Cheap Web Hosting Blog

BlueHost web hosting allows you to design a professional and polished looked website without breaking your budget. If you are just getting your business off the ground, you probably could use some help getting your business website set up. Or maybe you have a personal website that you are working on. After all, your website is your face on the internet, and the design of your website can make or break your new venture. But for most startups money is tight, and paying thousands of dollars to a professional graphic designer for a website design just isn’t in the budget. So how can you, as a small business owner, get the help you need designing a professional and polished looked website without breaking your budget? Choose a great web hosting company like BlueHost, that’s how.

BlueHost is one of the most praised web hosting companies because BlueHost gives small businesses lots of free development tools that help small business owners get their businesses going without a huge cost. One of the great tools that BlueHost offers to customers is a professionally designed website design tool. You can get a professional looking website that is customized for your business in just a few hours when you sign up for BlueHost web hosting.

There are lots of different design templates that were created by professional graphic designers so they are easy to navigate and have great color combinations for you to choose from. Choose your template, then customize it with your own colors and fonts or leave the colors and fonts and add your own graphics. You can change the template to make it fit your vision of what you want your business to be. The flexibility is grand which makes building your site very easy.

Graphic design is important when it comes to your website. There are certain colors of text that are easier to read, and certain colors that don’t translate well on a monitor. Graphics that are too big can make a page hard to load. Above all the site needs to be easy to navigate or people will surf away very quickly.

By using BlueHost web hosting you can access templates that allow you to create a very professional looking website without the high price tag. You can also add a shopping cart, sign up forms and other data collection tools too. And if you want to make updates to your site design yourself, you can use popular website design tools like Dreamweaver or Frontpage and update your page in BlueHost easily.

For small business owners the bottom line is always important. Sometimes it’s worth paying more to get a high quality product, but why pay a graphic designer when you don’t have to? BlueHost offers great web hosting and also gives customers many different business services like website design for one low monthly fee. Save the money that you would have spent on graphic design and invest it in marketing and promotion. Sign up for BlueHost as your web hosting company and see the other ways that using BlueHost can save you money while giving you the tools you need to get your business off the ground.

The CPU quota is surrounded by a lot of mystery, speculations and rumours. Recently, Alligosh, Bluehost’s principal systems administrator dropped into the bluehost forum and gave an exact definition of what constitutes the CPU limits.

The Bluehost CPU quota defined:

The CPU quota is calculated using a set number of runtime CPU seconds over a set number of realtime seconds.

With us, if you use more than 40 CPU seconds over a 60 realtime second period, the cpu quota system will suspend the website until the average over the last three minutes is below 40 CPU seconds. The three minute average is calculated every 15 seconds for the previous three minutes. As soon as your average is below the 40 CPU seconds, you will be unsuspended.

Also, processes are not terminated for going over the quota, as we don’t like killing half done processes. After the process finishes, it’s entire CPU usage is added into the last minute of processes.

If you have 200 processes in a minute that each use .5 CPU seconds, it will get you suspended. If those same processes take two minutes, you won’t get suspended.

Since the last sentence didn’t make any sense Alligosh later clarified that he meant to say .4 CPU seconds which makes sense again.

Bluehost introduces the option to switch on FastCGI in cpanel. This is another step to make Bluehost more competitve and offer their users an ever growing arsenal of useful tools to optimise their websites. In short FastCGI accelerates the apache web server performance hence will speed up your sites. If you want more information about FastCGI you can take a look at the abstract of “FastCGI – the forgotten treasure” by Peter Simmons or if you’re really geeky even read all of it!! If you want to take a look at the other features that Bluehost offers go ahead.

This review of bluehost’s forum complements the bluehost review on my site. The bluehost forum is just a user to user forum. At the beginning when Bluehost launched this forum technical admins like the mail expert Rando would come in and provide some advice but now it’s strictly a user to user forum. Once in a while you would even see the founder Matt Heaton reply to threads but I haven’t seen him there for ages. Bluehost can afford to keep it’s admins out of the forum because they have on of the best email support I know.

In addition the forum has a friendly, open atmosphere where you can always get a quick answer from other more experienced users. A couple of users I would want to mention in particular are EarlyOut, Falcon4, Felgall, and Basil. I’ve probably forgotten to mention quite a few helpful peeps. By the way the off topic forum is slowly but surely becoming a rubbish tip for SPAM and they are not doing anything about it which is pretty annoying. Apart from that the forum is a great help.

One of the ways in which I choose the web hosts hosted on this cheap web hosting review site are the hosting provider’s very own customer support forums. Many of these hosting forums are busy member to member places where you can ask pre-sales questions and general hosting queries. There are some that are virtually dead and not worth going to. A hosting forum should be reasonably busy, have knowledgeable members willing to help and it doesn’t hurt when there’s a friendly atmosphere. You don’t to be told to RTFM (read the fucking manual) every time you ask a question.

I will review particular forums in detail in the coming weeks but for the meantime here is a list of hosts that have good web hosting forums considering all the above points: Bluehost, Hostgator, Hostmonster, Lunarpages, and Powweb.

Bluehost‘s recent upgrade was a pretty substantial increase on many fronts. Bandwidth and storage both went up by 40% and domains and ftp accounts were increased to unlimited. As a long time Bluehost customer who has been a customer of other web hosts I know that usually the plan you buy is the plan you will stay on.

At Bluehost they are very happy to retroactively upgrade your account for you when you email support. So you never get stuck with a plan at signup time, Bluehost will always upgrade it´s customers to the newer plans.

Go to Bluehost

Yesterday another member at Bluehost asked me to test their download/site speed by downloading a 15 mb .wma file from his site. The download achieved an average speed of 140 kb/s (kilo byte per second) which is quite fast. My Internet connection is a 6 Mbit DSL line so it may be slower for other users with lower bandwidth deals.

For more info on bluehost’s speed and all other features please read my bluehost review or go to bluehost directly.

Bluehost and Hostmonster are one and the same company as you can tell by their shared mailing address:

1215 N. Research Way, #Q3500
Orem, UT 84097

Both are run by the founder Matt Heaton but Bluehost is a lot bigger than Hostmonster. There has been some discussion on the Bluehost forum regarding the differences between the two. Hostmonster´s plan is about $1 cheaper a month but has pretty much the same features. Hostmonster has unlimited FTP accounts and twice the number of PostgreSQL databases and MySQL databases. In line with Bluehost´s upgrade Hostmonster now also has 300 GB storage and 3000 GB bandwidth. So what´s the difference between the two? Rumour on the Bluehost forum has it that Bluehost runs on better servers and equipment than Hostmonster. That is why some say that Bluehost hosts more sites per server than Hostmonster.

Subsequently here´s a quick overview of the features:

Bluehost:

Linux plan, 300GB storage, 3000 GB transfer, unlimited domains, 1000 FTP accounts, 50 MySQL databases, 50 Postgre SQL databases and more. For all the features and a more in depth description please take a look at my Bluehost review.

Hostmonster:

Linux plan, 300GB storage, 3000 GB transfer, unlimited domains, unlimited FTP accounts, 100 MySQL databases, 100 Postgre SQL databases and more. For all the features and a more in depth description please take a look at my Hostmonster review.

At the end of the day these two are both great hosts so it really is your call whether you go for the cheaper price at Hostmonster or believe the rumour about the better equipment at Bluehost. In any case you´ll end up with an excellent cheap hosting provider.

Bluehost recently upgraded its already pretty impressive bandwidth and storage allowances. Storage increased by 50% from 200GB to 300 GB and monthly bandwidth also went up by 50% from 2000GB to 3000GB. What´s more you can now also host unlimited domains on one account!

Read my bluehost review here!