First article: I've supported a dozen domains at Bluehost for years and am generally happy. They haven't been down for more than a few hours per year, answer the phone when I need help, and offer a great deal. They are my first recommendation for most people's hosting.
Many thing I learned along the way that may be useful to others I thought I'd write up. If you sign up with them via my referral code, they pay me a commission. In return, I'll give you 30 days of a reasonable amount of email support for problems they can't help you with. I have a fair amount of experience with Joomla and some knowledge of Unix and other necessary tools, so often can help.
Does "Unlimited" really mean unlimited?
Pretty much so. I have 20 or so domains at Bluehost. There's my reporting at fastnetnews.com and related domains, several I've done for friendly non-profits and occasionally as web designer. I have about 14 gigabyte of material, much of it video done by my co-author on Web Video: Making It Great, Getting It Noticed. http://webvideobook.tv/ Our site for that book has many video examples, I get a lot of email.
However:
There is a limit on the number of files. I was once cut off by surprise. I went over 200,000 files. By default, Bluehost stored all my emails as separate files. I deleted old emails and changed the setup and haven't had that problem again. These days, they are pretty good about warning you before you hit limits like that. 200,000 files are a heck of a lot.
They are serious about enforcing the rule about using your hosting account for other storage. Years back, I didn't understand the system and put some of my music collection on my hosting account. It was very convenient for me to access the music wherever I was. They periodically sweep their servers. If you have a load of files like mp3s that aren't linked from your website it stands out like a sore thumb.
While I've never hit a limit on serving webpages or video, they effectively disallow functions that require substantial processing time such as video converters. I worked on a site that displayed video in several formats, using open source programs to do format conversion. When I spoke with them about using Bluehost, they told me it wasn't going to work because the video conversions would quickly put me over the limit on processor use.
There are a number of limits on specific services. I discovered I couldn't have more than a certain number of SQL databases and tables. Since every time I install Joomla it creates a database, after about five years of many installations I hit this limit and had to go back and clean out things I wasn't using. Any limit like this is far beyond what most people will need.
The vast majority of websites will never reach these limits.
How Reliable is Bluehost?
In my judgment, being down only a few hours a year is pretty good. Ask Joe E. Brown. "Nobody's perfect." Somewhat more often my site has seemed to slow down, presumably because of congestion. But that's been minor.
Is the Support Good?
The quality of support I believe very good for an inexpensive service. I need to call occasionally and usually am connected within minutes, 24/7. Their support staff know the system and generally can handle even some tough questions. Occasionally when it's been needed, they've spent significant time troubleshooting. This is very different from most services.
The online support system has lots of information and useful video tutorials. It's not as well organized as I would hope, but it's been getting better.
There are sensible but important limits to their support. They have dozens of applications (Wordpress, Joomla, ...) their "Simple Scripts" software can install, and they support the installation. But they do not support the applications or teach you how to make websites. Often, it's not clear whether a problem is in their system or your application. They've been generous trying to help me in ambiguous cases.
If you don't know how to do a web site, don't let anyone bs you about what it takes. Some very simple things can be done by anyone with a template, but most people want more. If you don't want to spend a fair amount of time learning and can't afford to hire someone, keep your site very simple.
How Easy is Bluehost to Use?
Much easier than most of their competitors, in my experience. (I've managed a dedicated server at Rackspace and worked with shared hosts at GoDaddy, Network Solutions, XO, and several others.) Their "Control Panel," with about 100 functions, is more than enough for 98% of what most websites will require. You have a file manager so you don't need to FTP, for example.
More to come.
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