My honest review on Bluehost

It’s fundamental that website has to be backup regurlarly. Although backup work are kinda redundancy work but it’s crucial to avoid accidental data losses.

Backups at Bluehost

The backups features in Bluehost allow you to download a compressed zip files of either your entire website to your local PC. The ingredient of the zip files include your website home directory, databases, email forwarders configuration, as well as email filters configuration.

Sounds pretty easy huh? Yeah sure it is. However, note that the backup process mentioned here are not done automatically. You’ll need to work it out manually and I’m going to show you how here.

Whenever you’re logged into your Bluehost cPanel, scroll down and search for the icon named Backups. Click in and it’ll bring you to the backup main page.

At the backup main page, you’ll be given two main options: To perform a full backup of your website; or to perform a partial backup. A Full Backup function will allow you to create an archive of all the files and configurations on your website; while the Partial Backup function allows you to download individual directory, MySQL database, email forwarders, or email filter settings.

PrintScreen of the full backup page:

For partial backup, all you need to do is click on the file name you wish to backup; while for full backup, you’ll need to generate the full backup files (might take a few minutes) and save it to your local PC.

Bluehost Backup Wizards

Another option for backing up websites at Bluehost is to do it with the Bluehost Backup Wizards. The wizard system is built to ease your backup work and everything can be done by just one click.

At Bluehost, using the backups feature allows you to download (to your computer) a zipped copy of either you entire site (your home directory, databases, email forwarders configuration, email filters configuration) or one of the previously mentioned parts of your site. These are not automatically scheduled backups. Automatically scheduled backups need to be enabled by the server owner / administrator.

Backup at Bluehost: Getting started

Login to your Bluehost hosting account. Scroll down and look for the ‘Backups’ icon under category ‘file’.

If you think you need complicated coding work and tedious maintenance procedure to host a website then you’re wrong. As the open-source software development flourished, various version of Content Management System (CMS ) are available free for download and usage.

What’s a CMS?

There are lots of different definition for the CMS however in our case, a CMS simple means a computer application used to create, edit, manage, and publish web content in a consistently organized fashion. Generally CMS are very user friendly thus people who’re not familiar with web programming to publish and maintaining web content easily.

What are the CMS you can get at Bluehost?

At Bluehost, there are a long list of free CMS. These CMS are ready to be installed within a few clicks with the help of Fantastico and Simple Scripts.

For instant, here’s the list you’ll get from Fantastico in Bluehost.

• Drupal
• Geeklog
• Joomla
• Mambo Open Source
• PHP-Nuke
• phpWebSite
• phpWCMS
• Post-Nuke
• Siteframe
• WordPress
• Xoops

Bluehost hosting also support other cms content management, for example moodle or pligg social bookmark script, and more.

My personal preferences on Content Management System (CMS)?

I used to work long hours on Dreamweaver and Zend to create my websites before I tried WordPress. Not that I didn’t know about all the CMS available free online nor they are not good; but I am being really picky with the CMS features.

Well then again, WordPress came into the picture and everything’s just changed.

People who knew me well should know that I’m a big fans of WordPress. WordPress is often known as a blog scripts rather than a CMS. However this is a very wrong perception because WordPress nowadays had revolved into something more than just a blog scripts. In fact, the reason I picked WordPress as my favourites is because that the folks in WP had made the scripts more powerful ever than any CMS in the market. WordPress websites are extremely user-friendly, easy to SEO, convenient to be maintained, stable, and there are tons of free addons (plugin).

ReviewBluehost.com is a website I built with purpose to review Bluehost web hosting services and their latest hosting deals/promotions.

As the website is mainly about Bluehost, it makes perfect sense to host it on Bluehost and provide real feedbacks on everything that comes in the picture.

Why keep looking at the server status?

One thing I like to do with my web hosting is to check its server status from cPanel regularly – it’s my habit to see if everything’s alright with the web host and react asap if anything smells fishy turns in. The habit had haunted me for years since I had my terrible experience with a lousy web hosting company (Network Eleven!).

(Hmmm, I wonder any webmasters out there have the same habit as mine?)

Server status reporting at ReviewBluehost.com

Anyway, with that being said, you can expect me doing the same for this website. And not only checking it, more over, I’ll be publishing the server status of ReviewBluehost.com at this wesbite for the sake of recording and for those of you who’re interested in knowing how’s Bluehost server doing.

Referring to the figure at your right, here’s how my Bluehost server doing today when I’m writing this article.

As you can see, all server functions are doing good with a healthy green light.

The server load level is moderate, CPU memory’s being used heavily with 45.4% used, disk usage on the home folder seems pretty loaded with 90% usage, and the rest of the hard disk remain around 40 – 50%.

That’s all for my report on Bluehost latest server status. I’ll be posting more on the issue whenever I have any updates, not only for my own websites, but as well as other websites that’re hosted on Bluehost.

Stay tuned!

Websites hosted at Bluehost are offered with two versions of MySQL database management services – MySQL 4 Servers and MySQL 5 Servers.

As a Bluehost customers, you’re offered with the choice between these two MySQL versions, but never both. For ReviewBluehost.com for example, the MySQL version is MySQL 5.0.45 Version.

To check the MySQL version of your account, all you need to do is login into your hosting control panel page, scroll down and look for the “MySQL version” on the right column.

Refer figure for the MySQL version at my hosting account.

What’s MySQL?

MySQL is an extremely popular “relational database management system (RDBMS)” which has more than 11 million installations according to the officials.

In fact, MySQL has become the #1 database choice for delivering web applications, where the program powers high profile web sites such as Yahoo!, Google, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia and millions of websites running on Apache servers.

MySQL is such popular mainly because of the program infrastructure implementation are highly leveraging the popular open source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python).

The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase.

Visit MySQL official website to learn more.