Affordable Website Hosting with Bluehost

Professional Website Hosting, Domain Name Registration, Dedicated Hosting

As a website design company we often get asked if we offer web-hosting. The truth is I could set up a wholesale hosting account and host our client’s website, but instead I decided to simply recommend the web hosting company I personally use and I’m satisfied with.

There are literally thousands of  web hosting services available and I tried some of the better known companies, and based of my research and experience, I recommend BlueHost.

Our websites and most of our client’s websites are hosted on BlueHost and over the years working with them I can easily recommend them for the following reasons:

• Reliability: BlueHost is super reliable. It boasts an uptime average of 99.9%. That’s about as good as it gets. This simply means your website is less likely to be down when someone visits your domain.
• Support: BlueHost has an amazing 24-7 support system. You can reach them via phone, e-mail or live chat. I personally used their support team a few times and found the support staff to be professional, courteous and do their very best to solve the issues you might have.
• Easy to Use: BlueHost is shockingly easy to use. They invested time to make it simple for non-geeks.
• Has no limits. BlueHost offers unlimited disk space, unlimited domains (you can host multiple blogs, or domains on one hosting account), unlimited e-mail accounts, and unlimited bandwidth.
• It’s Affordable: BlueHost is inexpensive (compared to some other hosting services) – you will pay about $3.95 – $14.95 a month depending on which plan you select. If you are willing to commit for a longer period of time, it will be cheaper.
• WordPress Friendly: WordPress itself officially only recommends three hosting services and BlueHost is number one. BlueHost hosts over 850,000 WordPress blogs.
• Company values: In its Terms and Services BlueHost prohibits, nudity, pornography and other adult content. It enforces this standard and deletes sites that violate their terms. For me personally this was as important as all the above. I don’t want my websites hosted on the same server as some pornographer. If this is something important to you, you might be surprised to know that almost all of the most popular hosting services allow pornography on their servers.

I want to be really transparent and make it clear that I am a BlueHost affiliate, which means the company pays me commission every time someone signs up via one of my links. However, this didn’t influence my recommendations, because all hosting services offer similar programs and I could of choose to be affiliate with any of them, yet for the above mentioned reasons and because I sincerely believe they offer the best hosting available I recommend BlueHost only.

Here are the steps how to set up your BlueHost account for your website or blog hosting.

If you decide to take my recommendations and use BlueHost to host your website or blog, then simply follow the next steps to sign up.

Go to the BlueHost home page and click on the green Get Strated Now button.

 

From there you will have different package options to choose from. My suggestions is to go with the Go-PRO package. It has everything you need to help your website rank better in search. Because SEO is important for you, this package has all the features you will need. (My commission doesn’t change based on the package you purchase. It’s a fixed one time commission.)

 

 

Now you need to decide whether you already have a domain name or you need a domain name.

1. If you haven’t previously registered a domain, using some other domain registration service (like GoDaddy for example), then now simply enter your domain name in the box, choose the appropriate extension (com, net, org, ca, biz) and click on the Next button.

 

Note: If your home address and your billing address are the same I would suggest to choose the “Domain WhoIs Privacy” too, but otherwise I would not sign up for any other services listed on this screen.

Now all you have to do is enter your billing information. Confirm that you have read and agree with BlueHost’s Terms of Service, and then click on the Next button. The system will now verify your credit card or PayPal information.

BlueHost will next ask you to “Select the Upgrades that Best Suit Your Needs.” I would skip all of these. Click the Complete button at the bottom of the page.

Now you need to choose a password for your account. Click on the Create your password link:

 

Enter a password and an optional PIN number. (Make sure you write these down somewhere.) Click the Submit button. Then you will be asked to login to your domain. Use the password you just selected and click on Login.

Now BlueHost will take you through “Getting Started.” It will ask you a few questions. This is really just a customer survey. Answer the questions and then click on Submit.

1. If you have previously registered your domain name on another service then the first thing you will need to do is to point your domain name to the BlueHost servers. This will vary depending on where you registered it.

BlueHost describes the process here.

Log into your Registrar (the company from whom you bought your domain) account where your domain is currently registered and look for the “Domain Details” page. Somewhere there (every hosting server is different) you should see a section called “Nameservers”:

Click on Set Nameservers and you will see two different options

• Enter ns1.bluehost.com in the field for Nameserver 1.
• Enter ns2.bluehost.com in the field for Nameserver 2.

Click OK. That’s it. Now log out. It typically takes 24–48 hours for these changes to take effect. You might get lucky, and it will start working in an hour or two.

Please note: BlueHost or your Registrar (the company from whom you bought your domain) may change their procedures from time to time. If you have any problems, please check with them. I do not provide technical support for this process.

After you click Sign Up Now on BlueHost home page, you will need to enter your domain name in the box that says, “I Have a Domain Name.”

Now click the Next button. Everything else should be the same as described above. If you get stuck, you may need to wait for the change in your Nameservers to take effect before proceeding. Be patient.