*DISCLAIMER: I have an affiliate account with Bluehost so while I’m being as objective as possible in this review, I acknowledge that if you follow any of my links to Bluehost on this site and subsequently sign up for their hosting package, I benefit by receiving a commission.

First let me say that so far I have really enjoyed using Bluehost, and I have set up several of my clients on Bluehost with their own hosting accounts.

At a glance, here’s some of the reasons that I like using their hosting service:

1. They are very affordable (ie cheap). With their current price holding stead at about $7 per month, Bluehost is very affordable.

2. Bluehost offers unlimited monthly storage and bandwidth, so you don’t have to worry about paying extra for getting too much traffic on your site, or having too much content.

3. Reliable uptime. Their average downtime for server maintenance, etc. for 2010 so far has been right around 99.9% uptime, with three months so far this year actually having 100% uptime.

4. Personal telephone tech support, 24/7 (with native English speaking reps, no less!!). This is a huge benefit to me. Knowing that I have the option to call and speak with somebody who will understand my issue and help me find a solution makes me feel very confident as a web developer.

5. Access to other help resources (in addition to phone support) like step by step online tutorials. Bluehost provides a fairly extensive set of video tutorials for accomplishing several advanced web mastering functions that you may need to accomplish on your site. In fact, just about two weeks ago I used their tutorial to walk me through setting up Google Apps on my site, and configuring the Bluehost mail server for my domain to use Gmail.

6. Simple Scripts. Bluehost offers this really incredible feature called Simple Scripts, which is more or less a “one click” installation service for many popular web scripts you might want to run on your server, like WordPress, ModX, Magneto, ZenCart, Ruby on Rails, bbPress, phpBB, BudyPress, Joomla, Drupal, QuickBooks, LimeSurvey, PHPList, ZenPhoto, Gallery, BaseCamp, WebCalendar and dozens more. Simple Scripts also manages your version upgrades, so once it’s time to move from WordPress 2.9 to WordPress 3.0, for example, Simple Scripts will notify you and then manage the upgrade! (Actually I just used it for that purpose yesterday to upgrade this very blog from WP 2.9 to 3.0 without a hitch.)

7. Many other features, including: an easy to use control panel (a.k.a. “c-panel”); easy subdomain management; email account management; web based directory browsing and code editing; affiliate accounts.

There have honestly only been a few cons to the service that I’ve experienced, but nonetheless some things to consider:

1. While you can always call their tech support line and get a helpful rep, I’ve noticed that most reps have a default reliance on pointing the customer to the online tutorials back at the Bluehost website. Usually the first thing they want to do when you describe your issue is send you back to watch a tutorial and resolve the issue on your own. While often that is still a sufficient solution, and many times I’ve been happy to resolve the my own issue that way after a rep showed me where to find the tutorial, sometimes you are going to want a little bit more hands on support. The reps will give it to you, but you sort of have to prod them to do that. I would suggest if you are less tech savvy, you might want to insist that they help by walking you through your solution personally.

2. Accounts are only intended to administer one domain, and one site (ie Bluehost does not currently offer a “developer” or “reseller” hosting plan). While technically you can manage multiple domains on your account, they are treated as add on domains and must be pointed to a subdirectory (or the main directory) in your main hosting account. The control panel is set up to only administer one primary domain. So their hosting package is not really suitable to add your clients to and resell hosting to them. Instead I have simply set up my clients with their own Bluehost plans, and set myself as the administrator to that account.

3. The C-panel has excessive promotional offers always featured at the top, like a $50 free Google Adwords credit, etc., which I just find annoying and worthless. While you can hide them each session when you login, I have not found a way to remove them permanently.

Despite some of the cons I’ve encountered, my expereince with Bluehost has been overwhelminly positive. I would recommend Bluehost to the average consumer and even to many developers. Since Bluehost at this time still does not offer a reseller plan, they may not be a good fit for developers who require greater multi-domain support. But for what most consumers and front end web designers or developers need in a webhost, Bluehost is an excellent choice. You should sign up today here.

I would like to see Dreamweaver become more of a code editor than trying to be a WYSWYG editor, and I think there are good reasons for this. Right now I’m a professional web & graphic designer (employed for in-house work, and doing freelance on the side). I was self employed for a couple years which I when I picked up web design/development out of recognizing the business opportunity for design work in the web. My story is likely one of hundreds that are very similar to it.

I had done graphic design as freelance/self-employment for almost 5 years, but never got into any code. Nevertheless, I had a strong desire because of the business and creative opportunity, so I picked up a great book (“Learning Web Design” by Jennifer Robbins) and learned HTML, followed by CSS. These skills have payed off dramatically in both business opportunity and creative fulfillment. (For me there is just some strange creative fulfillment about being able to work with code to build my design.)

Dreamweaver had certainly contributed to my learning curve, by providing a tool that I could use to learn markup, even when I didn’t know all the elements. Features such as auto-complete and the add styles dialogue box were invaluable to me in my early days of web development. If I didn’t know how to write a style rule, rather than having to look it up, I was able to simply open up that dialogue box. If I couldn’t remember the proper HTML tag, I just had to type the first letter and auto complete came to the rescue, while helping me learn.

Fast forward a year or so, after working with code almost on a daily basis – Dreamweaver is no longer my tool of choice. Notepad++ is on my Windows PC at my employer, and Espresso on my Mac at home. But why did I leave Dreamweaver? I’m interested in that answer too – especially with the upcoming prospect of either purchasing an upgrade to Adobe Design Premium CS5, or maybe just Design Standard CS5.

The main reason I don’t use Dreamweaver today, is that it’s just too bulky for what I need. Now that I’m past the learning stages of web development, WYSWYG features in a web design product are absolutely useless to me. In fact, even the Add (CSS) Styles dialogue box is out of date for my workflow, because a) I don’t like the code it generates very much, and b) It’s just easier and more natural for me to work with the native code in a text window now.

This is where it seems Dreamweaver is fundamentally flawed in it’s product nature. From my perspective, Adobe has tried to create a one-stop shop product for advanced web developers, intermediate developers/designers, beginner web designers, and even the graphic designer who’d like to occasionally produce a web site out of his Photoshop slices.

But a WYSIWYG editor is not the solution for many, if any, web developers and designers. It’s great for people that just do casual web updating or casual design. It’s even nice for clients that want to be able to update a site that has been professionally built for them. But a WYSIWYG based application is not where the people who primarily are responsible for building this stuff lives. I also don’t think it’s where these people are going (myself included).

Web standards, best practices for coding, and accessibility have all become such a high priority to the development community that designers/developers are no longer comfortable using things like table based layout or extraneous code, which WYSWYG tools tend to generate. Advanced developers are often most comfortable with a lightweight tool that allows them to simply code and upload files to the server. Tools like CODA, BBEdit, Esspresso, Notepad++, and others.

My suggestion is simply that Adobe either revamp Dreamweaver entirely as an application primarily built for people who make websites (as opposed to people who update them, or aspire to make websites), or else just release a new tool that is really just a code editor. I’m sure that last bit is going to come across as a jab at Dreamweaver, but it’s not. I’m just expressing that as a person who makes websites for a living, I’d rather have code editor than a WYSWYG website builder. Sure – DW proponents will argue, “what feature does any code editor have that Dreamweaver doesn’t?” And to which I will respond, “Exactly.”