Just Host vs Bluehost Website Hosting Comparison

April 20th, 2009 · 3 Comments

Just Host vs BlueHost Comparing JustHost and Bluehost is no easy task, since both providers are considered some of the best website hosting opportunities online. To some extent, the two companies seem similar in their offerings. It is only when you closely analyze the niceties that you realize one company has the edge. Let’s first discuss the similarities between JustHost vs Bluehost.

JustHost refers to its basic membership plan as the “last plan you will ever need.” For $3.95 users get a free domain for life, free instant setup and no hidden fees. In addition, users can also look forward to unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk storage, unlimited email accounts, unlimited MySQL databases, and even unlimited domain hosting potential. JustPlan Premium is slightly different than the basic plan and goes for $8.95 per month, the only difference being that users get three domains for life. JustHost has a special “anytime guarantee” that says you will get refunded back the money for the unused term, minus only your purchased domains. You also get to keep your lifelong domains.

Bluehost has its work cut out for it, trying to complete with a generous JustPlan Premium deal. Bluehost matches the $3.95 basic membership of JustPlan, and also matches the unlimited hosting space, unlimited file transfer, unlimited domains and even the free domain forever deal. The only lacking feature is that instead of unlimited email accounts as with JustHost, you get 2,500 email accounts. Users can also look forward to a site promotion package, free eCommerce and cart software, free blogs and forums and some Google and Yahoo voucher coupons to help you get started in SEO/PPC.

One of the most significant factors that makes Bluehost a threat to JustHost is that the former has been established since 1996, making it a more bankable service overall than JustHost. However, whatever JustHost lacks in longevity it covers in guarantees and in generous domain privileges. JustHost has recently lowered its price from $6.95 a month to $3.95, provided that the user signs for a 24 month contract. (This provision is also active for Bluehost) However, because JustHost offers a powerful anytime money back guarantee, there is no real risk here.

Recently JustHost web hosting, a company many predicted would become a “Best of the year” contender, outranked Bluehost on Web Hosting Choice’s Best 10 Web Hosting Sites. Key issues that determined the rankings included price, score, ease of setup, domain features, disk space, bandwidth and a money back guarantee. Both of these companies have advantages, and yet both companies have had erroneous information reported. Some users seem to believe that Bluehost is expensive (edit: BlueHost Special Offer now only $3.95 / mo.).

While it’s pretty much a tie between the two web hosts as far as web hosting features goes, it seems that BlueHost’s longevity has brought them the necessary expertise that gives them an advantage over Just Host.

3 responses so far ↓

1. Response by : K. Bjarnason on Aug 30, 2009 at 5:45 am

I tried JustHost. Their setup broke completely, their live support was worthless, little more than a recommendation I contact service by email. Doing this, I got an auto-responder to the effect of “send more money to get better support.”

Tech support claimed that the setup was “perfect”, despite the fact it didn’t work. They had no clue how their system even worked, or where the error lay.

Enough was enough, I canceled. According to the site, there’s a money-back guarantee. Except that you can’t phone anyone in billing or accounts, emails to them tell you little more than “fill out this form”, and filling out the form does nothing – I filled it out at least three times, to no avail.

So, let’s see. They claim “free instant setup”, but charged a $20 setup fee, for a service they were unable to provide. They claim to have tech support, but their support is clueless. They claim to have a money-back guarantee, but no mechanism is provided which actually works to cancel the account and get the money back.

They are bottom of the barrel. I wouldn’t use them to host a picture of my pet cat, let alone rely on them for anything remotely serious.

2. Response by : William Pitt on Sep 2, 2009 at 12:32 am

I was a member of bluehost and had to switch for one reason. They do not support wildcard SSL. When you have many subdomains and want to secure all of them you have no options with bluehost and they wont allow you to setup a third party wildcard SSL also. So, I had to cancel my service and the cancellation was quite easy. I could call the billing and they were more than happy to refund my money.

I switched to justhost and realized that they are not as great as bluehost. Justhost service and all is great but they just cant match bluehost. Also, their control panel is slow and I have heard complains on other forums which said their servers are generally slow and down for long periods of time but I did not see that yet. The control panel does not have as many options as bluehost. They do not have webdisk and secure webdisk options which bluehost offers. Justhost offers FTP for file transfer which is not secure. If you want to use SFTP you need to activate SSH which is $20/year. Bluehost offers this for free. The price for dedicated IP is the same for both the companies. But if you want a SSL certificate bluehost offers Comodo CA for 45$/year while justhost offers rapidssl for 65$/year. One last thing – Although Justhost claims unlimited everything, if you read the terms of Justhost they have a clause

“We reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to discontinue service to any customer with a website or other hosted data that takes up more than 10% of the server resources and/or 10% of the server’s CPU.”

I checked the same and bluehost’s terms and conditions seem more friendly

Although both these companies are on the top, I would say bluehost is better than justhost. I still did not see a reason for justhost to be awarded “Best of the year”.

3. Response by : Paul Wagner on Nov 4, 2009 at 10:25 am

I’ve been using Bluehost for about 2 years now and I’ve had accounts on 1and1, GoDaddy, Hostgator, and others–Bluehost support is bar-none the best. Every time I call they deliver WAY over the top and over the call of duty. I’m always left with a sense that they care–and my problems are solved. As I say on my website –”Use ‘em, Love ‘em”.