As an internet marketer or web developer it is very important to find a good web hosting company to use for hosting your domain and website building platform.
There are literally hundreds of choices to choose from when you are shopping for a good web hosting company. The challenge is finding a web hosting service that is considered established and has legitimate business practices and policies in place for its customers.
In this post, lion den products are going to reflect on our past experiences with a couple other hosting companies first. Then we aim to
We will also cover a broad variety of topics that relate with the web hosting market and why we believe bluehost is a company worth looking at before you chose your web hosting service provider.
Company#1 – Namecheap – The first company here is Namecheap, which is the first hosting company we tried out 4 years ago. We didn’t have many issues with Namecheap regarding downtime or buying domains.
Difficult navigation of the user interface:
When it came time to renew domains however due to the user interface being difficult to navigate, sometimes we couldn’t find our domains to renew. They simply wouldn’t show up in our list of domains that we had purchased. We can’t say whether this was just a bug on their site or a poor web development error, who knows.
We would end up having to call them directly just to make sure we renewed the domain in a timely fashion. Not a real big deal but it’s annoying to say the least.
Bad customer Service:
Another issue with Namecheap was with their live chat. The people on the other end were very rude at times when you asked a simple question like what your DNS server name was or asked for further explanation to acronyms they would use through live chat .
We don’t know if this was because these employees were disgruntled or hated their jobs, but it was unpleasant to say the least.
Company#2 – ClearHost – This is a company we tried out for around a year and half and we didn’t realize that they were a small business web hosting company. They closed their doors and because of this, another company took control of their customer base.
Horrible DNS migrations and customer support
We received an email saying they were closing and the servers that our website resided on were being redirected to new servers with a different company. They left a link for us to sign up with the new company and so we tried to sign up for an account that had our URL attached to the new account that resided on their DNS servers.
We signed up only to find out that they did not have any record of the URL in their database of DNS servers, so the domain name was not transferred like ClearHost claimed they had done.
This new company also wanted 150.00/month for a new plan before they would consider transferring our domain name from the other company if we were lucky enough to find the domain name on one of ClearHosts servers.
We literally spent 2 hours going back and forth between ClearHost support and this new company to find out that neither company seemed to own up to who in fact had the domain name.
Conclusion to the story – Apparently the domain name is lost in cyber space somewhere and we will have to wait until it expires before we can buy it back again and re-build it on a new WordPress C-Panel dashboard.
Pick a recognized brand name – A lot of people will only pay attention to pricing on hosting packages and end up going with a company that they aren’t so familiar with. They think that just because the pricing is lower than most the competition, that they will save a lot of money in the long run and still receive the best web hosting customer service out there.
This is a big mistake because you end up putting your website or online business in jeopardy as we did when we made this mistake. Look at names like GoDaddy, Bluehost, 1&1or HostGator.
Look at the size of the customer base – This is a crucial bit of information you want to look at for a good web hosting company. The number of customers the company retains will speak volumes about customer service and how well established the company is.
Our criteria for a good web hosting company is a customer base of no less than 2 million customers. From our research we only know of 5 reputable names that serve most websites online. Bluehost is in the top 4 of this list and makes up over 20% of all WordPress websites that are on Google.
Read reviews from others – Reviews can be bias sometimes. If the review does not include some good information in it that you can use or the person writing the review hasn’t had any previous experience with the company before, you might want to consider reading a different review possibly.
Reading reviews are good for helping with your decision on who you end up choosing for your web host provider. You just have to read the right ones because let’s face it, a lot of reviews are filled with a sales type approach or just offer very little information that can actually help the reader out.
For example, you may have noticed in this review you are reading right now that we started the bluehost web hosting review, with stories from other web hosting companies we have tried and recommend that you avoid. Read reviews that offer you more than just a banner to click on with a list of pros and cons.
Before we get started here with the review, we picked Bluehost because we are using Bluehost for our businesses web hosting services. We are affiliates with Bluehost because we believe in their services and therefore we support them.
We feel that we should inform you that we do get paid a commission if you click on any of the banners or links that direct you to Bluehost. If you decide to click on one of our links to purchase their services, we greatly appreciate you for doing so.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get started!
Go behind the scenes with us into the Bluehost Back Office
Watch the video below where we go into the back office of Bluehost and we show you how EASY it is to create a new website. This video also gives you a glimpse into the look and feel of the user interface, so you can see how the menu options are set up. NOTE: This video was taken when the package prices for the PLUS package were still priced at 5.45/month so this is why we say 5.45 and not 5.95/month in the video.
Pricing and web hosting packages overview
There are 3 packages to choose from for your website WORD PRESS hosting. Each plan is a little bit different regarding what services are included. The 3 packages are listed below. It is also worth noting that Bluehost offers additional hosting packages for the following below.
Additional Packages
Plan 1 – Bluehost Basic Package
3.95/month and is Normally 7.99/month. This package includes the following:
Plan 2 – Blue host Plus package
5.95/month and is Normally 10.99/month. This package includes the following:
When we signed up for this package they give you the choice of purchasing for different extended amounts of time for hosting. The first time you purchase you will have to purchase hosting for a full year but after the first year is up, you get the choice of 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or further out like 2 years or 5 years. We chose to go with 2 years and the total price for that and our domain name was 178.00.
If you go with 1 year you are literally up and running a business online for around 110.00 with tax. It may be a couple dollars off here but that’s not bad considering the overhead these days to start a brick and mortar retail store is in the 10’s of thousands of dollars at minimum.
Plan 3 – Blue host Prime package
5.95/month and is Normally 14.99/month. This package includes the following:
The site back up PRO is nice but it’s not necessary if you know how to export your site from WordPress to a .txt file extension. This backs all your data and content up for you and is FREE to do.
The last package you can upgrade to from the Prime package is the GO PRO package. This includes everything that you would get with Prime and an additional high performance and more.
If you want to know more about the GO PRO and what else is included, CLICK the image below and it will take you to their page where you can chat with someone from Bluehost to answer further questions you might have.
Conclusion
Like we said before there are other webhosting service providers that have lower costs for their packages and different variations of what all is included.
So, the question remains, Is Bluehost the best domain web hosting package out there for you? It really depends on what you are looking for, if it’s price then you might look elsewhere however keep in mind what potentially awaits you with lower priced services.
You don’t want to end up experiencing what we went through chasing lower prices. If it’s value, good customer service, a user friendly interface and a well established web hosting company that you are after, then we would highly recommend Bluehost over some of the other choices.
We hope this helps you out with your buying decision and who you end up choosing as your web hosting service provider.
Feel free to comment below on this review or ask questions about things we may not have considered for this review. We will be sure to get the answer and update the review for everyone as needed.
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