Blue Host is another web hosting company which offers affordable web hosting for personal or professional use. It claims to offer the full functionality on a small budget. However, the website is somewhat bare of details.
This web hosting service offers at $6.95 per month, a free domain name, unlimited storage, unlimited transfer, free ecommerce capabilities through SSH, password protected directories and shopping carts, free blog, forum and bulletin board, 2,500 POP3/Secure POP3 accounts, 2,500 IMAP/Secure IMAP accounts, web mail, auto responder, email forwarding, unlimited domain hosting, a free drag and drop Site Builder, 1,000 additional FTP accounts, 50 MySql databases, 50 PostgreSQL databases, FrontPage extensions. It also has PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby on Rails scripting support. Scripts available include PHPBB Message Forum, Formmail scripts, PHPNuke and PostNuke web portals, Guestbooks, blogs from WordPress, mailing lists, polls and surveys, Image Galleries, wikis and so on. Another thing that they offer is free website submission to search engines.
The website as I have said, does not offer any detailed information. It seems they have only one plan to suit everyone. That said, it must be admitted that the plan is pretty affordable. As far as the limitations are concerned – 2,500 POP3 and 2,500 IMAP accounts, 1,000 FTP accounts, 50 databases, and so on, the fact is that very few people are going to need more than that ever.
For multimedia, they support Streaming video, streaming audio, Real audio and video support, Flash support, Macromedia Shockwave support and Midi support. You can also add your own MIME types.
On the technical side, they use servers with Quad processors, have both UPS and Diesel Generator power backup, customized Apache Web Server, 24/7 network monitoring, and site backups.
On the whole this web hosting provider offers a package that is fairly complete and at a reasonable price. This is a basic no-frills package that is adequate for most purposes, given that it offers unlimited storage and bandwidth, e-commerce capabilities, blogs, forums and bulletin boards, a wide range of email capabilities including a reasonable number of POP3 and IMAP accounts. A Site Builder makes it easy for beginners to get their site up and running fast, without having to delve into the complications of HTML. For the advanced user there is PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby on Rails support, along with Database support in the form of MySql or PostgreSQL, to let you to have a data enabled website. Of course at a minimum, knowledge of PHP and Databases is required, but the capability is there and you can get a professional to do the site design for you.
One of the best things they offer is free site promotion, in the form of search engine submission. This is very vital nowadays, as most try to find web sites through Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo. These search engines crawl through the websites on the World Wide Web, and index them according to keywords so that on subsequent searches the results are presented almost instantaneously. If your website is submitted to search engines, for indexing, you have a head start in the race to get a top position in the search results.
Price: 10
Reliability: 10
Tech Support: 10
User Experience: 10
Overall: 10
