Webhost? Bluehost vs InMotion + Build Tech

[Cali-Glock]

It has been sometime since I have personally maintained a website, and need to throw up a super simple website and possibly make it more substantial later, and since I am at it I might as well resurrect one or two old personal websites.

I want to do this on a budget, but want a host that will not completely flake out on me.

I used to code my sites using text editors, but my I figure today I probably best off using one of the WYSIWYG tools, but which one? Wordpress seems to be the predominant tool out there, but I have the impression there are some good third party tools for using Wordpress.

From my reading I think I have narrowed it down to Bluehost or Inmotion; some places rank one better than the other and then the next review ranks the other a bit better.

My questions:

BlueHost or Inmotion? (or someone else)

Why?

What site/tools for building a site?

[diveRN]

If you're just looking for hosting for a family site, consider Hostgator. Have used it for years. Lots of storage and bandwidth on a shared box, but pretty reliable and cheap. They have tons of integrated tools you can use to build a site, including Wordpress.

As for tools, if you don't mind a little bit of a learning curve, you can have a decent, skinned Wordpress site up in an evening.

[WoodTurner]

I've been using Linode. Running a couple small websites off of their $5 server and it could easily handle more. Will probably want to have some basic Linux experience if you go that route. They have a "one click setup" for WordPress, but I'm not sure if you could host multiple sites on the single server that way. Runcloud is an easy/free/cheap solution to help manage your server if you don't want to install/setup manually.

[Cali-Glock]

Thank you everyone for the input.

I procrastinated for 9 months and finally went with HostGator and threw up my little site today using Weebly. Just in time for some meetings tomorrow!
The process was a bit frustrating - the site hosts a bunch of documents for a committee (and the larger body the committee serves). The first thing I did was to FTP into the domain - create a server and upload all my docs.

Of course Weebly would not let me link to those docs... that was the first of many frustrations. But my gripes aside it worked pretty well once I accepted it for what it is and worked within its limitations - coming up with some round-about fixes for some of its failings. The site looks better than anything I could have cobbled together using a text editor and HTML2.0 or whatever the ancient standard is that I used to use and sort-of-remember.

I look forward to figuring out what route I will take with my other sites.

I think my HostGator plan (Shared-Baby) will only let me upload one WordPress site, so I am considering going another route. The free development Weebly sites are limited to 6 pages - not motivated to pay $120 a year for the paid Weebly - especially given some of the other limitations I saw with it.

Perhaps I'll try the free/trial version of CoffeCup or consider purchasing an older (pre-subscription-only) Adobe Dreamweaver...