About James Grierson
James Grierson
VP Business Development |  |
James has been with the company since June of 2007 and has managed the company's partnerships, affiliates and marketing strategies. During his time with Bluehost, the company has grown from 425k domains to over 1.6 million hosted on its platforms.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Hello James, we thank you for being with us today and we are glad to have you as our guest at findbestwebhosting.com. To get this interview started, can you please give us a brief introduction to Bluehost and its history?
Bluehost was founded by a group of hosting experts who have been managing hosting platforms since 1996. The company is a leader in the shared-hosting space and has provided a number of trend setting innovations such as offering unlimited domains, unlimited bandwidth and new hosting features such as SimpleScripts. The Bluehost brand began with just 50 new customers in its first month of business and is now growing at a rate of over 700 new clients per day making the company one of the fastest growing hosting platforms in the world.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
BlueHost was established in 1996. The web hosting industry has changed a lot in last couple of years. What would you say is the biggest difference between 1996 and the current situation?
When the hosting industry first started our founders ran a company called 50megs.com which was a free web hosting platform. Back then 50mb of hosting space was unheard of as most sites were less than 5mb. The biggest differences between now and then is the capabilities that have been added to the web and the types of applications that can be handled, viewed and accessed through the browser interface. With each new innovation comes the need for more processing power, speed and bandwidth.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
What types of hosting service does Bluehost offer? Also, please brief us on Bluehost hosting plans.
Bluehost specializes in Shared Hosting and we offer one simple plan. Currently we offer hosting accounts in 3, 6, 12, 24, and 36 month options and pricing varies from $6.95-9.95 per month. Each account provides the user with a free domain name, unlimited bandwidth and storage, and a large number of additional features. For a full list please see http://bluehost.com/tell_me_more.html.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Bluehost is in FindBestWebHosting.com's Top 10 budget hosting list and have consistently won awards and rave reviews over past years. What do you do to maintain this position?
Our goal is to offer the best service with the best customer support. Many of our awards have been due to our 24/7 US based customer support team. Our average hold times throughout the day are under 30 seconds and less than 2 minutes during peak times. Try calling a few hosting providers and see how long it takes to have a support rep on the phone and you will see why this matters. If your website is having issues, reaching someone who can help is key to ensuring your website and business are available for your users.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Do you plan to expand your business to Dedicated or VPS hosting?
Bluehost is currently building its 4th datacenter. If things stay on schedule we plan to begin offering additional services during 2010.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Bluehost offers unlimited hosting (for a shared hosting plan). What precautions do BlueHost take to ensure that this will not affect server performance?
Bluehost server configurations are proprietary and allow us to constantly monitor server performance and adjust settings on the fly. Unlike most hosting platforms in a shared environment we are not limited to a cap on performance and can readjust based on a websites needs. What this allows is for a site with a sudden spike in traffic to have additional resources allocated for a brief amount of time so the site is still accessible while not adversely impacting the other users on the shared server. More information on this new technology will be publicly available on our website in the coming months.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Web hosting is a competitive business. Why should customers opt for Bluehost? What makes Bluehost stand out from the crowd?
Superior service at a very competitive price - our customer satisfaction record speaks for itself and our renewal rates are one of the highest in the industry. If you check our daily inbound/outbound and deleted domain accounts you will see that our trend is continual growth.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Reports suggest that web hosting industry has done well in these difficult times, as far as the global economy is concerned. Is this true? What is BlueHost doing to weather the storm?
Bluehost has actually seen an increase in number of new customers during the current economic situation in the world. During hard times people search for new ways to create income and many are turning to the tech industry and starting new businesses and websites as a way to supplement their incomes.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Please brief us on your Datacenters and server reliability.
Bluehost has three datacenters in operation at this time and is currently constructing its fourth. Our networks offer redundancy in fiber lines as well as backup UPS and diesel generators to ensure our networks are up and available consistently. This allows us to guarantee an 99.9% network uptime.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
We understand you offer 24/7 support. Can you brief us more about your customer support department?
Bluehost offers 24/7 support via phone, online chat, and an online helpdesk. Our technical support team is located in the USA at our Provo, UT headquarters. All technicians are hired locally and trained for 3 weeks before taking a final exam in which they graduate and are able to begin working with our customers. Our goal is to offer high level tech support in a timely manner. As stated previously our goal is to keep customer hold times under 2 minutes and generally our average wait time for phone support is less than 30 seconds.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Linux Hosting vs Windows Hosting? What's your take? Does BlueHost plan to introduce windows hosting?
Bluehost currently supports the open source community and as such we offer Linux based hosting. The day Windows hosting becomes more stable, open and secure than Linux (and other open source options) is the day we will look into the possibilities of offering it to our clients. Since that is asking an awful lot of Microsoft, I do not see anything happening in the short term.
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