Jul 3rd by Neil under Reviews, Web Design
Tags: Best Hosting Provider, Host, Hosting, Reviews, Website Host
So who is the better host, Bluehost, Justhost or Fasthosts? The Path Hosting has been launched and is better than all three sign up for just £1pm here.
Well I have experience with all 3 which is why Im comparing and reviewing them.
Im going to rate and review them on 4 main areas: Cost, Customer Support, Ease of Use and What You Get For The Money.
Cost:
Bluehost: Well the home page says $6.95 per month (Special deal of $3.95 on date of writing this post) but the helpdesk states $7.95 for a 24 month sign up and $8.95 per month for 12 month sign up. A dedicated ip can be added on for $30 per annum and a SSL security certificate can be added for $45 per annum. I would recommend adding the dedicated IP for sure and of course the SSL if you plan to host online shops or other site with data that requires protection etc.
Just Host: They are normally £4.95 ($8.13) per month but like Bluehost have a special deal on and are currently priced at £2.95 (£4.84). A dedicated ip can be added on for $19.95 per annum. Shared SSL security comes free as standard but a private SSL will cost $69.95.
Fasthosts: Also doing a deal at the moment! Packages start at £2.95 and range to £7.99 per month. Im unsure of the cost of a dedicated ip or SSL cert although the SSL comes as standard with the 2 more expensive plans.
OK so thats the costs, and overall taking into account SSL’s and dedicated IP’s Fasthosts might be edging ahead slightly with Bluehost in pursuit ahead of Just Host…….I doubt it will stay that way at the end of the review though!
Customer Support:
Well they all boast 24/7 support but only Bluehost have a live chat option allowing you to access support within minutes. Ive used it a good few times and only ever had to wait ten minutes max. They all have a support FAQ area; Bluehosts again seems to have more content and easier to find stuff, it laso has a lot of video how tos etc. You can submit support request in all three but annoyingly Just Host as a ‘Purchase Priority Support’ option which feels like they’re trying to screw you a bit! Overall Im going for Bluehost on this one, the Live Chat and and friendly service swing it!
Ease of Use:
To be honest they are all pretty easy to use. Bluehost and Justhost are almost exactly the same in the backend, both use cpanel, phpMyAdmin etc. Fasthosts dont have this and lack the control functions that can be utilised in both Bluehost and Justhost. So a tie between Bluehost and Justhost for this round.
What You Get For Your Money:
Ahhh the most important thing, value for money and getting the functionality required. So what do you get for your money with Bluehost? Well its not bad you get unlimited disk space and transfer, 999 subdomains, 999 addon domains and 999 parked domains; most people probably wouldnt even get close to reaching that many domains anyway. The only thing that worries me slightly is you can only have 100 databases, now I know that seems like a massive amount and that you can use one database for multiple domains etc but I would just be a little happier if this was a bit higher. Apart from that eveything is very good for a standard to high end user.
Just Host have kept it simple by making everything unlimited which I have to say for me being a high end user gives me good piece of mind for the future, although for your average user the unlimited-ness is uneccessary.
Fasthosts…..well not sure if I can be bothered because they cant be really. You have to take out another hosting package for each website you want hosted! So Justhost offer you unlimited websites, Bluehost give you 999 and Fasthost give you 1 so not much value for your dough their Im afraid. Fasthosts…..you suck.
Result:
Well Justhosts unlimited everything almost swings it for me but I have to say Bluehost get my vote because they are affordable and the support is good, I like being able to chat with someone straight away at no cost to me!!
I read somewhere that Hostmonster is owned by Bluehost too so they will probably be very similar and worth a look. Please use the comment form below to tell me your experiences with hosts and tell us which one you like best! Anyone know what Go Daddy or Host Gator are like?
See the hosts here:
6 Responses to “Bluehost vs Justhost vs Fasthosts Review – Whos the top web host?”
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I was a member of bluehost and had to switch for one reason. They do not support wildcard SSL. When you have many subdomains and want to secure all of them you have no options with bluehost and they wont allow you to setup a third party wildcard SSL also. So, I had to cancel my service and the cancellation was quite easy. I could call the billing and they were more than happy to refund my money.
I switched to justhost and realized that they are not as great as bluehost. Justhost service and all is great but they just cant match bluehost. Also, their control panel is slow and I have heard complains on other forums which said their servers are generally slow and down for long periods of time but I did not see that yet. The control panel does not have as many options as bluehost. They do not have webdisk and secure webdisk options which bluehost offers. Justhost offers FTP for file transfer which is not secure. If you want to use SFTP you need to activate SSH which is $20/year. Bluehost offers this for free. The price for dedicated IP is the same for both the companies. But if you want a SSL certificate bluehost offers Comodo CA for 45$/year while justhost offers rapidssl for 65$/year. One last thing – Although Justhost claims unlimited everything, if you read the terms of Justhost they have a clause
“We reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to discontinue service to any customer with a website or other hosted data that takes up more than 10% of the server resources and/or 10% of the server’s CPU.”
http://www.justhost.com/terms-and-conditions?hidenav
I checked the same and bluehost’s terms and conditions seem more friendly
http://www.bluehost.com/cgi/info/terms.html
Although both these companies are on the top, I would say bluehost is better than justhost. I still did not see a reason for justhost to be awarded “Best of the year”.
Yes I would have to agree with you although Bluehost had its share of server problems with me too. I cant say they were slow but did go down on a number of occassions with no warning.
Overall though I would say they are a good company with descent customer service.
But I would definitely recommend some smaller companies as they offer a more personal service.
Thanks for your detailed response William.
Justhost.com now has live chat/support that has responded in under a min everytime I have used it. There support, so far, has been great. Prices seem inline with the others.
BEWARE of Bluehost if you are an UK or EU customer, they will charge you VAT but will not provide your statutory consumer rights, and cannot provide and will not provide a VAT number as they are not VAT registered, hence not permitted to charge VAT as you need to be VAT registered to do so. i have been with bluehost for years with multiple accounts but BEWARE as to their new tactics.
Actually, Bluehost is registered and have a number, check this link out
http://www.bluehost.com/cgi/info/vat_information
Here is the part you should read:
In order to fulfill our EU VAT obligations, we have opted to register for VAT under the special scheme for non-EU suppliers of electronic services, also known as the one-stop scheme, in accordance with Article 357 to 369 of the above EC Directive rather than register for VAT in each EU member state individually. Our VAT identification number is EU826015180.
Just FYI
I am now with Justhost – They are very good, no problems at all since subscribing about 18 months ago.
I have never used bluehost.
I have used Fasthosts and they are by far the worst hosting company out there, AVOID!