Other things such as the web hosting panel used can impact a bill- whereas cPanel will cost much more than a free web panel offered by a hosting company.

Although it is a little ironic, sometimes spending more money on a hosting plan will give a customer a better discount. Web hosting companies will charge based on amount of disk space and bandwidth allowed. Such limits are increased dramatically with bigger plans. The cost per megabyte, thus, is much cheaper when paying for a larger plan. This is usually the best option for medium to large websites.

Those who have the funds to make a commitment, there are vast savings to be had by agreeing to a length of service. The most common length of service is a year- in which case the webmaster pays upfront for the entire year’s worth of service. This will commonly give the webmaster a month or two of free service in savings, although it also means that they will have to use the same service for a year- so make sure it is a reputable company.

Cheap webhosts can also be obtained through other types of efforts, although it’ll take more time and patience. The first way is to simply place ads on one’s website that link back to the webhost. This will require an “under the table” deal with the webhost, who will agree to offer a discount in exchange for the links. Other things, such as forum posting, referring sales, or even completing offers can help reduce a payment each month.

Final Thoughts

Web hosts have a lot of fees, bills, and expenditures to abide by. But this doesn’t mean that they can’t offer cheap hosting to their customers! To get the best deals, always ask about referral programs, ad placement opportunities, and always opt for the service agreement each year if the funds are permitted. And in the end, opting for established web hosts is usually the best route to take.

By: Chris Channing

300GB space
3,000GB bandwidth
24/7 Tech Support via phone/live chat
Unlimited Domains on 1 Account!
Free Domain Name Forever
Free best hosting company Bluehost Site Builder
Unlimited Email Accounts (more than any Bluehost customer will ever us)
Unlimited Email Forwarders
50 MySQL/PostgreSQL Databases
PHP4+5, MySQL4+5, Your choice!
SSH (Secure Shell), SSL, FTP, Stats
CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL
Fantastico (Free Scripts like Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress, phpbb Forums)
eCommerce Enabled
Streaming Multimedia
Free Search Engine Submissions

Prices

3 Months: $9.95 per month + $30.00 Setup + Domain ($10.00 if purchased from BlueHost)
6 Months: $8.95 per month + $30.00 Setup + Domain ($10.00 if purchased from BlueHost)
1 year: $7.95 per month (no setup fee, free domain from Bluehost included)
2 years: $6.95/month (no setup fee, free domain from Bluehost included)

best hosting company Bluehost, which began in 1996, touts itself as an affordable and reliable webhosting provider that serves over 475,000, domains/websites. I feel I’m qualified to do a Bluehost review because I actually use Bluehost.com for some of my CMS/Blogs.best hosting company BlueHost has some amazing features in its control panel. SSH is just one of the tools Bluehost comes packed with. What is SSH you may ask? Basically a SSH connection is a way for two computers to connect securely to each other without worry from outside interference or hacking. With SSH you can transfer files or have remote logins without worry because your Bluehost SSH encrypts info for you.

Crowns

Like most other hosts they do offer 24/7 toll free lines for support. Also you have a knowledge base, online chat and email support available. Better still, they have an active support forum which is a real help for the newbies. You get to share the information with support staff as well as experienced webmasters. Support tickets may not be fastest, but they do get replied in a reasonable time limit.

* Bluehost offers 24/7 managed care and tech support for your site. In my mind this is absolutely essential for any low cost web hosting service. Based on our personal experience with Bluehost and what we read in Bluehost reviews, the staff has always been honest, professional, courteous and will give you as much time as you need to help you with your issue.
* The best hosting company Bluehost Contol Panel is easy to navigate and comes with Fantastico, where you can get automatic and free downloads to put blogs, a CMS, forums, mailing programs, etc. seamlessly on your site with just a click of the mouse. Amazing!
* Drop and drag unlimited FTP makes it so simple for a non tech guy like me to upload files to my site.
* How can you beat the $6.95 per month Bluehost charges for all the features they offer?

- Bluehost.com trusted by 510,000 domain owner.
- Unlimited storage space, unlimited bandwidth transfer.
- Host up to 999 unique websites. Free domain name.
- Cpanel with fantastico. Blog, ecommerce, RoR, Joomla.
- Email, ftp, subdomain, MySQL, php 4/5, FastCGI.
- Bluehost Coupon: Special Link $6.95

To guarantee that we received no special treatment while conducting this Bluehost review, we purchased our Bluehost review account directly from the Bluehost website. At no stage did we inform Bluehost that we were conducting a review, so we are reasonably sure that we were treated the same as any ordinary Bluehost customer.

About BlueHost

Bluehost was founded in 1996, making them one of the oldest web hosting providers still operating. The fact that they have managed to survive in the often cut-throat web hosting business says a lot about the quality of services that they provide. Many lesser companies have come and gone in the years that Bluehost has been providing quality solutions to web-masters.

As you would expect from a company that has been in business for as long as Bluehost, their network infrastructure is first-class. The Bluehost data center is equipped with modern quad processor servers, mirrored storage backups, UPS / diesel backup power generator and 24/7 monitoring by trained technical staff. Internet connectivity is provided by an impressive OC-48 backbone connection, providing in excess of 2 Gbit / second bandwidth.

Plan Features and Pricing

Lately, it is becoming increasingly common for web hosting providers to simplify their product range and offer a single ‘one-size fits all’ web hosting plan and this is the path that Bluehost has chosen with their ‘Platinum Pak’ plan. Having only the one web hosting plan to choose from does make a prospective customer’s task in choosing a plan particularly easy, but there is always the potential problem that the single plan on offer will not provide the features you are looking for in a web hosting package. Fortunately, the plan that Bluehost has put together has more than enough features to satisfy even the most demanding customer.

The Bluehost Platinum Pak plan offers 1500GB of disk storage space, 15000GB of data transfer / bandwidth and a full set of features for the all inclusive price of $6.95 per month.

It is worth noting that Bluehost allows you to host an unlimited number of full domains and an unlimited number of sub-domains under the one account.

The table below highlights some of the major features that come as standard with the Bluehost Platinum Pak plan. Of-course, for an exhaustive list of plan features, you should visit the Bluehost web site.

Shared Server

Our Bluehost account was placed on a shared server containing two quad-core Intel Xeon E5320 1.86Ghz CPUs (for a total of 8 cores), 4GB of RAM and three 750GB volumes. The server was running the CentOS 64bit Linux distribution. These specifications are very impressive for shared hosting in this price range.

During our testing, the average server load on our server was measured as 1.5 or less and we did not experience any server slowdowns due to excessive CPU load. Our test site remained fast and responsive, even during peak usage periods.

Control Panel

It came as no surprise that Bluehost, in common with most web hosting providers these days, supplies the industry standard cPanel for administration of your web-sites. cPanel is popular with good reason, as it very easy to navigate and provides access to all the configuration options you could wish for.

In addition to the normal configuration options, the Bluehost panel offers a web-based file manager and easy to use Page-Wizard, allowing reasonably professional looking web-pages to be created with a minimum of fuss. Fantastico script support is also available via the panel (more information below).

Scripting Support

As mentioned above, Bluehost provide Fantastico script support via the Bluehost panel. This allows the easy installation and upgrade of dozens of useful software packages, including packages for blogging, forums, content management systems, picture galleries, online surveys and polls etc. Fantastico has built an admirable reputation among users and by making it available, Bluehost has added enormous value to their already excellent hosting plan.

For those that prefer to install their scripts manually, Bluehost offers a large variety of industry standard scripting languages, including PHP4, PHP5, PERL5, Python, Ruby / Ruby on Rails and of-course, CGI.

Custom php.ini settings are supported, as are Apache .htaccess files and CRON jobs for executing scripts at regular intervals.

Reliability

Massive storage space, bandwidth and plan features are of no use if your chosen web host lacks basic network reliability. Nothing sours a relationship with a web host faster than frequent downtime. Of-course, some planned downtime is unavoidable, for things like network upgrades and maintenance, but a good host will keep such outages to a minimum and provide adequate warning to their customers.

Thankfully, we can report that our Bluehost test site experienced excellent reliability. We only detected one short 30-minute outage during our 3-month monitoring period. While we would have preferred no downtime at all, the 30 minutes represents only a very small percentage of the total, and our overall uptime during the 3 months was in excess of the ‘magic’ 99.9% that is often quoted by other web hosts.

Technical Support

Bluehost give customers a number of choices when it comes to technical support. Firstly, there is the superb on-line help-center, where you can browse or search a large knowledgebase of articles on a diverse range of subjects; this is often the quickest and easiest way to solve a problem. The help-center also provides the ability to open a support ticket directly to Bluehost support staff. We opened a number of support tickets during our test period and found the replies to be both prompt and accurate.

For those that prefer receiving their technical support from a ‘real live human’, Bluehost provide a 24 hour / 7 day technical support phone number. Bluehost also supply a separate technical support number for those customers outside of the United States.

Conclusion

Overall, our experience with Bluehost was pleasant and uneventful. Their network proved to be solid and reliable (except for one small incident) and Bluehost technical support was first-rate. The plan we reviewed supplies 1500GB of space and 15000GB of data transfer at a very affordable price.

If you are in the market for a new web host, in our opinion Bluehost warrants your serious consideration. In-fact, we were so impressed by the overall service provided by Bluehost that we recently moved this site to our Bluehost account.

From the business owner to the individual who desires full functionality on a small budget, Bluehost provides your complete web hosting solution. View a listing of what we offer below or try our services for yourself by accessing our online demo site.

			FEATURES INCLUDED / ALL ACCOUNTS		INCLUDED
			Disk Storage (NOW MORE!)		Unlimited
			Host UNLIMITED Domains (WOW!)
			Free Drag and Drop Site Builder (NEW!)
			Free Domain Name
			Support International Domain Names
			POP3/POP3 Secure Email Support		2,500
			IMAP/Secure IMAP Email Support		2,500
			2 Different Web Based Email Solutions