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• I used to be with another hosting company and I was paying over double for the service. Now after a while they decided to charge me more for services because my tiny website was getting too much traffic.

  But the real kicker was their email client was getting corrupted every month or so and I would have to download all my emails and then reinitialize the system. For someone who uses email as much as I do it was retarded. Their customer support was awful. You would send an email (if you could) to them and they would reply back within 48 hours. That’s a long time to deal with a corrupt email client.

  I’m not sure how many times My husband had to do this for me. I can’t imagine what would have happened to all my emails if he wasn’t a tech support guy. I would have been screwed.

  Blue Host is good, and… when someone stole a picture of my son from my site and put it on another blue host site then shut them down within 30 minutes of me contacting them. Of course I had all the emails and tweets that I had been trying to contact the site for 2-3 days. I love their chat service.

  In fact the best thing about Blue Host for me is that other than the stolen picture, I haven’t been in touch with them a sure sign that things are working properly. Seriously of you’re calling your blog host all the time something is desperately wrong!

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     That is a really great recommendation Rachelle. They always seem to be really keen to help with that kind of thing.

     Did that situation with that person who stole the photo get resolved on a personal level?

     1. I tried to resolve the situation amicably by contacting them for days and I came on this very site and a reader suggested I contact their web host. I did and they did manage to find and remove the picture within a few hours of their site being down.

        They never did contact me. Although they did post a bullsh*t explanation of why their site was taken down.

        Interesting factoid though just today I was speaking to another lady in business who had the same kind of stalking victimization happen to her as happened to me from that site. Weird. Now it’s three people banned from the site and stalked and harassed.

        1. the Blog Tyrant

           Interesting. In my country and I think the USA what they did is a federal offense. I hope it has all settled down for you now. Internet obstacles are yuck.

• I hear a lot of good things about Bluehost, I think they were giving people a “free” domain for the first year at one point as well. I’m using Web Hosting Hub at the moment and can’t fault them, although I haven’t had a lot of experience with other hosting companies, or trouble with my hosting to be able to compare too much (not complaining though!).

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Shaun we really need to meet up this fortnight! Lets have a Fringe meetup.

     1. “Fringe” as in the tv series? I want to join too!

        1. the Blog Tyrant

           Ha ha.

           Nah, Fringe is a massive event in our town that goes for a month. Its the second largest in the world – comedy, theater, street performers and a lot of cool outdoor venues.

           Another reason you should move here Cristina!

           1. That sounds even better!

        2. Like BT’s readers aren’t fringe enough lol

     2. Sounds good to me, haven’t been making the most of the Fringe this year.

        1. the Blog Tyrant

           So many good things on!

• You must be psychic! I start researching hosts for my site and your post appears in my email. Talk about knowing your clients. Thank you.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Ha ha. I am going to pretend that I knew you were looking Cindi!

     Thanks!

• I use JustHost for most of my sites. It was great, I never had any problem with them until a couple months ago. I experienced downtime too often for a while, although it seems to be ok again.

  Customer Service is nice and helpful. They have a live chat where they reply to you immediately. Except precisely during those rough months. Once they kept me waiting forever (after the initial “hello, what’s your domain?”).

  And more recently I had a concern about security (someone was trying to break into all my sites in that particular server) and when I asked the support what were my options to increase security they replied very fast that there was nothing they could do. Then I found out by myself that the cPanel has an option to block IP’s.

  So, I’m a little bit disappointed lately. Maybe I’m too demanding. But when it’s about security I have to be.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Yeah that is strange.

     Whenever I ask Blue Host about security issues they bend over backwards to help as it is so important for their service.

     Thanks heaps for the great comment. I’ve heard good things about Just Host as well.

• the Blog Tyrant

  What tax was it? A British one?

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Strange. And other hosts have no taxes?

     1. In Europe, you pay VAT every time you buy anything. Groceries, books, professional services, a car, a house, drinks… Anything you can imagine. Vat in Uk is 20%

        That said, when you buy something directly from a company outside the EU-Members you don’t pay VAT.

     2. Not sure it was VAT what is sure is that the lad at the other end (BlueHost) said it was a “tax” added…slipped into my bill just before I hit the BUY button. As I said I cancelled the next second and I’ll have second thoughts when buying from BlueHost.

  2. You were charged a VAT tax. This is a European tax.

     I have an online merchant account and the service I use takes care of all proper taxes so I don’t have to mess with it. VAT tax is one of those.

     1. the Blog Tyrant

        Interesting stuff. Seems like a really high tax though – $50 one time fee.

        1. For the sake of precision I cannot say it was $50 sharp but I was upset they didn t inform the customer Me I was in the process of being charged extra money so for me BlueHost is something I won t try again. Just a personal choice…

• Thank you so much Blog Tyrant for posting this. I just got into an “issue” with Hostgator this week (and another one last month) and after dealing with 3 techs who were stuck on stupid, I did get one great one. Problem was, those three techs that were clearly wrong definitely put Hostgator in a negative light for me so I’m researching new hosts when my term ends because I think it’s time for a breakup. Will have to check out BlueHost.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Let me know how you go.

• Dude, since you still use that sceptre icon, how can I be sure it’s not a BLuehost employee writing this post ?

  Bluehost is great, especially for beginners – the service is grrreat and and they’re quite reliable – it’s no wonder they’re one of the top server brands out there for beginners.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Ha ha. The Blog Tyrant works for no company!

     Face coming soon anyway. Promise.

     1. Dude doesn’t want to reveal himself because he’s so handsome all the ladies flock to him

        Or he’s got Proteus syndrome…

        1. the Blog Tyrant

           You know which one it is! 😉�� haha

• I’ve used Bluehost and another company that won’t be named. Bluehost.com, by far, goes out of their way to make sure that support issues are addressed. The live chat feature is a boon – I’ve always found the techs to be knowledgable and prompt in answering my questions.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Totally agree. They are wonderful.

• Jordan J.

  If you’re a newbie, such as myself, the support from Blue Host is absolutely invaluable. It takes what can easily be a “please shoot my left toe off” frustrating experience into a doable one. Perhaps as I learn more about this stuff I will change my mind. But for now, I’m happy to be a Blue Host customer.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Yeah that was a big thing for me. Knowing those guys are there for all your frustrations and needs.

• Brandon Weekes

  Great Article. Reading comments are interesting. I know we all have our own experiences and each have our own needs for hosting. Hence some bad experiences with great companies. I’ve heard good and bad about many hosting companies. BlueHost has been great for me and a lot of people I know.

  I know a number of top social media guys and gals that recommend BlueHost, but I also know others that recommend other hosts. To each their own.

  For anyone looking for a new host or tired of the one they have I would recommend trying out BlueHost. They are highly rated, appearing in the top results for most of the searches on “best web hosting sites”.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Thanks Brandon. Appreciate your review.

• This may be a dumb question, but what I’ve never understood is what’s the difference between a blogsite and a website that has a blog on it? My site is with FASO (Fine Art Studio Online) and I have a blog page on it. My main focus is on selling artwork rather than blogging per se if that makes a difference. FASO is wonderful, best tech support in the world, but as you’re saying, it’s not self-hosted and I do see the advantage in that, but I always thought you had to be a computer wiz, know html, Dreamweaver, whatever, to do that, and I’m not there yet!

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Hi Carole.

     So FASO is a free account?

     1. No, it’s 28.00 a month, kinda steep, but worth it for my purposes until I can figure out how to work with this self-hosted stuff.

        1. the Blog Tyrant

           Interesting. Sounds like you’d be better off on your own on a number of fronts. Let me know if you ever need help.

  2. Hi Carole,

     I am not sure if you may have got the answer to your question offline perhaps but I thought for others that might have wondered I’ll give you a brief answer which I trust will help

     A “Blogsite” as you put it is simply a site that is being used for dynamic content; typically a blog that gets updated regularly with new and fresh content. The blogging platform like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc would normally be installed in the root directory of your domain i.e. “public_html” folder for cPanel users or “httpdocs” folder for Parallels Plesk users.

     Although a blog is being used very successfully as a business model by many business owners, bigger companies seem to have their business services/products displayed and promoted on static pages i.e. pages with content that can be changed by diving deeper into code but does not change on a regular basis. Many SEO experts believe that ranking with static pages are easier. Many still believe that static pages hold more authority. Looking at a site like Facebook which is dynamic indicates quite different. So these companies have separate dynamic pages (the blog) added on-top of the static site.

     This simply means that the blogging platform might be installed in a different folder other than the root, with a simple link from the root folder (static site) linking to the WordPress installation for instance.

     The nice thing about using WordPress as a platform for your site regardless of static or dynamic (I am sure the others provide for this as well) is that you can set or have custom static landing pages which is exactly the same thing as having a static site that links to the blog or posts page as it’s also known as.

     Having a platform like WordPress makes things just more manageable and of course is less time consuming and often there’s no need to dive into the code.

     This was briefly and things can get a lot more interesting but I hope this helped you with your question.

     1. Thank you! Doesn’t mean I can actually take the steps to do it yet, but at least now I understand the difference, which puts me miles ahead of where I was. Onward and upward! Thanks again…

        1. the Blog Tyrant

           Great work guys!

        2. Glad you “are miles ahead” now Carole!

• Hey, thanks for including my Tweet!

  I think new bloggers tend to try to get the cheapest hosting possible, thinking all hosting is created equal. Normally, I’d be all about saving money, but a bad web host is so very frustrating. Bluehost has always been great for me. Spend the 5.95 (which is a great price anyway!) a month and don’t bother going for the 2.99 a month hosting.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Yeah its really not that much more and you get a pretty good deal.

• I started out on WordPress.com, but it wasn’t too long before I realized the kinds of things you’ve been telling us here. For a business, a self-hosted site is really very important. You have so much more say that way.

  Anyway, I currently use HostGator and am very pleased with their pricing and especially with their customer service. Even when I’m trying to figure out some puzzle about how to manage my site or something, they patiently walk me through the answer. They also have a good supply of special offers and such to go with their service.

  I can’t really compare since they are the only paid web hosting service I have ever used, but at this time, I personally have no reason to switch. (Just sharing my experience since you asked. )

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Thanks so much Sheila. Really appreciate it and am glad you enjoy hosting with them.

• Hey Tyrant, in response to your article and your question on Twitter. I have several accounts for hosting and by far, my favorite is DreamHost for one and simple reason: FREE PRIVACY WHOIS INFORMATION!

  All the other hosts are charging 9,95$ per domain per year and considering I like to launch a lot of micro niche sites, I like to maintain my whois information private, therefore, for me, DreamHost is the most appropriate.

  Thanks for your article.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Good point. I think Namecheap has a good deal on them too.

  2. I hope you don’t use Adsense on these microsites…

     1. Why’s that Zimbrul?

        The TOS specify that you can have AdSense on your site if: “(b) You are the owner of each Property or You are legally authorized to act on behalf of the owner of such Property(ies) for the purposes of this Agreement and the Program; ”

        So it’s not against the TOS and I don’t see why they would penalize you for wanting privacy on your domains.

        1. I was refereeing to privacy issues. If you’ve got same Adsense code on all your sites won’t be difficult for someone interested to link all your microsites to the main site; the WHOIS privacy is not working anymore…correct me if I’m wrong.

           1. the Blog Tyrant

              I’m not sure about this. Can you clarify your method?

• I have recently switched to BlueHost following recommendations from others and partly because my previous host were a bit lack lustre with resolving an issue I was having.

  Seems as though they have your back which is reasuring to know.

  I would agree with some of the comments above that BH is great for people/businesses starting out with self hosting, but a VPS set up is more of an ideal if one can stump up the cash.

  Cheers

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Yeah that is really amazing that they just autocorrect that issue. I heard about that from a few people now. Wonderful service.

     Thanks for the comment Mark.

• I have used Bluehost for several years too and use them for all my sites and client sites. I got into troubles recently and thought seriously hard about changing hosts but their support was so great that when the time came to renew my hosting I stuck with them.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Sorry to hear you had problems.

     Yeah, one thing about Blue Host is that their support is so good its sometimes like learning from an expert. I can’t tell you how many things I learned from a guy called Taylor on support chat.

     1. Maybe I’m the exception, but I had the opposite experience with Blue Host. I constantly felt like I was being talked down to and like the support reps were flummoxed when I’d get in touch with them about my server being down.

        About a month ago, I got into an argument with a support rep who claimed my website was not hosted on their servers because I was using CloudFlare. It was clear he didn’t understand the way my DNS was set up and was making all sorts of assumptions and telling me not to talk to them because it wasn’t their fault my site was down (even though he said their server was).

        As a result, I moved 5 domains and 3 websites over to VPS servers at Rackspace. I haven’t looked back since.

        Basically, I would still recommend Blue Host to beginning bloggers as their prices and support are generally good, but for more seasoned pros I’d take your site elsewhere.

        1. the Blog Tyrant

           Sad to hear that. Generally their customer support is really wonderful. Must have got them on a bad day.

           VPS environment is really cool but it is way to expensive for most people. I’m paying $45 a month.

           But I agree, hopefully all bloggers will grow enough to move on to one soon.

           1. Yeah it was a combination of that bad day plus I was already looking at VPS servers. I had used Blue Host for about 3 years before without many problems.

              Which service are you using if you don’t mind sharing?

              I have my main site on a Rackspace Cloud Server VPS for $20/month and then a set of three websites on another VPS for $10/month. I configured them with Nginx which can handle loads of traffic far better than the Apache standard. I had to teach myself all of that, so it’s a really steep learning curve, but I’m really happy with the results and the reasonable price.

• Love bluehost will never change. They help me so much and almost welcome the fact I’m a new blogger.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Thanks Deb.

• Thanks for the post and heads up on Blue Host. I’d been screaming into a twitterverse vacuum asking for host tips and when @bcweekes said coupon and everyone else was complimentary I jumped on it. 36hrs later I was live and good to go! Their tutorial videos helped me through the hardest part and now I look forward to fine tuning. Thanks again!!

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     No worries. Thanks for all your great comments Louise.

• Ali

  Blog Tyrant, Some people are addressing you are Louise!!!! Now tell me what this is? Is it your name, or people confusing ???

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     I have no idea what happened there Ali. I think they got confused with the first comment on the latest post. I am 100% male.

• Lina Remmie

  I have a Desktop, a ThinkPad and a Motorola Photon Android phone. I also have two external hds I’m using for additional storage. Right now I am using Carbonite on the two computers and have a fair amount of data being backed up. The subscription is about to run out so I am thinking about another service. Basically I would like to backup/store my data on all three. At the same time I would like to do some syncing of the machines to the phone. I’m paying Carbonite $59 yr for each machine so I don’t mind doing the same for another service.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Wow Lina that sounds like quite an operation!

• Choosing a web host is a major decision for bloggers and online entrepreneurs. Make the right choice, and it’s like having a first-class personal IT department who fixes all your tech problems. Make the wrong choice, and you’ll waste precious time talking to tech support when you should be creating content.

  My advice: 1) Read reviews on Web Hosting Talk. That’s the best place for relatively objective opinions.

  2) Don’t choose web hosts based on Google searches for “best web hosts,” “top 10 web hosts,” etc.

  3) If you’re using WordPress, try to go with a host who offers Softaculous. It’s an “auto installer” like Fantastico, but much better. They promptly e-mail you about WordPress core updates, and have 1-click backup and restore. Super-helpful if you need to fix a website.

  On another note, if you’re planning to create a lot of small niche sites, Blue Host allows you to update all your WordPress sites with one click. Spencer Haws at Niche Pursuits did an article and video about it:

  Going further, ManageWP looks awesome. Allows you to manage all your WordPress sites from one dashboard. Update, install plugins, and etc. on all your sites at the same time. That would save you loads of time from logging in and out of each site.

  If anyone is interested, I use HawkHost. Chose them after doing a lot of research on Web Hosting Talk. They’ve been great so far. Fast and responsive to all my support tickets. Many times, their technicians fix the problem without me having to do anything. I actually think they’re too cheap for how good their service is (but don’t tell them that. Ha ha!)

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Yeah updating all your WordPress blogs through Blue Host is very nice.

• Jenise Fok

  The Zettar ZCloud Virtual Appliance (ZCloud) enables you to setup a local Amazon S3 sandbox instantly on any computer, even a tiny netbook. Developers and QA engineers can use it to prototype, analyze, test, and stage a cloud application locally, before rolling it out onto Amazon Web Services (AWS). Thus, ZCloud can improve, simplify and speed up your development, and minimize AWS S3 development costs.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Interesting. How much learning does it take? Beginner, middle or expert?

• Alline Mattas

  I concur with Brian. I have attempted to cancel five times in this past week. They keep on assuring me that it has been canceled but then I was just charged again yesterday! Their instructions on how to cancel are intentionally confusing and misleading and their customer service is clearly inept.

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     I’m not really sure why you have had this problem.

     A few weeks ago I bought a new account on Blue Host and then decided a week later that I didn’t really need it. I asked for a refund by email and it was all done within a few minutes. Excellent experience.

• Soon to be blogger

  Thanks for the article! Been thinking about making a blog as a hobby and I’m liking all the positive comments about it!

  1. the Blog Tyrant

     Good luck!