There are a lot of crappy sites out there recommending hosting companies. I run a digital media company, operate a lot of websites, and work with a lot of hosting companies. For the vast majority of small businesses, I honestly believe the best choice you can make for your web hosting is BLUEHOST.
The rest of this short letter is a review of Bluehost that lays out some of the reasons I think Bluehost offers the best web hosting for small businesses. If you are curious, you can also read more about who I am at the bottom (below the signature).
First, though, an important disclaimer: the links to Bluehost on this page are affiliate links. If you click them and ultimately purchase a hosting package from, we will receive a commission. You won’t pay anything extra – it’s just a payment from Bluehost. But if you want to skip paying the commission, you can always open a new browser tab and just type www.bluehost.com.
I set this page up partly as a small extra revenue stream for our business. But it’s also intended to genuinely help you make a wise choice for hosting. We can recommend any hosting company we want to here. We have affiliate relationships with all of the major hosting companies, and all will pay us a commission for referrals. Many will pay more the Bluehost. The bottom line is:
We believe that the vast majority of small businesses
will be best served working with Bluehost.
We or our customers have worked with all of the following: Bluehost, Dreamhost, HostGator, GoDaddy, MediaTemple, Rackspace, Hivelocity, 1 & 1, Amazon, Hostmonster, Fatcow, Powweb, Laughing Squid, iPage, Justhost, Inmostion, Site5, WebHostingHub, WebHostingPad, GreenGeeks, NetFirm, Yahoo, 123-Reg, FastHosts, Bludomain, Host Papa, IXWebhosting, Liquid Web, NetworkSolutions, and probably two dozen others. Of all these companies, the one we rely on the most, and the one we recommend to our long-term customer-clients, and the one that has consistently offered the best experience to us and to everyone we’ve sent their way is Bluehost.
I use Bluehost for my personal site: www.erickdanzer.com. This site is hosted on Bluehost. I also host at least a dozen other sites, both personal and business, with Bluehost. Out of 8,000 customers that use Photocrati’s WordPress themes, I would estimate at least one-third use Bluehost.
An exception: Our flagship site, www.photocrati.com, is hosted with Rackspace. This is because we need a great deal of power, storage, and expandability. We pay between $400 and $800 per month for hosting at Rackspace (vs $6 at Bluehost). If Bluehost offered cloud-based or dedicated servers, I would happily move.
SEVEN GOOD REASONS BLUEHOST OFFERS THE BEST WEB HOSTING FOR SMALL BUSINESS
1) They are among the cheapest. I don’t think price is the most important thing in choosing a hosting company. Service and reliability are more important. But if you can get the same reliability and service AND the lowest cost, why wouldn’t you? A typical Bluehost hosting account costs an incredible $5.95 per month. For a small business, that’s basically nothing. It never ceases to amaze me that that they can offer unlimited hosting that inexpensively, and still provide the quality of support they do. It’s a testament to their operational efficiency.
2) They have true, unlimited hosting. With that single, inexpensive account, you can add as domains and websites as you want, and use as much storage as you want. Again, amazing. One note here: you have to act within the bounds of reason. I would never try to run www.photocrati.com on a Bluehost account. If you plan to have CNN-style traffic, you should consider a Virtual Private Server or Dedicated Server.
3) They have phone-based support, and ALWAYS pick up and solve the problem. Bluehost’s phone based support is outstanding. They always answer the phone, and they always solve the problem. Many hosting companies don’t provide ANY phone based support. If you have the choice, I simply cannot understand why you’d choose a company that doesn’t offer phone support.
4) They are the #1 recommended server for any WordPress website. WordPress is the fastest growing web platform in the world. There’s a very good chance that you are building your website on WordPress (if you’re not, you should be). Bluehost is the the single most recommended and most popular hosting company for WordPress. This is because it’s hosting environment is very, very WordPress-friendly. They offer a simple, one-click install of WordPress, which is great. But equally important, their servers are configured in an optimal way to work with WordPress.
5) They have the simplest, easiest interface of any hosting company. It is always painful and frustrating to have to learn a new interface. And there are a lot of small, complicated aspects to managing a domain and hosting service. Bluehost’s interface is not fancy, but it is the SIMPLEST and easiest to use, hands down, of any hosting company out there. I’m a seasoned web guy, and even I get frustrated with the convoluted interfaces of most other hosting companies.
6) They experience remarkably little downtime. You’ll see all kinds of “down-time guarantees” among hosting companies. Despite being the cheapest, Bluehost has the best track record of any company I’ve used. Better even than our $800 dedicated server at Rackspace our our $300 Rackspace Cloud account. If Bluehost had these same kind of large scale solutions, I would move there in a heartbeat.
7) They’re one of the most popular hosting companies in the world. I don’t know the exact number, but I know they hit 1 million sites hosted sometime in 2009. I assume they now host at least 2 million websites.
THE DOWNSIDE OF BLUEHOST
You need to know what you are buying. Bluehost is a “shared” hosting solution, meaning you will share one server with hundreds of other websites. If one website on your server experiences a major burst of activity, your site may slow down. This is common to ALL shared hosting. And if you are looking at hosting solutions for $10 or less, you are looking at shared hosting solutions.
Again, if you need dedicated bandwidth and speed for an enterprise-scale business, you should consider other alternatives. After a lot of exploring, we chose Rackspace for www.photocrati.com. I don’t feel as strongly about Rackspace as I do about Bluehost.
WRAPPING IT UP
I’ve written another high-profile testimonial about Bluehost on the Photocrati blog here: The Best Web Hosting for Photographers and WordPress. I suppose I’m something of a Bluehost evangelist. Bluehost is the first hosting company I’ve ever used, and also the one I keep coming back to. There just haven’t been that many cases in which I’ve experimented with such a wide swath of market alternatives in any industry and felt that one offering so unambiguously outperformed all others on almost all conceivable metrics.
So, in sum, if you are looking for hosting, save yourself time, research, or the headaches you will experience if you go elsewhere. Go set up your account at Bluehost, get started, and spend your time on your business.
Best of luck and success,
Erick Danzer
Founder, Photocrati Media
I’m the founder of Photocrati Media. We’re one of the leading providers of WordPress themes for photographers. I’m also the founder of the Photographer’s SEO Community, and Best of Wedding Photography. You can read more about me at my personal site here: www.erickdanzer.com. Thanks.