BlueHost owns a high reputation in web hosting field, but is it a good choice for hosting Joomla? To make that clear, we have reviewed BlueHost Joomla hosting in this article on its price, features, speed, uptime, technical support, and customer satisfaction.
Joomla is one of the most reputed CMS around the world, which is free, customizable and easy-to-use, owning more than 2 million users over the Internet.
Being officially recommended web host by Joomla.org, BlueHost is a leading company that has been providing reliable and affordable hosting services to individuals and small businesses since 1996. Now, BlueHost has been hosting over 200,000 websites created on Joomla platform.
Price & Discount
BlueHost, one of the best Joomla web hosts, always provides highly professional, powerful and reliable Joomla hosting at a pretty low price. Now, this company offers a considerable discount – 63% off for visitors going through this particular promotional link, with which the actual price starts from only $2.95/mo, but not the regular price of $7.99/mo.
Note that the promotional prices of BlueHost three plans – Basic, Plus, and Prime, apply to 36-month billing terms only. Therefore, if you choose a shorter 12-month or 24-month billing term, the prices will be slightly higher than what we have mentioned above.
What’s more, BlueHost offers anytime money back guarantee, which enables customers to get a full refund if they cancel their accounts within the first 30 days. After that period, the company offers a prorated refund without questions and time limits. Besides, with the support of PayPal payment, the purchase is completely easy and risk-free.
Joomla Compatibility
Joomla is written in PHP and backed by MySQL. Actually, BlueHost servers have far surpassed the minimum requirement for running Joomla as all of them are pre-installed with PHP 5.3.x/5.4.x, MySQL 5.5+, and Apache 2.2.x with mod_rewrite. In addition, PHP can run as suPHP for increased Joomla security.
In this case, you can be rest assured that the hosting environment of BlueHost is 100% compatible with the latest version of Joomla and you can focus on building your online presence with confidence.
Ease of Use
As many other web hosts do, BlueHost includes a cPanel control panel, one of the most popular control panels in the field, within each of its hosting plans by default. However, this reputable company has gone a step further to level up its usability.
With the help of its dedicated technical team, BlueHost has made much enhancement to the cPanel control panel, such as integrating it with a billing account system and CPU throttling.
As you can see from the following screen capture, this enhanced control panel comes with a clear interface and many amazing features, with which users can manage their Joomla websites, domains, and other aspects with ease.
Joomla Installation
Many people think that the installation is one of the most difficult parts of deploying a Joomla website on a shared web hosting successfully as installing Joomla is a complex task which needs to create MySQL database, configure PHP.ini for optimization and configure Joomla itself.
However, BlueHost makes Joomla installation quite easy by offering SimpleScripts – a 1-click application installer developed by BlueHost themselves to automate all the downloading, database initialization, runtime optimization, and configuration works. This tool enables people to set up Joomla 1.5 or 1.7 with the minimum effort and knowledge.
Basic Features & Freebies
Besides multiple Joomla-friendly features, an easy-to-use control panel, and so on, BlueHost also provides each user of its shared hosting plans with almost all the basic features and various free extras. In order to make it clear for you to check, we have made the following table to display some critical features of BlueHost three plans.
| Feature | Basic | Plus | Prime |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Domain | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Hosted Domain (s) | 1 | 10 | Unlimited |
| Website Space | 50GB | 150GB | Unlimited |
| Monthly Transfer | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Sub Domains | 25 | 50 | Unlimited |
| Parked Domains | 5 | 20 | Unlimited |
| Email Accounts | 5 | 100 | Unlimited |
| Promotional Price | $2.95/mo | $3.95/mo | $13.95/mo |
| How to Claim | Link Activation | Link Activation | Link Activation |
Also, with BlueHost, users are able to enjoy multiple freebies like a free domain name that is valid for 1 year, free Google AdWords voucher, free website building tools, etc. What worth mentioning is that free marketing credits are not available for the Basic plan at the present.
Speed
BlueHost has invested more than 20 million USD in its 3 dedicated data centers located in Provo, Utah. By utilizing multiple separate physical fiber lines brought directly into building through 2 diverse entrances with access to all major IP/transit providers, BlueHost provides really fast speed for customers to run their Joomla websites smoothly and stably.
Uptime
BlueHost always provides reliable hosting services. Its three state-of-the-art data centers are equipped with high-performance dual quad processor servers with multiple independent cores, UPS power, and diesel generators, which enable this company to deliver over 99.95% average uptime for Joomla websites.
Besides, one of our editors has a Joomla-based weblog hosted with BlueHost since four years ago, and he has never experienced any accidental server downtime or network interruption, which proves the strong reliability of BlueHost Joomla hosting.
Technical Support
BlueHost has been providing satisfactory technical support since it was established, which is spoken highly of by over 95% of its customers. At BlueHost, 24×7 US based customer service is available via phone, live chat, and email. All of their technical support staffs are well trained, knowledgeable, friendly and patient. Going with BlueHost, whenever customers come across technical issues, they can contact with the technical team that is sure to give a quick response and professional answers.
Besides, customers are also able to turn into the BlueHost comprehensive online knowledgebase to look through hundreds of articles and video tutorials to solve their Joomla hosting issues by themselves.
Customer Satisfaction
Up to now, we have gathered over 450 verified BlueHost reviews from real Joomla users. According to the BlueHost review statistics, 99.6% users are highly satisfied with BlueHost Joomla hosting services, including the technology, Joomla hosting price, compatibility, reliability, performance and technical support.
Conclusion – BlueHost Joomla Hosting Is Recommended
Considering the advantages in price, compatibility, speed, uptime, technical support and customer satisfaction, BlueHost is absolutely one of the best Joomla hosting services all over the world. It deserves the high reputation and recommendation. In addition, the 44% discount can really help customers save a lot of money.
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