4 years with Bluehost, and I am very happy with their service.
I have 6 sites on the one hosting plan, and get about 50,000+ hits per month.
In my opinion, an excellent budget priced host.
Since joining Bluehost about 1 year ago, it's disappointing to say that Bluehost has gone from excellent to just average. My site is slower than before with occasional down time. My site has not seen a drastic increase in traffic so it's not the problem with increased visitors to my site. I have submitted a few tickets ever since the problem arise. They replied that they were having some problems with their network and were fixing it. But as expected, no signs of improvement. Unless they seriously start doing something I think I will be looking elsewhere.
generally they are good. except that server is a bit slow at times. i've experienced downtime on my email, but websites just work fine. i submitted ticket, but they didn't know what was the problem too because webmail was working fine after testing. however, 1 day later, it just went back to normal. i'm not sure if bluehost did something to it, but still, they resolved it. so i'm fine with it. service is responsive. fast in reply.
I've had great luck with bluehost. You do get what you pay for in some respects, but I've been able to run a 3000+ visitors/month website using drupal. Drupal is pretty heavyweight, and performance is decent. I'm just about at the point where I'll need to move to a VPS, but it would have been wasted money in the beginning.
Works perfectly well, and enough activity in their forums that you can usually find out how someone else solved a problem.
Bluehost has been pretty solid for me. The loading time is fast and the cpanel is definitely way more sophisticated than most hosts. The only question is, when will they hit that point where it is tough to be profitable and the server loading times magically begin to slow. I have had this happen to many of the cheap hosting packages before.
When I signed up for Bluehost last year I had not built any website since about '96 when my local dial-up BBS gave us a place online to store our HTML files. I love how simple Bluehost has made it to set up CMS, it is just enough of a hand up to where I could have something I could tweak and learn more about PHP and CSS.
I had to disable some sluggish addons when my site went to the front page of Digg, but even if Bluehost shuts down your site from overuse they'll give you five minute windows to re-optimize before trying to bring it back up. I managed to find the offending file from the logs, turn off the mod, and the site ran the rest of the day minus the five minute warning period.
Kind of awesome for a few bucks a month, but I'm usually not using too much traffic and definitely not anything that's too resource-intensive.
In 2 yrs. I have had 2 problems with add on domains not propagating properly. A simple phone call to support and within minutes the sites were up and running.
I have a couple of sites which load faster on other servers, but they cost well over 10 times the price in hosting fees per month. .. you typically get what you pay for.
Short story. For the price, I would recommend Bluehost without any hesitation.
