Updated: January 2019
This Bluehost Review has been a long-time coming. I’ve wanted to write this for a very long-time and I thought I would take this opportunity to write it here on our own Index Nuke Blog.
Firstly, let me tell you a little bit about myself before I give you my review about Bluehost because it is a very personal story.
I’d always had a vision of working for myself and after picking myself up after a huge ego-blow I started to dabble with Affiliate Marketing.
Naive beginnings…
My name is Paddy and I first found myself neck-deep in Affiliate Marketing around 2007 after being made redundant as an IT consultant. I’d always had a vision of working for myself and after picking myself up after a huge ego-blow I started to dabble with Affiliate Marketing. Believe it or not, it was around this time when ‘Gurus’ such as ‘The Rich Kid’ and Joel Comm were spewing books out left, right and centre about Adsense and eBay and I wanted some of that. I thought this ride was going to be easy and I would be a millionaire by the time I was 30. Well, clearly that did not happen and another big ego-blow was about to hit me. I’d tried everything from creating Blogger Blogs for dog products, spamming forums with affiliate links to creating crappy eBooks. You name it I tried it. You see, my problem was that I never stuck at anything and always moved onto different projects before I finished the last.
As my sites grew so did my need for a reliable Web Host and as I was making a little bit of money I decided it was time to upgrade my Web Hosting.
That’s when I began building real websites with real content. Something to last. But there was a problem and that was hosting. I have so many horror stories about Web Hosting that I could fill several books. Literally. You see, at the time I was on a budget and choosing a free web host seemed like a good idea. Yes that’s right I chose 000Webhost. Boy was that a BAD idea. Not only did I lose several websites due to hacking I also spent most of my time sending support tickets when my sites would not load. Oh yeah, did I mention that they used to add a sneaky footer link to your website?
They literally injected the code right into your HTML or PHP code. Sneaky little…
As my sites grew so did my need for a reliable Web Host and as I was making a little bit of money I decided it was time to upgrade my Web Hosting. That’s when I found Hostgator. Now don’t get me wrong, Hostgator hosting is OK but I did get my sites hacked a few times and I do believe this was a Shared Hosting hack and not a vulnerability on my sites. This was back in 2007 / 2008 when WordPress was still new and my sites were built from pure HTML or PHP. It was also around this time when I started to dabble with building automated Websites that would literally take a seed Keyword and spew out 1000’s of related pages. Of course this was when I got my hosting account banned for using too many server resources. Did I have a backup? Nope!
The future is bright…
Moving on several more years and as my portfolio of websites grew so did my need for reliable hosting. I first came across Bluehost several years ago and it was about the same time I started t build my first PBN network. I needed good reliable hosting that I would give me extra IP addresses. Anyone in the SEO field will understand why this is a must. At the time I don’t believe Bluehost offered a VPS as this was quite a while ago so I purchased their shared hosting plan each with a separate IP address. As their hosting was so cheap I managed to build a small 10 site PBN purely using Bluehost’s shared hosting.
Moving forward another year or so the requirement to build bigger PBN networks grew along with the need for additional hosting for my ever expanding portfolio of sites. Having shared hosting did not make sense any-more mainly due to the fact that some of my sites were huge and had a lot of traffic. I also didn’t like to have to manage separate shared hosting accounts all the time. It became a nightmare and decided I needed a VPS. Luckily Bluehost began to offer really cheap VPS deals and I snapped them up. It took about a day to migrate all my sites from Shared Hosting to my VPS server and now everything was nicely managed via WHM.
Index Nuke was born…
Around 2014 I had around 8 years Internet Marketing / SEO experience. I’d come from a programming / IT background so everything I had built up to that point was by me. I had pretty much automated most of my daily SEO tasks using PHP scripts and other delightful little programs. It was also also around this time when automation was the name of the game as far as SEO was concerned and anything that could be automated pretty much was. Building backlinks on mass with tools such as GSA SER and SEnuke was pretty common. Getting these backlinks indexed were another challenge. Now I pretty much signed up to all the Backlink Indexing services at the time but got pretty mediocre results to say the least. As a programmer I thought I could do better and created my own personal Backlink indexer all built using PHP. These indexing routines would literally attempt to Brute Force the backlinks and perform lots of routines to ensure they would get indexed.
Disaster hit…
Now this is where my personal story with Bluehost came in. As I mentioned earlier, at this point I owned several VPS’s and shared hosting accounts with various providers (also with Bluehost). As my main portfolio of sites were hosted on a VPS I didn’t want my indexing scripts to effect their performance and as the quantity of links I was trying to index at the time were small I decided to use several Shared Hosting accounts spread over several providers. I think I must have been having a bad day but somehow (and I still don’t know how I did it) I managed to delete all my PHP scripts for my personal Backlink Indexer that took me around two months to build.
After a quick call to Bluehost they managed to restore my files from a backup tape
You would have thought that I had learned my lessons with regards to backups but sadly I hadn’t. I must have spent hours searching all my disks for backups but the ones I had were from the very beginning of the project. I had removed the files to an external USB stick months prior which was then accidental thrown away. I never go around to downloading them again for safe keeping because hey, nothings going to happen right?
After a quick call to Bluehost they managed to restore my files from a backup tape. At the time this wasn’t normal for them to do but I think they felt the anguish and stress in my voice. Bluehost saved my ass and I am forever gratefull. Index Nuke probably would not have happened if they hadn’t managed to restore my files. Thankfully site backups come pretty much as standard with them now and you have full control of them yourself.
New beginnings…
Index Nuke was officially released at the end of 2015. No-longer was it a personal collection of privately owned PHP scripts but a fully-fledged Software / Cloud product. But this came at a price as Index Nuke was now going to be used daily with many users using the software & Cloud. I needed many servers not just one.
Not only did Bluehost save my ass several years ago they have really proved themselves as a competent reliable Web-host many times over.
Thankfully Bluehost came to the rescue again and offered me a really good deal on 20 VPS servers which we still use today alongside Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. We have a total of 28 servers currently processing the links of our Index Nuke customers and that does not include the servers used for our Index Nuke private PBN network. Although Amazon AWS & Microsoft Azure give me more flexibility to fire-up additional servers in minutes if the load on our system reaches a threshold, the side-by-side costs Vs specification is much better with Bluehost.
This is why I recommend Bluehost
Not only did Bluehost save my ass several years ago they have really proved themselves as a competent reliable Web-host many times over. I must have used 20-30 providers over the years but Bluehost has been the consistent variable at every step in my journey. If I could give one tip though, go for a VPS. I think their current price for an entry level server is $14.99 for 2GB RAM with 2 CPU cores. You can also purchase additional IP’s to add to your VPS. If you have more than one site, a site with high-traffic or building a PBN then a Bluehost VPS is a must rather than using shared hosting. It makes everything so much easier.
Here are the pros and cons of Bluehost at a glance: –
Pros:
- Very good support. Fast response times
- Good solid Shared Hosting. Low contention
- VPS Servers very fast. Comes with WHM
- Latest cPanel
- Reliable up-time. 99.9% as of 21st March 2017
- Excellent value for money
- Up and running very quickly after payment
Cons:
- Not a scalable solution if you need lots of servers fast like Azure / AWS
Bluehost VPS Deals
(Navigate to ‘VPS Hosting’ on main menu):
Bluehost Shared Hosting Deals:
Click here to view latest Bluehost prices.
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