To find the best shared web hosting service for hosting forums, we have reviewed 100+ web hosts on the quality of their forum hosting packages, and finally granted the award to BlueHost, a leading provider that has been offering an all-in-one shared web hosting package for more than 17 years.
Building and keeping a consistently active forum has many strict requirements on the web hosting platform it resides on. High performance is the essential one, while rich web hosting features, responsive technical support, and some other aspects are also important.
BlueHost wins the award because it has done well in nearly all the things that matter. Basically, this company gives forum users the following advantages.
Cost-Effective Package with Large Discount
BlueHost prices its shared web hosting package at $6.99/mo regularly, while the company allows a 44% discount for customers signing up through this promotional link. With this special discount, the effective price of the package starts from only $3.95/mo.
To make the package even more cost-effective, BlueHost also offers customers with some additional free features and extras, including free domain name registration, $100 Google AdWords credits, $50 Facebook ads credits and $50 Twitter ads credits.
BlueHost Promotional Link Activation
Easy Forum Creation
There are several ways available at BlueHost that can be used to set up a forum easily and quickly, among which SimpleScripts is the simplest tool to get a forum online. Developed by BlueHost, SimpleScripts is a 1-click installer that can automate the installation of most popular forum software including vBulletin, SMF (Simple Machines Forum), bbPress, phpBB, and more. With this tool, webmasters can build their own forums in minutes. No technical skills are required.
Besides SimpleScripts, there is another tool for people to get a powerful forum in no time – the Weebly website builder. This drag and drop site builder is quite easy-to-use, requiring no knowledge on HTML or CSS but several clicks. In addition, it comes with professionally designed templates that can be directly used on the newly built forum.
User-Friendly Control Panel
The control panel adopted by BlueHost is cPanel, the most popular control panel offered by nearly all the leading web hosts. With rich features, cPanel allows webmasters to pay close attention to the consumption of their allotted server resources, website statistics, and security status.
Within the graphic user interface, forum owners can also manage the website files, installed software, emails, add parked/add-on domains, configure databases, or even handle advanced features like error pages, SSH and the DNS.
99.97% Real Uptime
Almost all web hosts guarantee 99.9% uptime for the websites hosted on their shared web hosting platform, but only a few of them can really keep an uptime record as good as that. BlueHost is exactly one of them. Backed by the high quality dual quad servers and first-rate data centers with UPS power, BlueHost delivers an average of 99.97% uptime in the past half a year, as we monitored.
Fast Speed
BlueHost nationwide fiber network ensures fast speed for all the locations around the country, and the multiple 10 gigabit Ethernet connections deliver high performance to websites all over the world. Besides, BlueHost has arranged a team of engineers to monitor the network to prevent network issues from influencing the hosted websites.
We have monitored BlueHost server response speed for a long time. The results of the past 30 days are as the following chart.
Award-Winning Technical Support
BlueHost support team is among the most professional ones we have reviewed. Being 100% US based, the team consists of web hosting experts with over 5 years experience and can be reached 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via phone, live chat and email.
Besides the specific knowledge on web hosting and open source projects, the professionalism of BlueHost support service is also proved by the time for responding to requests and resolving technical issues. We have personally made calls, sent emails and chatted with support representatives, and we usually got a response in 30 seconds for phone and live chat, and 35 minutes for emails.
Anytime Money Back Guarantee
BlueHost offers a guarantee of 30 days full money back, so that forum users are entitled to ask for a full refund for the cancellation of accounts in the first 30 days of their terms. After that period, they can also get a prorated refund for the remainder of the terms. This is a good guarantee for the service quality of the company.
Conclusion
BlueHost all-in-one shared web hosting package is indeed a good option for hosting small to medium sized forums. When a forum outgrows the server resource limitations, the owner can also easy upgrade the hosting package to VPS hosting or even dedicated server hosting.