BlueHost cPanel Review

I’ve been thinking about trying a new web hosting service for months because I want to get rid of my reseller account, but buying web hosting is a lot like buying underwear – you know you need them, but the choices available make the process so overwhelming. So today I finally pulled out my wallet (October 7, 2011) and was so blown over what I saw when I logged into my account that I had to blog about it.

Why Pick Blue Host?

First off, these are my top reasons for picking BlueHost, but not necessarily in this order.

cPanel Control Panel – I’ve tried hosting with other control panels, but cPanel is the best for my needs. I’m more of a geek than the average website owner, so I like all the bells and whistles like domain level email filters, IP blocking, awesome website stats, CRON jobs and more. Everything is logically categorized and I’ll give you screen prints of each section below.
A+ Better Business Bureau Rating – The top web hosting companies all have the same features like unlimited hosting space, data transfer, email accounts, databases, etc. and their pricing is fairly similar. That’s probably why it’s so hard to choose one company. When all else fails, I look at the company’s Better Business Rating because if there are problems, believe me, the BBB’s gonna hear about it. BH has been in business since 1996 and that’s plenty of time to establish a proven track record.
High Inode Allowance - Even when a web hosting provider advertises unlimited hosting space, most of them restrict the number of files that can be hosted on a single account. They’re not all too terribly strict about it unless you’re hogging server resources, but it will exclude your site from courtesy backups. My SuperGreen account allows only 50,000 inodes. BH allows 200,000. Click here to read more about inode limits.

Blue Host cPanel Review

Drumroll please…here’s the reason I’m writing this review. cPanel is pretty much the same thing from host to host. It’s logically arranged into category groups. Sometimes hosting companies also have another account control panel which is different from the cPanel web hosting control panel and it confuses the user because it’s accessed from a different link and they can’t figure out “How do I get to my website stuff?” BH got it right. I love the way they integrate the account management with cPanel.

Here’s a shot of how crazy simple they combined the two different control panels, yet kept them out of each other’s way – they did it with tabs. All the account management stuff is accessed by clicking on the appropriate tab at the top.

The cPanel menu sections are collapsible and moveable. Note in this image that I’ve collapse several of the menu items that I don’t use. To see their contents, all I have to do is click on the little arrow in the right corner of the gray bar. To move your most used sections to the top of the page, simply click and hold the mouse on the gray bar then drag and release it to your preferred spot on the page.

Let’s take a look at each cPanel category.

Domains

Doing Addon Domains and Parked Domains in this version of cPanel is a little different than on my other web hosting accounts in that it requires a level of security the other hosting companies don’t enforce. To insure that you are the owner of the domain names being added to your account, you’ll be asked to verify your ownership via 1 of 3 tasks you’ll need to perform.

Mail

I like that cPanel gives you both overall account and user level filtering. That way you can set up filters only on specific domain names or filters on the account level that will apply to all domain names on the account.

Logs

I LOVE Awstats. You’ll get tons of information about your website statistics, including the keywords people are using to find your sites in the search engines. Also, CPU Throttling will tell you if your site is being throttled due to excessive core useage like a script that’s using too many server resources and that’s better than not knowing at all. It can help you identify problems.

Databases

Here’s a bonus for you web-based application programmers. You get both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Files

If you purchased the Pro strength daily backups option with your BH account, you’ll find it in Site Backup & Restore. I absolutely paid for it. I’ve had sites go haywire both from my own experimenting and through no fault of my own. I’m not going to get caught with an old backup ever again. File Count will show you the number of files you have on your account. No other web hosting account I’ve ever had gives you this. BH has a 200,000 inode limit. Inodes are simply all the files on your account. The File Count utility allows you to monitor your count.

Security

Gotta love the IP deny manager. Great for blocking abusive users from your forums or blogs.

Software/Services

I’m SUPER excited to finally test out SimpleScipts. For those of you that have already been using cPanel, you know it comes with the Fantastico Deluxe 1-click script installer, a super easy way to install cool software on your webiste without having to upload and configure scripts. Well, BH has SimpleScripts instead of Fantastico and that means more cool stuff! I just installed WordPress for that site I’m transferring and I was blown away to see that I can chose which version of WordPress I want to install. Being a former programmer myself, I can plainly see how that would be necessary for developers.

Oh, and the other day someone asked if there was a drag-n-drop sitebuilder they could use on their hosting account. I never heard of such a thing unless you bought some online site building service like Wix or Homestead. Well, guess what? BH has a drag-n-drop website builder right here in this software section called Zazavi. Just click to install it and then start building.

Search Engine Optimization Tools

Ever wonder what Google thinks of your website? Get your Google Score Card. Also, get your business listed in Google Maps.

Advanced

Here’s where you can schedule CRON jobs. For example, if you’re running WordPress you may eventually come across a plugin that needs to have an automatic job setup to run in the background at a scheduled time. If you’re using Microsoft FrontPage or ExpressionWeb to build your websites, you’ll need to enable the FrontPage Extensions in here. Index Manager is sweet. Ever go to a website and there was no site built, but it displayed a list of files on the domain? You can turn that behavior off in here. You can also create customer Error pages.