Amazon Lightsail vs. Bluehost vs. Carbonite by OpenText

We utilized Amazon Lightsail to get a web application proof of concept up and running. It's easy to set up, requires minimal configuration, and lets us to concentrate on the coding. It's designed to help you get started fast and easily, but it's not designed for corporate applications or workloads.

Incentivized

Bluehost is a decent all-around choice for web hosting with professional web development and domain management features that are particularly ideal for WordPress websites and blogs. They have a good reputation within the industry as a company that invests heavily in new technology and platform innovation. Bluehost has made a lot of improvements to customize their back-end administration (AMP & control panel) by working to improve the usability and design of the browser interface. Bluehost is primarily focused on customers who use WordPress and we would recommend either their hybrid cloud or managed WordPress platform, which provides everything that you need to build and maintain a popular website. All in all, Bluehost is a well-established brand that continually improves its hosting products, regularly upgrades their data center hardware, and is generally considered a leader in the development of new cloud hosting platform services.

Incentivized

More than enough for small companies with several on-prem servers. In 2021, it wouldn't be wise to pit all important data to a single backup service. Carbonite Server is solid, but it's not 100% reliable so I'd definitely recommend having multiple backup services either on the cloud in conjunction with other backup services so the user has multiple safety nets in case of disaster and failed granular restorations.

Incentivized

• Its provide pre configured Apps and operating system
• Very easy to use interface and the cost is also very low
• Integration with other AWS services like route53, S3 etc

Incentivized

• Customer service/tech support is simply top-notch. Being able to pick up the phone, get help, and not get charged for it is rare in the tech-support world.
• Their Dashboard/C-panel has a wide selection of popular tools and options to make website design and all that goes with it very easy. Lots of choices; they are more than a simple hosting service.
• Keeping their tools up-to-date. I never have to worry about upgrades or having the latest features; it just happens automatically!

Incentivized

• Simple administrative web interface - It's easy to provision users, look at data usage stats, disable users, and update policies to control what folders users are allowed to backup, and what options they can access
• Easy client installation - Installing and updating clients was very simple. The client would notify the user when a new update was approved by the site admins, and they typically went very smoothly.
• Good performance - Backups went fairly fast, and were generally invisible to the user, other than the icon updating on files to indicate whether the current version of a file was backed up or not.

Incentivized

• slow
• complex integration to AWS Cloudwatch - complex setup required
• No IPv6, a big downside
• less value compared with Linode or Digital Ocean

Incentivized

• Setting up wasn't difficult but I think for some having tutorial videos would have been better than screenshots.
• Provide more than one free domain on the Plus plan.
• Offer site migration - not an option I saw when I signed up.

Incentivized

• While overall file restoration is easy to do, obtaining earlier versions is not as user friendly as it could be. You need to enter a date and click search to bring up the latest versions as of the date entered. That’s fine, but what is missing is the ability to see all versions of an individual file. If I am looking for a past file version I want to be able to view the file history as a subset of that file (in other words I should be able to click a + sign and expand to see past versions of the file). Otherwise I am just guessing which dates the file was changed in the past. Sometimes that’s OK, but Mozy needs to build in this enhanced, but necessary feature.
• A couple of years ago, for non enterprise users, Mozy made radical storage and pricing changes forcing myself and many users off their system, as the price for the same storage was going up significantly. So be careful when using Mozy as past experience has shown they are willing to make major changes regardless of the negative impact on their users.

Incentivized

Carbonite Server Backup does not integrate or support any reporting; it is not good at it. We required monthly and quarterly reports for audit. If we fail in that we get fined or we have to pay a certain amount of money to customer. It does not support cloud instances and we are using N2WS for the cloud instances. This is an additional burden for customers.

Incentivized

My overall experience with Amazon Lightsail is very good, and the online community of Lightsail users is very large and its helps to resolve any kind of issue i faced on my server. I also like the integration of other AWS services with Amazon Lightsail like we can export our Lightsail instance into ec2 server using snapshots.

Incentivized

I use Wordpress for my website on Bluehost, so I already know how it works and happy with it. I gave it this rating as I love the fact that If you do plan on creating multiple websites on Bluehost you'll be able to create specific login access for each website sites making it less likely to enter into the wrong website accounts. Which makes it even easier to manage client websites if you plan to create and host websites on behalf of your clients.

Incentivized

Out of all the vendor we deal with they are one of the best when it comes to customers service. Reliable,you can reach them by telephone easily, Great overall can not say anything to the contrary. Usibility is excellent. I recommend them highly whether you need a simple backup ofr more complex for servers etc.

Incentivized

They are quick, easily reached, and can usually solve problems on the first try. However I noticed I had to go to customer support more often than with other providers, whether that was things breaking more often or if their customer support couldn't fix things on the first try. But in most scenarios, they are fine.

Incentivized

I usually find what I need to know by looking in the Carbonite knowledge base online. We haven't had any major problems, usually we just need clarification on a point or more details about a feature so we look it up. We haven't had to call in for help in quite awhile.

Incentivized

We had appliance and we just needed to setup the Director Console which was straight forward and easy.

Incentivized

Amazon Lightsail is a great platform. Before we started using it, we were using AWS EC2 instances as our primary servers after being dissatisfied with other providers. After Amazon Lightsail's introduction, we were able to reduce our operating costs, improve our quality assurance tasks, and provide much more efficient and better apps with our microservices architecture.

Incentivized

Bluehost did not stack up against HostGator; in fact, HostGator was where we ended up migrating after we realized Bluehost was not for us. Bluehost is not geared toward businesses, especially ones like ours that have a very customized site. HostGator allowed us the customization that we needed, and their prices were terrific.

Incentivized

Netbak is a great product but we also had a secondary issue of having to backup several PC's on site and at remote locations. Carbonite helped with both and gave us one central admin console to be able to check the progress of all our backups, where netbak would have required us to setup a tunnel or use the internet to move data back to our main office.

Incentivized

The website is slow. The speed is not reliable. Sometimes, sites would go down without warning. You would have to get a VPS to get consistent speed. If you have small website as a hobby, then Bluehost will be sufficient. Otherwise, I recommend looking for something more fast. Storage is good, but speed is lacking

Incentivized

• Hosting a production application on Lightsail will guarantee you a loss
• Saved lots of time for our prototyping
• Other VPS providers are better

Incentivized

• It allowed me to get my website up and running and sell services.
• It is fairly low cost, so it was easy to recoup my investment.
• Having to pay for a whole year upfront made it take a little longer to get the return on my investment.

Incentivized

• We have a safety net that we didn't have before.
• Key players are now backed up through an automated system that was easy to silently install.
• The resources used impacted our exchange server negatively and slowed email until it was disabled.

Incentivized