1 BlueFish Hosting Reviews:

BlueFish Introduction

BlueFish was founded in 1997 with the core goal of improving hosting for its customers and keeping its prices as low as possible. Based out of Provo, Utah, their senior staff have on average seven years of experience, and their junior staff average over four. What this means is that they know their product, the industry, and the customers. They remain independently owned and operated.

BlueFish specializes in shared hosting only, focusing on providing individuals and businesses a simple hosting solution on a budget.

Shared hosting services

BlueFish only offers one web hosting option – shared hosting. This level of specialization means that they know their product and their niche customers better than ever, and can cater precisely to them.

Their shared hosting plan is pretty stock-standard. It comes with unlimited email accounts, storage, bandwidth, and domains for every account. They also have a couple ecommerce carts (Agora, OS Commerce, and PayPal Shopping Cart), vDeck server control, and a website builder with hundreds of templates. Plus they recommend a couple custom website design companies. They’re compatible with Microsoft Front Pages extensions if you have a legacy site or system you need to integrate, and finally, they offer a few pre-installed scripts, including:

• Form Mail
• Guestbook
• Bulletin Board
• PHP Nuke
• Chat
• Blogger
• Java Applets

BlueFish is a good hosting company for those looking to get online as inexpensively as possible. They’re perfect for a small business’s first website or a personal blog.

Datacenters

BlueFish runs out of two Tier 1 datacentres in Los Angeles and in Phoenix, AZ. They use HP ProLiant servers with at least dual Intel Xeon cores and RAID 5 storage. Their datacentres connect to both Qwest and AboveNet backbones with multiple redundant OC12s.

Support and Customer Service

BlueFish doesn’t offer much in the way of customer service or support. When you sign up, they will give you a call to get you started, and there is a toll-free phone line. However, when tried at the time of writing it was busy both times (during business hours), and the only option is to leave a message. Further, their phones are only open 8am – 6pm Mountain Time, Monday-Saturday. There is no live chat, and while they do offer email communication, there’s no timeframe placed on it. There is no ticketing system in place. Their competition generally has far better live support. They have a knowledgebase with some common questions, but there’s no search bar, making finding what you’re looking for a little challenging. They have a number of tutorials as well, but again there’s no search bar to look for what you need.

Backups

BlueFish doesn’t offer any backups for their customer’s data at all, and recommends that their customers manually back up their own websites through vDeck. In their terms of service, they explain that they are not liable for any problems or data loss due to their own error or circumstances outside their control.

Payment Policy & Money Back Guarantee

BlueFish charges every 3, 6, 12, or 24 months depending on what you choose, and only accepts payment via credit cards. They can accept wire transfers or checks, but it’s unusual and comes with some additional fees. They do offer discounted prices for their long term plans, as well as waiving the setup and domain fees.

They do offer a 30 day money back guarantee that guarantees their customers a full refund, less any setup and domain fees, if they cancel within the first 30 days. Outside that 30 day period, if a customer wants to cancel, they are refunded their money for any unused months of the contract. So if you get a 24 month plan, and after 6 months you want to cancel, you’ll be refunded 18 months. This cancellation policy excludes any setup and domain fees, as well as any additional costs that might have been accrued. Payment are due 30 days after they’re invoiced. There’s a 15 day grace period, then BlueFish can start charging late fees and interest. If customers continue to not pay their bills, BlueFish can shut down the site.

Summary / Conclusion

All in all, BlueFish is a good starting point for a new personal website or ecommerce store. With a free website builder, simple scripts, shopping carts, and other website basics, their plan is easy to understand and has enough functionality to get you started. However, their focus on shared hosting and their inability to guarantee uptime or the security of your site and data means that as soon as you’re generating more visitors or money, it’d be best to look elsewhere for a more secure host.