Bluehost powers more than two million websites. It does a great job of demystifying the process of setting up a website for beginners. Especially if you want to use WordPress. All plans include a free domain for the first year, great uptime (based on real-life data), a free CDN, an easy website builder, and a free SSL certificate. Everything you need is one place. Is it right for your next website? Let’s find out.
Bluehost Compared to The Best Web Hosting Services
After two weeks of rigorous testing, which included signing up, building a website, talking to customer support, and 30 days’ worth of uptime and speed testing, Bluehost came in at #5 in our list of the eight best web hosting providers. Although other hosts outperformed Bluehost, it’s still an excellent choice and our top pick if you’re looking for a free, beginner-friendly WordPress drag-and-drop site builder.
If that’s not something you care about, there may be a better option. See all of our top picks to check out in-depth reviews by a team of researchers who’ve actually used the products, our scoring strategy, and which one is best depending on what you need.
Bluehost: The Good and The Bad
Every web hosting service has its flaws, even the most exclusive. Here’s an in-depth look into Bluehost’s top good and bad features.
The Good
Great Security: Bluehost has one of the best security measures on the market. All Bluehost security features are efficient and will help you cut back hours of tweaking your website. It will also give you peace of mind, which is especially needed for absolute beginners.
All Bluehost plans come with resource protection, and CodeGuard Backup Basic can be added for an additional $2.99 per month fee. CodeGuard will help you with daily backups and monitoring while notifying you of any changes.
The most basic version of this security feature comes with 1GB storage space, daily backup and monitoring, and three restorations per month. However, for the more expensive plans like Choice Plus and Pro, you can expect free automatic backups for one year and 24/7 network monitoring.
Extensive and Fast Customer Support: Another excellent feature of Bluehost is its extensive and fast customer support base. Customer support is paramount for any web hosting service to have, but finding a service that has fast and efficient support can be a dime a dozen.
Luckily, Bluehost offers just that, and most users have said the customer support is very helpful when needing immediate support. In fact, there’s a high chance you will connect to Bluehost’s Live Chat system within five minutes of waiting.
All of its support-base is available 24/7, so you don’t need to worry about figuring out time zones. Bluehost also offers phone and email support, but the waiting times vary. However, you always have the option to pass the time by browsing its extensive knowledge base support forum for multiple FAQs, videos, in-depth articles, and support resources on everything web hosting related.
Easy to Use: Not only is Bluehost the most popular web hosting service on the market for its outstanding features and products, but it’s also because it’s so incredibly easy to use. Ease of use is an important feature to have because web hosting can already be confusing to some, so there’s no need for the onboarding process to be difficult, too.
Fear not though, as Bluehost has an easy onboarding process that takes a few minutes to complete, to get your website up and running. With an intuitive interface, it will ask you to fill out a form that includes your website goals, what you want to add to your site, and what you want your name and the tagline of your site to be.
After answering these questions, you get to choose a theme of your choice from the Bluehost Marketplace, and then it automatically installs WordPress for your ultimate convenience. All you have to worry about is customization, while Bluehost takes care of the backend and the technical nitty-gritty.
High-Performance Servers: The last thing that’s great about Bluehost is that it offers very high-performance servers to all users purchasing the Pro plan. Although it’s not always ideal for every user to fork out more money, we think you get what you pay for. For $14.95 per month, you get access to Dual Quad Processor Performance Servers that will keep large ecommerce websites functioning effectively.
This server is an excellent option for larger websites because Bluehost makes sure there are fewer users per server—with an individual file count of 300,000—so there are no slowdowns for anyone involved.
However, if you don’t want to pay the price for these servers, we still think regular Bluehost servers that come with the other plans are great and work just fine.
The Bad
No Free Site Migration: Now here’s where the downsides come into play. Currently, Bluehost does not offer free site migration, which can be an issue for users transferring from a different web hosting service.
You can expect to pay a hefty $149.99 for Bluehost to migrate up to five websites and 20 email accounts. Although this service comes with 24/7 support, a complete review, and an uninterrupted transition, it’s still quite expensive for most users—especially when many other web hosting services will transfer your website for free.
What’s also not great is that this migration service does not cover reseller, VPS, or dedicated server accounts, nor does it include domain registrations.
No Guaranteed Uptime: Unlike most web hosting services, Bluehost doesn’t offer an uptime guarantee on any of its plans. This is concerning because downtime can be quite detrimental for website owners, as you can lose potential customers if your website is experiencing this.
An uptime guarantee gives users that extra peace of mind and shows them that the provider will keep your website up and running in the most efficient way possible—and is serious about the customer service experience while putting its customers’ needs first.
However, even though this may be an issue for some, many users have still applauded Bluehost for its uptime, regardless of guarantee, as the data shows it has an uptime of 99.99% efficiency.
Bluehost Pricing and Options
Bluehost offers quite a few pricing plans for individual website goals and needs. Let’s break it down into each level.
Bluehost Pricing
The great thing about Bluehost is that it has a wide variety of options at an affordable price. It offers three main business niches, with different pricing plans according to said niches. These include shared hosting, online stores, and managed WordPress.
Shared Hosting Plan
The shared hosting plan offers the most flexibility and is most popular with Bluehost users. The thing about Bluehost pricing is that it’s much cheaper on a 36-month plan, instead of a 12-month plan, so let’s compare these two. This plan has four pricing options, including:
- Basic: $4.95/month on a 12-month term; $2.95/month on a 36-month term
- Plus: $7.45/month on a 12-month term; $5.45/month on a 36-month term
- Choice Plus: $7.45/month on a 12-month term; $5.45/month on a 36-month term
- Pro: $18.95/month on a 12-month term; $13.95/month on a 36-month term
As you can see, the pricing for 36-month terms is much cheaper than 12-month terms. Bluehost also offers a 24-month term, but that’s only a tad cheaper than the 12-month option.
With that said, all pricing plans include a free domain for one year, free CDN, free SSL certificate, custom themes, and 24/7 support.
The Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro plans have unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage, and free Office 365 for 30 days.
Online Store Plan
The Bluehost online store plan feels a lot less complicated than its shared hosting plans. These specific plans are best for ecommerce stores, where you can build, promote, and start selling through your store that’s packed with WooCommerce tools.
This plan has two pricing options for 12-month and 36-month terms, including:
- Standard: $15.95/month on a 12-month term; $12.95/month on a 36-month term
- Premium: $32.95/month on a 12-month term; $24.95/month on a 36-month term
Both plans come with unlimited products, WooCommerce installed, 24/7 customer support, payment processing, discount codes, and CodeGuard Backup Basic.
Managed WordPress Plan
This powerful plan focuses on users who are building their website through WordPress. It allows you to purchase a plan that offers scalability, security, speed, and support for your professional WordPress website.
This plan has three pricing options, all on 36-month terms, including:
- Build: $9.95/month
- Grow: $14.95/month
- Scale: $27.95/month
All plans include top features like one WordPress website, 200+ global edge servers, free SSL, built-in high availability, staging environment, and best for up to 50,000 visitors per month.
You can also expect daily scheduled backups, malware detection and removal, and domain privacy and protection.
Bluehost Offerings
Bluehost offers quite a few web hosting-related products that cater to most users. Here’s an in-depth look at some different products from Bluehost:
WordPress Hosting
Bluehost and WordPress go hand-in-hand, and there’s no better way to run your website than with its official WordPress hosting. Bluehost crafted this specific hosting package to boost your website, with resources and tools that seamlessly integrate with WordPress.
With maximum compatibility with any WordPress website, this hosting plan will work best for blogs, websites, or online stores. Bluehost offers features like automatic WordPress installation, automatic WordPress updates, and Google My Business verification.
Not only that, but you get to choose from a unique range of themes and templates from the Bluehost Marketplace, that is specifically tailored to WordPress. You get full design freedom with customization features and easy-to-install plugins.
Some other features of WordPress hosting include:
- Microsoft Office 365
- Free domain for one year
- Secure login setup
- 24/7 WordPress hosting support
This hosting package has different pricing plans to the Managed WordPress plans. You can get specific WordPress hosting under three plans on 36-month terms, including:
- Basic: $2.95/month
- Plus: $5.45/month
- Choice Plus: $5.45/month
Shared Hosting
Just like we discussed earlier, the shared hosting package is the most popular among Bluehost users because it’s the easiest way to get your website up and running at an affordable price.
To put it simply, shared hosting allows multiple users to run their website on one server. This specific package is best for blogging, hobbies, or small business websites.
The best feature about the shared hosting package is that Bluehost manages and monitors the server, so users don’t need to worry about server management or platform patches.
Some features of the shared hosting package include:
- Domain manager
- Resource protection
- SSL certificates
- Google Ads
Small businesses would reap most of the benefits of a shared hosting plan because it’s more simple and affordable. Because shared hosting doesn’t guarantee RAM or CPU, small businesses aren’t as affected as larger businesses that need the extra space.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is an excellent package for larger-scale businesses that need an increase in storage, power, and control. This package is on the high-end side of web hosting, so it focuses on performance and security.
Unlike shared hosting, a dedicated hosting server provides the highest level of protection, security, and control to its users. These servers are separate from one another, so each user gets full access to the server without being affected or affecting another user’s experience.
With Bluehost dedicated hosting, it guarantees every user stable and predictable website performance, with full control and privacy.
This package is best for users that have high traffic websites, as you will need the full spectrum of RAM and CPU to run your website efficiently—which is exactly what dedicated hosting does.
Some supportive features for dedicated hosting include:
- Extreme speed
- Fast provisioning
- RAID storage
- Root access
- Dedicated support
- Storage upgrades
- Free domain for one year
However, Bluehost’s dedicated hosting does not go for cheap. It offers three pricing plans, including:
- Standard: $79.99 per month with 500GB storage and 4GB RAM
- Enhanced: $99.99 per month with 1TB storage and 8GB RAM
- Premium: $119.99 per month with 1TB storage and 16GB RAM
- All pricing plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Comparing the Best Web Hosting Services
We spent hours reviewing different web hosting services. You can check out our comparison guide here.
- Hostinger – Best web hosting for most
- SiteGround – Best for keeping uptime above 99.99%
- HostGator – Best for scaling your small business easily
- DreamHost – Best for pay-as-you-go web hosting
- Bluehost – Best drag-and-drop page builder for beginners
- Inmotion – Best price for hosting two websites on one plan
- Nexcess – Best for experienced WordPress users
- A2 Hosting – Most dependable web hosting for European and Asian audiences
Overall, Bluehost is an excellent choice for beginners since it comes with everything you need to get started with WordPress, from a free domain name and automatic WordPress installation to a free drag-and-drop page builder and thorough step-by-step instructions for every step of the way.
With extensive product offerings like WordPress hosting, shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and multi-tiered pricing plans, we think most users will enjoy the Bluehost experience.
The good outweighs the bad, and it’s definitely a web hosting service worth looking into—especially for WordPress users.
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