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Our independent research projects and impartial reviews are funded in part by affiliate commissions, at no extra cost to our readers.
If you’ve heard of Bluehost, you may be wondering if they are a good hosting provider. As one of the most popular hosting providers on the market, Bluehost hosts over 2 million websites worldwide. In addition, the company offers SEO services, social media marketing, graphic design services, domain names, and more.
They also provide a lot of price discounts that can make web hosting more affordable than you expected. Read our Bluehost review to determine if Bluehost is the hosting solution and web host for you.
Bluehost is for hosting sites and purchasing domain names. It’s a great solution for start-ups that need to get a website established as simply as possible.
Bluehost was founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton and is one of the 20 largest hosting companies in the world. Endurance International Group (EIG) is currently the owner of Bluehost.
Bluehost’s HQ was in Orem, Utah, USA, until 2017, when EIG shuttered their Orem, Utah office and moved to Burlington, Massachusetts.
The current CEO of Bluehost is Suhaib Zaheer.
Bluehost’s WordPress hosting has the following features:
HostGator’s WordPress hosting has the following features:
Bluehost hosting allows you to use WordPress, but you may be wondering if you should go with Bluehost or just WordPress to host your website.
First of all, Bluehost hosting differs from WordPress in that Bluehost is a web hosting provider, while WordPress is a content management system (CMS). This means you can make a WordPress site without purchasing anything additional, such as a domain name.
You can use Bluehost to make a WordPress site, but you can also use other types of sites with Bluehost. Bluehost hosting also gives you other services such as a range of shared and VPS plans, free SSL certificates, free domain registration for the first year, and other features discussed in the above sections.
Bluehost hosting offers a variety of web hosting plans.
WordPress Hosting caters to WordPress sites with high visitor traffic. This type of hosting is best for:
Bluehost hosting has standard pricing per plan, but the web host also offers various discount plans. If you sign up at the right time, you may receive a discount on the standard pricing. Keep in mind that on any hosting plan, there are ‘extras’ that can bump the price up should you opt-in.
Bluehost’s plans include Basic, Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro. Each plan features 24/7 customer support and custom themes. What varies among these plans are pricing, the number of sites you can set up, email storage, and extras.
Bluehost provides a free domain name with web hosting for one year for all plans.
The longer the period you choose to host your site on Bluehost, the less expensive it will be. As such, we recommend that you go for the 36-month term option.
Bluehost hosting does offer package extras, which can be useful if you have a lot of website files you want automatically backed up and better privacy options.
A Basic hosting plan allows for one website, five email accounts, and 100 MB of email storage per account. You’ll also have 50 GB of SSD storage. The extras on the Basic package are admittedly ‘basic,’ with a free domain (one year), plus free CND and a free SSL certificate.
If you need to host multiple websites or want unlimited email accounts and storage, you’ll need to upgrade to a Plus, Choice Plus, or Pro plan.
Regular pricing is per month, but costs vary based on the term of your plan.
Bluehost often runs specials with discounts you can lock in. Here are the most recent promotional prices.
Along with free unlimited websites, email, and storage, Plus plans also offer a 30-day Office 365 trial.
Regular pricing is per month, but costs vary based on the term of your plan.
Bluehost often runs specials with discounts you can lock in. Here are the common promotional prices.
Choice Plus plans offer a couple more perks on top of Plus plans: free domain privacy coverage and free automated backup for one year. Especially if you maintain several websites, free automated backup is probably the most appealing part of this plan.
Regular pricing is per month, but costs vary based on the term of your plan.
Bluehost often runs specials with discounts you can lock in. Here are the common promotional prices.
Pro plans are the only options that offer the perks of each other plan (with free automated backup that has no time limit) plus a free dedicated IP and optimized CPU resources. In short, the faster you want your site(s) to be, the more likely it is that you will need a Bluehost Pro plan.
Regular pricing is per month, but costs vary based on the term of your plan.
Bluehost often runs specials with discounts you can lock in. Here are the common promotional prices.
These FAQs will help you determine if Bluehost is the right platform for you.
Because BlueHost offers a variety of hosting options for everything from eCommerce to WordPress and beyond, it can be a solid web hosting choice for nearly any type of business. But due to its integrations with WordPress and commerce sites, these are two of the best applications of the service provider’s offerings.
BlueHost can also be an excellent choice for websites that want to start small but plan to scale up. Plans are flexible, and the company will help with site migration if you want to, say, upgrade from shared to dedicated hosting.
Yes, Bluehost allows you to register and buy new domain names. Bluehost also offers the following:
Bluehost gives you a variety of domain options to choose from, including:
Customer service and tech support answer your questions and concerns about any issues you’re experiencing while using Bluehost, sales, and account management.
Technical support and customer support refers to Bluehost’s customer service, where they answer any questions and concerns you have about using Bluehost’s services.
Customer care and support are integral to your experience on Bluehost. Feel free to reach out to Bluehost’s support agent any time you have questions or concerns, which is available 24/7/365 for the following areas:
Bluehost offers several ways to contact them:
While many customers have reported positive experiences with great, helpful customer service agents, some others have stated that Bluehost’s customer care is lacking.
Phone calls can take a while to get through, and some customer care agents provide little to no help. Agents may take a long time to address server upgrades, bugs in the code, and other errors.
Although open source appears to be more accessible and easy to use at times, there are times you should pay for enterprise even when open source supposedly has you covered.
Open-source apps and plug-ins often rely on volunteers to maintain them, so many open source projects are not sustainable in the long run. Open-source developers usually work on these apps and plugins in their spare time or out of curiosity, which may peter out over a few years.
Only very popular projects will get a steady stream of support using GitHub Sponsors, Buy Me a Coffee, and Patreon. Others will get very little monetary support, and as such, there will be little incentive for open source app developers to follow up if you have an issue with their app or code.
On the other hand, enterprise developers get proper compensation for their work, and as such, will be able to follow up with their projects in the long run.
A hosted email account allows you to send and receive emails using your custom domain, such as you@yourdomain.com.
You can use Bluehost’s email accounts and email hosting by creating a suitable email for your domain.
Email hosting will give your company a more polished and professional look. This will be part of your company’s brand.
Furthermore, you will be able to keep control over your company emails when someone leaves your company. By giving your employee an email address hosted through your Bluehost domain, you will be able to access your employee’s emails even after they leave and redirect emails, so nothing gets lost.
All Bluehost plans come with email accounts. The Basic plan allows you to have five email accounts, and all other tiers allow you to create unlimited email accounts.
With Bluehost, you can create Gmail app-based hosted email, Office 365, or cPanel email.
Performance and uptime KPIs matter because they affect your site’s ease of use and functionality. They affect every aspect of the site, especially site speed.
The longer it takes for your site to load, the fewer potential customers you will attract and the lower your site will rank in Google’s search results. The slower your site, the less trustworthy your site will seem. Therefore, it’s imperative to make sure your website’s performance and uptime KPIs are top-notch.
Bluehost provides excellent page load times with its various plans. Make sure to track your resource usage and traffic volume so you can upgrade as needed. Otherwise, your site may become sluggish if you don’t upgrade to a higher tier.
We recommend making sure each page of your website has a clear purpose. Otherwise, your website might be confusing for potential customers. Think about making your website as streamlined and straightforward to use as possible.
Bluehost can handle high traffic. Your server typically supports 12,000 to 16,000 visitors per day and 12,000 to 16,000 hits per hour. A hit is when a user requests a website server to download a file. A visit is when a user accesses a web page by clicking on it.
Internal uptime monitoring is a process of understanding your site’s service levels, availability of key business transactions, and system availability. It is done through apps so organizations can consistently monitor server functions to see how users interact with the website.
The monitoring is usually done from different locations worldwide to a specific website or server to detect issues related to network hop issues, Internet latency, server response times, and others. Once the app detects an error or problem, it sends out alerts via SMS, phone, SNMP trap, and email. The app may also provide screenshots and videos of the website going down.
These diagnostics will help you figure out if your site is fast enough on all platforms, from mobile to desktop. Your network webmasters and administrators can then work to correct the issues.
Bluehost boasts of a 99.99% uptime on average and occasionally goes up to 100%. If you experience too much downtime, you can cancel your subscription with Bluehost without paying cancellation fees.
Bluehost offers a variety of marketing offers with shared host accounts and hosting packages. This is why and how they stand out from their competitors.
You can use several marketing tools and marketing credits.
With Bluehost’s shared hosting packages, you will get Google Ad and Bing Ads marketing credits.
You can redeem your credits as follows:
Bluehost offers you SEO tools to promote your website to potential customers. They will help your website get listed higher on Search Engine Results such as Yahoo!, Bing, and Google.
With Bluehost’s SEO tools, you will get the following:
Bluehost is great for blogging. It is the recommended web hosting by WordPress, which is one of the best and most well-known blogging platforms.
Bluehost’s great user interface, excellent customer support, and affordable prices make it a good choice for blog hosting.
All Bluehost users will be able to use the cPanel control panel.
This control panel is well-designed and organized and will make organizing your website easy.
With cPanel, you can do the following:
Bluehost offers fully dedicated hosting services. Fully dedicated hosting services are the complete opposites of shared hosting services and give users an exclusive server on the host’s network. Getting a fully dedicated server will give you an unlimited website.
This provides a lot of stability and security that shared hosting services usually can’t offer. Getting a fully dedicated hosting option is expensive, so we do not recommend it for everyone, particularly those with tight budgets. We recommend getting full dedicated hosting services for growing companies or extensive and complex websites.
For most users, shared hosting is already more than enough. Shared hosting is the default choice and is available at a budget price.
As such, only get a dedicated server if you have the budget for it and you think it is necessary to have a server all to yourself. A semi-dedicated or VPS plan blends the best of shared and dedicated servers at a more affordable price, so feel free to look into getting a Bluehost VPS server as an alternative to dedicated if you’re on a budget.
Like any other web hosting platform, you can cancel Bluehost at any time. However, the refund value may be limited. It is on a prorated basis and does not include some development costs such as domain name registration.
Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for all of its web hosting plans. If you cancel any time within 30 days, you will receive a full refund. If you cancel after 30 days, you will receive a prorated refund for the rest of your contract term.
Note that Bluehost’s 30-day money-back guarantee only applies to web hosting plans and not to their add-ons, including domains.
You can cancel your account using the following methods:
All in all, Bluehost is a powerful web hosting service and reputable web hosting company. We highly recommend it for small businesses of all sizes and individuals who want to step up their website game. It is also great for individuals with a WordPress website who want more bang for their buck.
Compared to alternatives like HostGator, SiteGround, and others, Bluehost hosting stacks up. As one of the oldest web hosts around, Bluehost remains one of the most flexible, affordable, and recommended web hosts out there. Bluehost’s advanced hosting packages are particularly great for larger companies. While competitors such as GoDaddy offer better prices at lower tiers, they lack many of Bluehost’s functions and add-ins at higher tiers.
A Bluehost plan is definitely worth it. As one of the most popular website hosting choices out there, Bluehost is an easy way to get your site up and running. Fast, reliable, and flexible, users of all backgrounds will find it easy to start building their site from scratch with Bluehost.
We hope this review has helped you decide whether a Bluehost plan and hosting option is for you.
