Tag: bluehost

Fast and affordable web hosting

Bluehost was founded in 2003 by Danny Ashworth and Matt Heaton. Heaton, a web guru, realized as early as 1996 that web hosting services were strongly lacking and he wanted to offer a product that met his own expectation in a hosting service. It is currently owned by owned by Endurance International Group and is one of the 20 largest web hosting providers with over 2 million domains users. Based in Utah, they employee over 750 employees to provide 24/7 tech support to their customers.

An entire segment of their staff is dedicated to troubleshooting WordPress issues. Nearly 10 years ago, Bluehost partnered with WordPress, offering bloggers and web designers an opportunity to utilize both services simultaneously.

Part the of the success of Bluehost has been their affordable and fast web hosting capabilities. They often offer promotion discounts rates, with tiered rates for those who chose to stay with them longer. Additionally, they provide free domains, free webmail, easy installation, free site builders, and a vast technical suite of tools. No coding experience is required, although they do provide an option to write your own code, making it completely customizable.

Overall, Bluehost has aimed high and has successfully built a company that offers the best hosting services available at a low price.

Free domain

Every new hosting package purchased through Bluehost comes with a free domain. They make searching for available domains easy, and offer a variety name that is available, should the one you choose to be taken. Currently, 15 different extensions are available, from .com to .store to help you customize your site from the very beginning. Noteworthy, all domains are freestanding. Unlike Wix sites, the domain you chose is the one you will have; it will not have a /wix or /bluehost at the end of the url.

If you happen to already have a domain, Bluehost makes it easy pointing your domain to your new website.

You can also park domains. With their basic package, you are allowed to park 5 domains. All other packages allow you unlimited parking.

Free webmail

Every Bluehost account comes with free webmail services. With their basic package, you get 5 email accounts. Their plus and prime packages give you unlimited email accounts, as well as unlimited email storage.

Email addresses can be created for each employee, different departments, or different sections of your site. The options are totally up to you, which makes Bluehost very versatile.

Performance

Bluehost is pretty user-friendly. With a cPanel for backend functions and easy to use site builders, performance wise, it ranks very well. Comparing to other hosting services, Bluehost is indeed competitive. When compared to GoDaddy, Bluehost’s cPanel is clean and easy to navigate. There is no upcharge for the cPanel service like GoDaddy has, and their tech support is easily accessible.

Both sites boast a 99.9% uptime stat. Rarely do their sites go down and performance times are done during off-peak hours. Both also have easy to use upgrade options, however, Bluehost offers better money-back guarantee deals, better google advertising credits, and is less a target for hackers through SiteLock and other safeguards.

WordPress web hosting

One of the areas that Bluehost is recognized time and again is their relationship with WordPress. Recommended by WordPress themselves, Bluehost and WordPress have worked closely since 2005 to create a hosting platform ideal for running WordPress websites.

1-click install

One of the features that have been created is a one-click installation, through Bluehost, of WordPress, making the use of operation and accessibility seamless. Setting up a WordPress site is done nearly instantaneously and you can be up and running in a matter of minutes. Immediately you are free to customize your site as you see fit. From themes to layouts, every aspect of a WordPress site can be changed and customized so that no two sites will ever look identical. Many drag and drop website designers do not have this flexibility.

Free site builders

For those needing help with building a site, Bluehost offers a variety of free site builder tools, including Weebly. Weebly is a drag and drops web builder where you can put a text box wherever you want on the page and fill put in your own information. These are great for those who want a simple site. The downside is that the exact locations are limited when working with drag and drop technology. For those looking for better customization, WordPress is that option.

Cloud hosting

Your website information is important to you and to Bluehost. In order to protect that data, Bluehost enlisted the help of Cloud Hosting to protect you making your website more reliable and more secure. Bluehost boast that “should hardware issues arise at one, our failover technology automatically designates one copy of your website to keep functioning while the other two copies work to rebuild.” This means that you will never lose your site if something catastrophe happens on a server level. The Cloud and Bluehost will have your back.

Additionally, if a surge of users should flock to your site, the speed will not slow down, as is demonstrated in the image. There are different power plans to choose from, depending on the size of your site and how powerful you want your site’s performance to actually be, to avoid site downtime. Fees are not based on usage, so you won’t be charged more for Black Friday Specials, and are flexible based on need.

VPS Hosting

Sometimes you want or need a dedicated server for your website, and Bluehost offers that option. Depending on the amount of storage and the desired speed, there is a tiered pricing system to meet your needs. All offer a 30-day, money back guarantees. They have 24/7 monitoring and support to ensure your site runs as smooth as possible. VPS Hosting is easy to use and can be up and running in seconds, where most VPS solutions take hours or days to activate. Bluehost designed their VPS servers to be available immediately and the very second you need it.

The technology Bluehost is using is ever changing and additional storage and usage are being added all the time. Everything can be controlled through the cPanel, for ease of use.

Dedicated hosting

Bluehost understands that some clients required a dedicated hosting team, and they provide it. They offer custom engineers to their Dedicated hosting clients and immediate service, so there is no to minimal downtime. Depending on the size, speed, and storage you require, Bluehost has a plan to meet your business’ needs.

Access through the cPanel allows you to control your hosting operations and 24/7 support enables you to always have a dedicated team of help.

WooCommerce hosting

WooCommerce considers themselves as the most customizable e-commerce platform for building an online business and is offered through Bluehost. Over 31 million e-stores are operated through WooCommerce, which makes up nearly 28% of all online stores. They have free and paid platforms and can easily be changed to meet your exact business needs.

Bluehost offers a dedicated support team specifically for their WooCommerce users. It is easy to set up and can be functional in a matter of minutes. Prices are low, for this add-on service, and it functions within WordPress, which makes it an incredible add-on to any commercial website.

Technical details

While Bluehost makes website design extremely simple, there is a ton of technical detail happening behind the scenes. Coding, such as PHP, is a complex system that enables your site to do exactly what you want it to do. While you will see just words or prompts, an entire world of line coding is taking place in the background. Additionally, security enhancements are also taking place. To ensure that your site does not come under attack, safeguards, like CloudFlare, protect your coding to ensure that your site performs as you wish.

Using CloudFlare

CloudFlare is a security setting that you can use on your website. It shields you from attacks and adds a firewall. Without CloudFlare, hackers can bring your website offline. If you are an e-commerce site, this can have detrimental effects on your sales.

One way from of attack that Cloudflare prevents is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). These attacks are on the rise and wreaking havoc on the internet. According to CloudFlare, the average hourly cost of downtime due to an infrastructure failure is $100,000 per hour. Attacks of this nature likely lead to customer churn, brand degradation, and lost business.

In addition to larger attack volumes, efforts are shifting from the network and transport layers to the application layer (layer 7). Application layer attacks are far more sophisticated, often requiring fewer resources to bring down a website or application, and can disrupt operations with even greater impact. With a layer 7, the HTTP flood attacks generate high volumes of HTTP, GET, or POST requests from multiple sources, targeting the application layer, causing service degradation or unavailability. This can be detrimental to websites, especially during high-site visit times.

Cloudshare’s results have been very high. They have seen a 95% total bandwidth savings too with 226,500,000 attacks blocked between August 2015 and November 2016 — 500,000 attacks per day. Noteworthy, not one attack was successful.

By utilizing CloudFlare, your website is not slowed down and your site is protected.

Php versions

PHP is a server-side scripting language that was designed primarily for web development. It is also used as a general-purpose programming language. It is embedded in HTML and works to improve bug reporting and code. There have been several updates, since its release in 1995, all working to help security and fix systematic bugs.

For example, the introduction “Hello World” that is seen on all new WordPress sites, is written in PHP code that is embedded in HTML text. It looks something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

    <head>

        <title>PHP Test</title>

    </head>

    <body>

        <?php echo '<p>Hello World</p>'; ?>

    </body>

</html>

 

Web developers can utilize PHP to talk to a website and install different functions and commands.

PHP is free software. It is typically not attacked by hackers, making it a safe way to write code, although it is time-consuming to write simple context, as noted in the “Hello World” example above.

Free backups

Bluehost offers free backup service, however, if you are looking for a frequent backup system, paid services are also offered. The free backups are done randomly and are not guaranteed. Bluehost.com states that they assume no responsibility for failed backups, lost data, or data integrity and that they are unable to create automatic backups for sites above 30 gigabytes in size. For larger sites, paid backup services are available.

24/7 Support

With over 750 employees, all based in the United States, Bluehost is able to offer 24/7 support. This is incredibly important for those who work on their small business marketing or blogging after hours. Whether it is 2 a.m. or you are running a last-minute Christmas Eve special, you can be sure that if you run into an issue that someone will be there to help you and that your site is being monitored so that it will not go down unexpectedly.

Should you actually go for Bluehost?

Bluehost is extremely user-friendly, has amazing tech support, and is affordable for all levels of website designers. Whether you are using it for your first website buildout or your 50^th, Bluehost always provides the same level of service. Because they are always running different promotions, you can never be certain you will get every site for the same price, but competitively, even the highest price is a great deal, with free domain, email, and cPanel access. Additionally, they make design simple. There is no complex coding knowledge required and safeguards are in place to ensure that your site will be as protected as possible from hackers.
If you are looking to create a website, Bluehost is an extremely good choice.