BlueHost. We read a lot of reviews online. We looked at a lot of domain name and web hosting companies. We did our homework.
And, at the end of the day, we went with BlueHost.
Some of our friends have been asking us which web host company is the best and which blog software they should use. It’s your call, really, but we can talk about why we went with BlueHost and why we chose WordPress to be our blogging platform. Then, you can decide if it’s right for you.
This is the story of how we started with free blogger accounts and ended up paying $6.95 to BlueHost per month and running a self-hosted WordPress blog. And we couldn’t be happier.
(skip to our list of 101 reasons why we love BlueHost)
In the Beginning…
We were broke. We wanted to try running a blog, but we didn’t want to pay for anything. So we signed up for a free blogger account.
We’ve been blogging for nearly 10 months now. Our first post was on May 24, 2007 and was hosted by Blogger. We had two different blogs at the time:
We didn’t like that our website addresses ended in “blogspot.com” so we spent some cash to buy domain names for both of them.
We’re Canadian, and we wanted to support Canadian industry, so we went with a company called webserve.ca. At the time, we were paying over $20 per domain name per year and thought that Canadian .ca domain names were just more expensive than .com domains. (We’ve since found 10dollar.ca that sells .ca domain names for $10. We’ve switched over all of our Canadian domains)
We also bought a web hosting package from webserve.ca for $96.75 per year. We created a website to publish our Japanese Canadian recipes. Originally we were using DreamWeaver to make our website, but then we realized that we could publish our recipes as a blog, so we moved it over to a free blogger account.
Our Free Blogger Blogs
There are some very cool things that you can do with Blogger.
- For one thing, it was so much easier to publish our Japanese recipes as a blog than as a website from scratch. You didn’t have to edit html code unless you wanted to.
- We started to try to make money online with blogging. We put up some Google Ads and tried our hand with affiliate marketing. Heck, we even tried to get paid to blog through sponsored posts.
But it was kind’ve like painting a portrait with a fish. Sure, you could do it, and even make something cool with it, but in the end, something is still kinda fishy.
We got frustrated with blogger for many reasons:
- the free templates never looked as good as the free templates for WordPress
- Blogger was very unforgiving if you made a mistake when you edited the templates. It would simply reject your changes and tell you there was an error.
- We kept on hearing about these WordPress plug-ins that let you list the top commentators on your site, or create a 5-star rating system for each post. Cool things that blogger didn’t offer.
At the end of November 2007, we had enough with blogger and opened a free account with WordPress.com.
Our Free WordPress Blogs
I think we had a WordPress.com account for one day before we realized that you couldn’t use Google Ads with it. (You also can’t run plugins, either. What’s the point? That’s like getting bread without the jam.) You’re not allowed to use a WordPress.com hosted blog to make money through affiliate links, sponsored posts, or any ads.
But, we knew we had seen other WordPress blogs with Google Ads, so we did some research. (WordPress.com was trying to get us to sign up for their VIP Hosting if we wanted to lift the ads restrictions.)
It turns out that you can use ads on a WordPress blog if you host wordpress on your own web host.
Our First Self Hosted WordPress Blog
Here’s why you want to host WordPress on your own web server.
- You can download WordPress for free from here.
- Supposedly it takes 5 minutes to install WordPress, but I think it took us 4 hours to figure it out. Check out the instructions and you’ll see what I mean.
- Once you’ve installed the WordPress software on your website, you can do whatever you want with it, including…
- Running Google Ads
- Adding Affiliate Links to make money on commission
- Installing plugins to add extra features to your blog
At the time, we had still had our webhosting account with WebServe so we spent a few hours installing WordPress.org on our webhost.
Moving Gohanyo.ca from Blogger to WordPress was ridiculously easy with WordPress’ import function.
We loved WordPress right away - so much more control, and so many more features available through the plug-ins. But we weren’t satisfied with WebServe as a web host, so we started shopping.
Top 3 Reasons Why We Chose BlueHost
Around January 2008, we paid for a webhosting package with BlueHost. We were considering GoDaddy, but here are the 3 reasons why we chose BlueHost.
- BlueHost offers a free domain name for life when you sign up for their web hosting package. (GoDaddy wanted to charge us $1.99 per year)
- BlueHost offers free domain privacy registration. (GoDaddy wanted $6.99 per year)
- You can install WordPress on your blog with the click of a button. (Free Fantastico Deluxe installer scripts for WordPress)
So we switched from a free Blogger account to a self-hosted WordPress account on BlueHost. And we’ve been happy ever since.
A self-hosted WordPress account on BlueHost makes it ridiculously easy to manage multiple blogs, email accounts and domains. In the span of 2 months, we’ve launched a number of different online experiments.
Bottom Line: We wanted you to know that we were real bloggers just like you trying out our hand at 1) blogging, and 2) making money blogging.
You might be perfectly happy experimenting with a free blogger account or a free wordpress account. That’s great. We started there too. When you want more, here are 101 reasons why you should choose WordPress and BlueHost as your soapbox to stand from.
It took us a lot of time to research our options before finally deciding on BlueHost. Let us save you some of the legwork.
(The list is a work in progress… we’re still discovering more things that we love about BlueHost and WordPress.)
101 Reasons Why You Should Switch to WordPress and BlueHost
Why we love BlueHost
- Web Hosting with BlueHost only costs Web Hosting - $6.95/mo! (You have the option to sign up for 1 year or 2 years, but you have to pay a lump sum when you sign up for your account)
- You get a Free Domain
 forever for as long as you have an account with BlueHost. We get the domain name webdiggin.com free, and it’s ours for as long as we are with BlueHost. If you want to start a blog, just get an account with BlueHost for $6.95/mo, and they throw in your own domain name for free.
- You can switch which one of your domain names you get for free forever. Originally, we signed up with BlueHost with SnitchAndBitchCafe.com because we were so excited to get started. But later, we bought WebDiggin.com and wanted that to to be our main account (and get that name for free forever). No problem. We sent in a work ticket and now we get WebDiggin.com for free. If in a year, we start up a different website and want to close down WebDiggin.com, we just switch our main domain name and just let the WebDiggin.com expire. (We still need to pay our monthly BlueHost fees).
- You get $50 Free Yahoo Search Marketing Credits. Once you sign up for your BlueHost account, there’s a button in your control panel that will get you the coupon code for $50 Free credits at Yahoo to do some Pay Per click advertising for your site. We blogged about our experiences getting the credit. Took a few days from Yahoo’s end to give us the credit, but we got it just fine. The $50 credit is only with new search marketing accounts with Yahoo.
- You get $50 Free Google AdWords Credits. Similar to the Yahoo offer. Only applies to new accounts with Google AdWords, and you have to sign up right away or it expires. But getting $100 from Google and Yahoo pays for the expense of signing up for your BlueHost account.
- Now, you also get $75 Free MSN AdCenter Credits. Similar to the Yahoo and Google offers. You’ll have to pay $5 of your own money to activate the account, but then you’ll get $75 to spend on advertising. A few things to note: the $75 credits will expire so make sure you spend them in a month or two after you sign up, or they’ll disappear. Second thing is this offer may only be valid to US citizens. MSN Adcenter promo codes are country specific and their online system will reject your code if you have a mailing address in a different country. But, if you call their 1-800 number, you should be able to get a promo code. They have unadvertised promo credit codes for Canada and the UK, so call.
- You can purchase domain names from BlueHost for $10 per year. (.com, .net, .biz, .org, .us, .info)
- It’s easy to transfer domain names from other providers to BlueHost. You can transfer any domain name. We transfered our .ca domain names to BlueHost, even though they don’t sell .ca names. We buy them from 10dollar.ca for $10 / year. For example, we point Gohanyo.ca to our BlueHost account and now, we get a huge space to run our website, unlimited subdomains on Gohanyo.ca, unlimited email addresses with Gohanyo.ca, and all of the other feature that you get with BlueHost. Buy your webdomain name for as cheap as possible and them point them to BlueHost’s servers: ns1.bluehost.com (74.220.195.31), and ns2.bluehost.com (69.89.16.4)
- You get unlimited parked domains on 1 BlueHost Account. If you want to try making money on misspelled domain names or on niche domain names and just want to park your domain name on your search portal, BlueHost allows you to park unlimited domain names. (You’ll still have to buy them at $10 per name)
- You can host Host Unlimited Domains
 on 1 BlueHost account. Each domain costs $10/year, but once you have your BlueHost account, it means you can use it to launch as many websites as you want and they’ll each appear to be independent. For example, WebDiggin.com is our main site, but we’ve bought Gohanyo.ca, SnitchAndBitchCafe.com, RipplesofKindness.com, SocialMonkeys.com, and SocialMonkies.com and hosted them all on our account at no additional charge for webhosting.
- You can host Host Unlimited Sub-Domains on 1 BlueHost account. This means, if we don’t want to spend the cash to buy additional names, we can still set up separate websites as subdomains. For example, leadsearch.ca is the domain for one of our websites. Ink.leadsearch.ca is a separate website living on the subdomain of leadsearch.ca. Later on, if we wanted to buy a domain name to use for our coupon site, instead of ink.leadsearch.ca, we could do it easily enough.
- You get 1,500 Gigabyte of Hosting Space. We have around 10 blogs up and running and we use around 300 MB of space. (Our control panel tells us that we have used 294.91/1,536,000.00 MB)
- You get 2,500 POP/Imap Email Accounts. (Setting up an account is ridiculously easy. Plus, you can check it from your internet browser (webmail), or you can set up your email program (like Microsoft Outlook) to get your messages.
- You can create automatic forwarders to help you with your mail. We have an info@domain.com for each of our websites, but we only bothered to create one email account: info@webdiggin.com account. Then, we just created a bunch of forwarders to forward the mail from info@gohanyo.ca, info@snitchandbitchcafe.com, etc. to the info@webdiggin.com account. Easy stuff.
- We got 1,500 Gigabytes of Transfer Bandwidth, but I believe they are now offering 5,000 GIGS of Transfer (NEW!) With 10 blogs up and running, our control panel tells us we are using 571.08 MB out of 15,360,000.0 MB (1500 GB)
- You get SH (Secure Shell) and SSL. I’ll be honest. We don’t use these features yet, but it’s nice to know the option is there for future growth.
- You get FTP services. That goes without saying, I suppose, but you can use any program (CuteFTP, DreamWeaver, FrontPage) to upload your WordPress template into your BlueHost account.
- You get Stats. They offer Weblizer Stats as well as Awstats, in addition to catching your error logs, latest visitors, bandwidth, and raw-access logs. I’ll be honest with you - I turned on the stats feature, but I didn’t really like the look and feel of their stats program. I might not be using this stuff to the best of what’s offered, but I’ve just stayed with www.statcounter.com which offers free stats and pretty graphs. (They just limit your log size to the last 500 visitors)
- GI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL
- They offer 2000/2002 Front Page Extensions. Several years ago, when we designed our first website, we used front page, and it was a hassle to find a good webhost that offered this feature. (Or at least didn’t charge extra). Quite frankly, I would never go back to Front Page. We use WordPress as our platform, and we use Adobe DreamWeaver to fix and hack the WordPress templates. But you don’t even need to have DreamWeaver. You can use a free FTP program to upload your WordPress template into your BlueHost account and if you pick a good template (or use the default template), you’ll never have to change a line of code.
- Free Site Builder. We’ve never explored this option because we just click the Fantastico De Luxe button at the bottom of the Control Panel, click on WordPress installation, and we’re good to go!
- You get BlueHost Domain Privacy for free which will hide your personal information from being listed in the public WHOIS database. (Otherwise, when you register a domain name, your address and telephone number show up in the WHOIS public database)
- You can speak with a live person at 1-888-401-4678. We had to call in after we joined to verify our account details, but then after that one initial call, we’ve done everything online (like buying various domain names, transfering domains to BlueHost, etc)
- BlueHost supports a variety of platforms, including ASP, PHP, Perl, Frontpage, SSH. We only worry about PHP because that’s what you need to run WordPress, and yes, WordPress runs beautifully on BlueHost.
- They host over 490,000 domain names. They’re big, reliable, stable and safe. And lots of people use them.
 You can accept credit cards on your site. (The offer is 1.99% Discount Rate, $0.30 per transaction fee, $10 statement fee, $25 gateway free, but you get a Free shopping cart, free gateway setup, free merchant account set up, free online reporting, and no monthly minimums) We don’t use this feature yet, but again, nice to know if we ever growth in that direction.- 24/7 Superb/Responsive Sales/Support. We transfered our blogs over from Blogger to WordPress. Setting up WordPress on our BlueHost account was easy (use the Fantastico Deluxe button on the control panel). Transfering over the posts and comments and content was easy (use the Manage > Import feature in WordPress). There was a minor glitch because we would type whattheduck.ca into our browser, but when the blog loaded, it would show whattheduckworld.blogspot.com in the address line. We searched the help area, but couldn’t find the answer, so we sent in a call ticket for support. Within half a day, we received a reply with step-by-step instructions on how to fix the problem (through the phpMyAdmin section.)
- You can password protect directories at the webhost level. So, if you want to be sure that certain sections of your website are secure from casual glances or even search engine robots, this is the option for you.
- You get phpMyAdmin. We didn’t have this option with our last webserver, so we were thrilled to see it here. If you’re technically competent, this is the way to access your WordPress database.
- You also get a MySQLDatabases Wizard, RemoteMySQL, PostgreSQLDatabase Wizard, and phpPgAdmin. I don’t use these features yet, but I can appreciate that there are those who do.
- You get access to Orange Soda’s Search Engine Submit feature. They submit your website detail to 40+ search engines just by filling out “one form”. They also give you the option for Search Engine Marketing consulting services which we passed on. Still, if it works the search engine submitting process works, great.
- You get Cron jobs. Cron jobs allow you to automate certain commands or scripts on your site. Depending on your technical proficiency, you can set a command or script to run at a specific time every day, week, etc. For example, you could set a cron job to delete temporary files every week so that your disk space is not being used up by those files, or to backup your websites.
- You get mailing lists. Mailing lists can simplify sending messages to a large group of people. You can add a group of email addresses to a mailing list to avoid typing in those addresses each time a mailing is sent. Then, you just email your message to your mailing list address and everyone gets your information. We don’t use this feature because we use feedburner to manage the distribution of our blog content through RSS syndicated feeds as well as their email subscription list. But if we weren’t running a blog with a RSS feed, it’s nice to know we have this option.
- You can control redirects for any domain name that is being managed by your BlueHost account. For example, any traffic that comes into socialmonkies.com gets automatically redirected to socialmonkeys.com. You also have access to your .htaccess file, but doing it through the control panel meant we didn’t have to worry about figuring out what to type in the .htaccess file. Just point and click, baby!
- You get a tool to edit custom error pages. With this tool you can create custom error pages to display when a user enters a wrong URL, an outdated URL or when the user is not authorized to access a specific directory of your web space. Create your own 400 (bad request), 401 (Authorization required), 403 (Forbidden), 404 (Wrong Page), and 500 (Internal server error) for any of the domain names controlled by BlueHost.
- You get email security and spam filtering. Postini Email Security ensures your email is free from threats and junk mail. It blocks spam, viruses, phishing, and email threats, and provides sophisticated message management and policy enforcement. In addition, policy compliance is assured via Postini’s automated archiving, which provides a Google-like interface for email discovery and retrieval.
- You get the Agora Shopping Cart. The Agora Shopping Cart is a free shopping cart program. Support can optionally be obtained through a mailing list setup specifically for Agora Users for a small fee of $25.00 per year. We haven’t used the shopping cart because our limited exposure has been to use Amazon’s shopping cart system or to directly send traffic to our affiliate links, but again, it’s nice to know we have the option.
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Why we love WordPress
- It’s easy to install WordPress on BlueHost. From your control panel, there’s an option that says Fantastico De Luxe. Click on it and you’ll see a list of programs that you can install. click on the WordPress script, fill out the questions, and you have your blog set up instantly.
- It’s easy to upgrade WordPress on BlueHost. Simply go to the same place that you went to install WordPress the first time. Log in to your BlueHost control panel, click on Fantastico De Luxe, and when you select WordPress, you’ll see the option of upgrading all of your WordPress blogs to the latest version. Note, it takes a little bit of time for the people at Fantastico De Luxe to create the latest installer.
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