When we started Poe in Wonderland a couple of years ago, we knew we had to select the easiest, quality services we could find to make the writing process as smooth as possible. One clear and simple choice was Bluehost to be our webhosting service. They have 24 hours/7 days a week customer support which can be a literal lifesaver for a blog. I write late at night and you never know when you need a question answered right-that-minute.
We use the $3.95/month basic plan and have opted to use key add-ons as we build our site. We can personally attest to how well they've worked. Bluehost builds its brand on making your experience as seamless as possible. The first step is to choose your domain name.
Bluehost will guide you through the entire process. As mentioned above, we chose the basic plan but as we went on we added key add-ons we felt we're needed.
Domain Privacy + Protection
Adding Domain Privacy + Protection will mask personal information from the WHOIS database, which is publicly visible to anyone on the internet. Customers can easily protect their personal contact information from marketers, spammers, and unwanted solicitation by adding Domain Privacy + Protection.
CodeGuard Basic – Poe in Wonderland uses the Pro version since we wanted 5 GB of storage for backup.
CodeGuard is essentially a time machine for customers' websites. CodeGuard monitors their website every day and takes daily backups of the site, saving them as a separate version. Those backup copies are then stored across multiple secure locations.
This add-on is the ultimate insurance—if disaster strikes, customers can easily revert back to a previous version of the website with a single click of a button!
SiteLock Security – Essential
Bluehost has partnered with SiteLock to provide customers with automated malware detection and removal services designed for peace of mind. Customers can select the level of protection they need for their website and the frequency of malware scans directly from their dashboard, and receive weekly reports on the performance of their security scans.
Bluehost goes a step further by also providing customers with an industry-leading CDN/WAF that not only improves site load times but also intercepts incoming traffic to prevent DDoS attacks or stop hackers from injecting malicious code that might expose sensitive information.
We highly recommend promoting these add-ons in your Bluehost content. Add-ons can help reduce customer churn and increase your chances of a sale (if a customer cancels within 30-days, your referral is lost).
Our absolute FAVORITE service Bluehost offers is Blue Sky Pro. We wandered in the desert for months trying to figure out WordPress quirks and coding. Watched Youtube videos and asked friends – who incidentally did not know much about WordPress. Then, we discovered Blue Sky Pro. In a nutshell, you pay a monthly fee to call and ask any questions and their experts walk you through your problem step by step. It's not inexpensive but you can pay for a month and get a lot out of it without signing up for anything past that month. We learned 2 years' worth of knowledge in the 30 days we had it! No kidding. It was a revelation. You can talk 30 minutes per call. That is the limit, and then you hang up. The good thing is you can turn right back around and call again. I was on the phone with them for 5 1/2 hours one day working through WordPress issues I just could not figure out on my own. I use Blue Sky to help me with my themes, audit my plugins, uncover why pages might not be loading as fast as they should, and many other items. The investment I made for that one month of service was completely and utterly worth it. Cannot say enough good things about it.
We hope whatever you use works the way you need it too. We just wanted to pause a minute to share what we've found has helped us. One thing we're trying to work on is networking and getting advice from other bloggers on what they like and don't like so we can improve what we do. Share with us in the comments if you use a service you really like.
