Although they are not based in San Diego, we feel Bluehost is a legitimate enough company to make our top ten. Bluehost offers state of the art hosting with an expansive control panel (modified Cpanel). They include website building options, to help you establish your website. They don’t try to make any big differences between themselves and other hosts (one plan for all solution) and offer unlimited transfer and space.

Location

Based in San Diego? No. Although they are not based in San Diego or even close by (located in Provo, Utah) we felt Bluehost is a good company and one that should be reviewed.

Reliability

Bluehost doesn’t promote any type of uptime guarantee but they have a reported 99.84% uptime at the time of the last noted test. As for backups, they don’t offer any free backups like other hosts but do provide a Pro Package service which you can purchase.

Bluehost’s network services are monitored. If an outage occurs, engineers will fix the problem shortly. Overall, the servers seem very reliable.

Money Back Guarantee

Bluehost says they will return your money at anytime if you don’t like the service. However if you cancel after 30 days you’ll get a pro-rated refund. This means you’ll get back money for the unused time. If you cancel prior to 30 days you’ll get a refund minus the setup and domain name fees.

Ease of Use

On the front end of things the Bluehost control panel gives you quite a bit of functionality. In addition to the common cPanel functions, Bluehost provides options to easily purchase and manage upgrades and domain names. They have put a bit of work into their control panel to make it user friendly.

Technical Support

This is one of the areas where Bluehost has some differentiation. Phone, chat, and ticketing support are available. The response is good with our tests providing a bit under 3 minutes for an answer to our phone call, a 2 minute wait for chat, and a little bit longer for ticketing response. Overall good response times in our assessments.

Conclusion

At the rates and service level Bluehost offers we felt compelled to include them on our top ten list even though they aren’t based in San Diego. There are some glitches with the service (some of those incorporating 3rd party providers) which we could do without. The support is good so that can offset some of the frustration you may experience with an issue you encounter. They are a national brand and one that you won’t necessarily go wrong with.