Why we love BlueHost
- Web Hosting with BlueHost only costs Web Hosting – $6.95/mo! (You have the option to sign up for 1 year or 2 years, but you have to pay a lump sum when you sign up for your account)
- You get a Free Domain
 forever for as long as you have an account with BlueHost. We get the domain name webdiggin.com free, and it’s ours for as long as we are with BlueHost. If you want to start a blog, just get an account with BlueHost for $6.95/mo, and they throw in your own domain name for free.
- You can switch which one of your domain names you get for free forever. Originally, we signed up with BlueHost with SnitchAndBitchCafe.com because we were so excited to get started. But later, we bought WebDiggin.com and wanted that to to be our main account (and get that name for free forever). No problem. We sent in a work ticket and now we get WebDiggin.com for free. If in a year, we start up a different website and want to close down WebDiggin.com, we just switch our main domain name and just let the WebDiggin.com expire. (We still need to pay our monthly BlueHost fees).
- You get $50 Free Yahoo Search Marketing Credits. Once you sign up for your BlueHost account, there’s a button in your control panel that will get you the coupon code for $50 Free credits at Yahoo to do some Pay Per click advertising for your site. We blogged about our experiences getting the credit. Took a few days from Yahoo’s end to give us the credit, but we got it just fine. The $50 credit is only with new search marketing accounts with Yahoo.
- You get $50 Free Google AdWords Credits. Similar to the Yahoo offer. Only applies to new accounts with Google AdWords, and you have to sign up right away or it expires. But getting $100 from Google and Yahoo pays for the expense of signing up for your BlueHost account.
- You can purchase domain names from BlueHost for $10 per year. (.com, .net, .biz, .org, .us, .info)
- It’s easy to transfer domain names from other providers to BlueHost. You can transfer any domain name. We transfered our .ca domain names to BlueHost, even though they don’t sell .ca names. We buy them from 10dollar.ca for $10 / year. For example, we point Gohanyo.ca to our BlueHost account and now, we get a huge space to run our website, unlimited subdomains on Gohanyo.ca, unlimited email addresses with Gohanyo.ca, and all of the other feature that you get with BlueHost. Buy your webdomain name for as cheap as possible and them point them to BlueHost’s servers: ns1.bluehost.com (74.220.195.31), and ns2.bluehost.com (69.89.16.4)
- You get unlimited parked domains on 1 BlueHost Account. If you want to try making money on misspelled domain names or on niche domain names and just want to park your domain name on your search portal, BlueHost allows you to park unlimited domain names. (You’ll still have to buy them at $10 per name)
- You can host Host Unlimited Domains
 on 1 BlueHost account. Each domain costs $10/year, but once you have your BlueHost account, it means you can use it to launch as many websites as you want and they’ll each appear to be independent. For example, WebDiggin.com is our main site, but we’ve bought Gohanyo.ca, SnitchAndBitchCafe.com, RipplesofKindness.com, SocialMonkeys.com, and SocialMonkies.com and hosted them all on our account at no additional charge for webhosting.
- You can host Host Unlimited Sub-Domains on 1 BlueHost account. This means, if we don’t want to spend the cash to buy additional names, we can still set up separate websites as subdomains. For example, leadsearch.ca is the domain for one of our websites. Ink.leadsearch.ca is a separate website living on the subdomain of leadsearch.ca. Later on, if we wanted to buy a domain name to use for our coupon site, instead of ink.leadsearch.ca, we could do it easily enough.
- You get 1,500 Gigabyte of Hosting Space. We have around 10 blogs up and running and we use around 300 MB of space. (Our control panel tells us that we have used 294.91/1,536,000.00 MB)
- You get 2,500 POP/Imap Email Accounts. (Setting up an account is ridiculously easy. Plus, you can check it from your internet browser (webmail), or you can set up your email program (like Microsoft Outlook) to get your messages.
- You can create automatic forwarders to help you with your mail. We have an info@domain.com for each of our websites, but we only bothered to create one email account: info@webdiggin.com account. Then, we just created a bunch of forwarders to forward the mail from info@gohanyo.ca, info@snitchandbitchcafe.com, etc. to the info@webdiggin.com account. Easy stuff.
- We got 1,500 Gigabytes of Transfer Bandwidth, but I believe they are now offering 5,000 GIGS of Transfer (NEW!) With 10 blogs up and running, our control panel tells us we are using 571.08 MB out of 15,360,000.0 MB (1500 GB)
- You get SH (Secure Shell) and SSL. I’ll be honest. We don’t use these features yet, but it’s nice to know the option is there for future growth.
- You get FTP services. That goes without saying, I suppose, but you can use any program (CuteFTP, DreamWeaver, FrontPage) to upload your WordPress template into your BlueHost account.
- You get Stats. They offer Weblizer Stats as well as Awstats, in addition to catching your error logs, latest visitors, bandwidth, and raw-access logs. I’ll be honest with you – I turned on the stats feature, but I didn’t really like the look and feel of their stats program. I might not be using this stuff to the best of what’s offered, but I’ve just stayed with www.statcounter.com which offers free stats and pretty graphs. (They just limit your log size to the last 500 visitors)
- GI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL
- They offer 2000/2002 Front Page Extensions. Several years ago, when we designed our first website, we used front page, and it was a hassle to find a good webhost that offered this feature. (Or at least didn’t charge extra). Quite frankly, I would never go back to Front Page. We use WordPress as our platform, and we use Adobe DreamWeaver to fix and hack the WordPress templates. But you don’t even need to have DreamWeaver. You can use a free FTP program to upload your WordPress template into your BlueHost account and if you pick a good template (or use the default template), you’ll never have to change a line of code.
- Free Site Builder. We’ve never explored this option because we just click the Fantastico De Luxe button at the bottom of the Control Panel, click on WordPress installation, and we’re good to go!
- You get BlueHost Domain Privacy for free which will hide your personal information from being listed in the public WHOIS database. (Otherwise, when you register a domain name, your address and telephone number show up in the WHOIS public database)
- You can speak with a live person at 1-888-401-4678. We had to call in after we joined to verify our account details, but then after that one initial call, we’ve done everything online (like buying various domain names, transfering domains to BlueHost, etc)
- BlueHost supports a variety of platforms, including ASP, PHP, Perl, Frontpage, SSH. We only worry about PHP because that’s what you need to run WordPress, and yes, WordPress runs beautifully on BlueHost.
- They host over 490,000 domain names. They’re big, reliable, stable and safe. And lots of people use them.
 You can accept credit cards on your site. (The offer is 1.99% Discount Rate, $0.30 per transaction fee, $10 statement fee, $25 gateway free, but you get a Free shopping cart, free gateway setup, free merchant account set up, free online reporting, and no monthly minimums) We don’t use this feature yet, but again, nice to know if we ever growth in that direction.- 24/7 Superb/Responsive Sales/Support. We transfered our blogs over from Blogger to WordPress. Setting up WordPress on our BlueHost account was easy (use the Fantastico Deluxe button on the control panel). Transfering over the posts and comments and content was easy (use the Manage > Import feature in WordPress). There was a minor glitch because we would type whattheduck.ca into our browser, but when the blog loaded, it would show whattheduckworld.blogspot.com in the address line. We searched the help area, but couldn’t find the answer, so we sent in a call ticket for support. Within half a day, we received a reply with step-by-step instructions on how to fix the problem (through the phpMyAdmin section.)
- You can password protect directories at the webhost level. So, if you want to be sure that certain sections of your website are secure from casual glances or even search engine robots, this is the option for you.
- You get phpMyAdmin. We didn’t have this option with our last webserver, so we were thrilled to see it here. If you’re technically competent, this is the way to access your WordPress database.
- You also get a MySQLDatabases Wizard, RemoteMySQL, PostgreSQLDatabase Wizard, and phpPgAdmin. I don’t use these features yet, but I can appreciate that there are those who do.
- You get access to Orange Soda’s Search Engine Submit feature. They submit your website detail to 40+ search engines just by filling out “one form”. They also give you the option for Search Engine Marketing consulting services which we passed on. Still, if it works the search engine submitting process works, great.
- You get Cron jobs. Cron jobs allow you to automate certain commands or scripts on your site. Depending on your technical proficiency, you can set a command or script to run at a specific time every day, week, etc. For example, you could set a cron job to delete temporary files every week so that your disk space is not being used up by those files, or to backup your websites.
- You get mailing lists. Mailing lists can simplify sending messages to a large group of people. You can add a group of email addresses to a mailing list to avoid typing in those addresses each time a mailing is sent. Then, you just email your message to your mailing list address and everyone gets your information. We don’t use this feature because we use feedburner to manage the distribution of our blog content through RSS syndicated feeds as well as their email subscription list. But if we weren’t running a blog with a RSS feed, it’s nice to know we have this option.
- You can control redirects for any domain name that is being managed by your BlueHost account. For example, any traffic that comes into socialmonkies.com gets automatically redirected to socialmonkeys.com. You also have access to your .htaccess file, but doing it through the control panel meant we didn’t have to worry about figuring out what to type in the .htaccess file. Just point and click, baby!
- You get a tool to edit custom error pages. With this tool you can create custom error pages to display when a user enters a wrong URL, an outdated URL or when the user is not authorized to access a specific directory of your web space. Create your own 400 (bad request), 401 (Authorization required), 403 (Forbidden), 404 (Wrong Page), and 500 (Internal server error) for any of the domain names controlled by BlueHost.
- You get email security and spam filtering. Postini Email Security ensures your email is free from threats and junk mail. It blocks spam, viruses, phishing, and email threats, and provides sophisticated message management and policy enforcement. In addition, policy compliance is assured via Postini’s automated archiving, which provides a Google-like interface for email discovery and retrieval.
- You get the Agora Shopping Cart. The Agora Shopping Cart is a free shopping cart program. Support can optionally be obtained through a mailing list setup specifically for Agora Users for a small fee of $25.00 per year. We haven’t used the shopping cart because our limited exposure has been to use Amazon’s shopping cart system or to directly send traffic to our affiliate links, but again, it’s nice to know we have the option.
|
Did you pay too much for your domain name?
(5 votes, Rating: 4.6 out of 5)
Loading ...
March 16th, 2008 at 7:20 am
[...] 101 Reasons to Choose WordPress and BlueHost [...]
March 17th, 2008 at 6:45 am
I totally agree. I signed up for 2 years with bluehost and am very impressed with the package that they’re offering.
Jung Kim’s last blog post..From Creekside Park, Greenbrae, CA
March 18th, 2008 at 3:57 am
Yeah, I’ve met a lot of people who love their BlueHost account. (There are lots of other good webhosts out there, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just BlueHost is so much better than webserve.ca which is who I was with before.)
I assume you’re using WordPress as well. (I thought it was a blogger template when I first popped by, before I saw the WordPress at the bottom!)
March 21st, 2008 at 7:25 am
[...] Benefits and Review of WordPress and BlueHost websites [...]
March 22nd, 2008 at 4:04 am
[...] Although we don’t use the free version of WordPress.com, to host our blog, we still like to look at it and learn from it. (We run WebDiggin.com – An Adventure to Make Money Online off of our self-hosted WordPress account powered by BlueHost.) [...]
March 22nd, 2008 at 7:06 am
[...] Benefits and Review of WordPress and BlueHost websites [...]
November 15th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Thanks for all the great information. I really like the theme of your blog job well done.
Pete’s last blog post..Hello world!
November 16th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Congrats!
You marvellously summarized why BlueHost is also my number # web host for affiliate websites.
Some of them are pure html whereas I’m also testing WP blogs to mix and evaluate the different possibilities.
To Your Success!
Stop Wasting Money with Adwords’s last blog post..Ways To Make Fast Money
November 28th, 2008 at 4:12 am
Thanks for the info. I’ve been obsessing about whether or not to move my (brand new) WP blog to BlueHost and this answers a lot of my questions.
SEO Wordsmith’s last blog post..Meta
November 30th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
“This Is The Opportunity To Discover How You – Or Anyone – Can Earn A Comfortable Living From Adsense… In A Paint-By-The-Numbers Fashion!”
December 12th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Thanks for the Information
December 30th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Great blog! Everyone’s tips have been helpful for a newbie like me! moneyonline
March 1st, 2009 at 10:03 pm
wasn’t there a new release for this?
March 21st, 2009 at 4:54 am
Information over here is eally great, I am looking forward to shift from free blogger to bluehost wordpress.
slym’s last blog post..Jessica Alba, …my job to give all the boys their first kiss
April 19th, 2009 at 12:20 am
I don?t usually reply to posts but I will in this case. WoW
April 26th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
You did make some great points there – although I disagree with some.