Web Hosting Recommendation

Having run my web sites on my own hardware and internet connection since 1996, the limitations of that set up meant that I wanted to find a good web hosting provider.

I spent a lot of time researching, reading reviews and comparing the popular hosting providers. I eventually decided on going with a hosting provider that had very good reviews. Unfortunately, it didn't take long before I realised it wasn't a good choice for the following reasons:

• Useless support. It took ages to get a response and then when you did get hold of someone, they were mostly clueless.
• Clunky admin panel which was a real pain to use.
• Limits on number of domains, storage, bandwidth etc.

After being with the other provider for less than one month, I looked around again and decided to give Bluehost a go. That was a good decision and I have not looked back since. The main reasons I like bluehost are:

• Excellent support. I've never had to wait more than 5 minutes for support (I usually get a response in under 1 minute) and the support staff actually know what they are talking about. It's very rare they need to refer a support request to another level.
• Having SSH access was a big plus. A lot of hosting providers just give you FTP access, which is OK if that's all you are used to using, but when you are used to using the Linux command line, SSH access makes life so much easier and more flexible.
• Great range of tools. Bluehost supply everything you could possibly need like Perl, PHP, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Postgres etc.
• Virtually unlimited resources. For example, unlimited disk space, bandwidth, addon domains.
• Good uptime. No hosting provider can give you 100% uptime and bluehost does have the occassional outage, but they are generally infrequent and of short duration.
• Latest cPanel with all the features you could want .