Bluehost enables anyone to create and get their website up and running in a span of a few clicks. Is it the ease of use that makes Bluehost the most popular web hosting provider? Or is it something else? Bluehost also is the first and one of the only few officials recommended hosting providers by WordPress.org
There are numerous features that come with any of the Bluehost hosting plans you choose. The hosting platform promises also promise great all-around service. Do they stand up to the promises they make?
Let’s check out every aspect of the service you expect from any web hosting provider and where does Bluehost stand.
For you to save time here is a summary of what you will read in detail:
| Overall Performance | A+ |
| Average Response Time | 1.3ms |
| Free Domain | Yes |
| Free SSL | Yes |
| 1-Click WordPress Install | Yes |
| Free Migration | No |
| Support | Live Chat/Call/Knowledge Base (Available 24/7) |
| Plans Starting from | $2.95/month |
About Bluehost
Bluehost was founded in the year 2003 and from then they are constantly growing as one of the most reliable web hosting providers. They currently host over 2 million websites on the web.
They have the largest standing partnership with the WordPress community. Bluehost is among the only few recommended web hosting providers by the official website of WordPress.org
All kinds of hosting plans suited for small individual websites to large enterprises websites are provided by Bluehost in their large range of plans. Bluehost also boasts of being among the most affordable hosting providers. The hosting plans start at as low as $2.95 a month which includes a free domain name for a year, a CDN, and an SSL certificate.
Read ahead to find out what are the pros and cons and why I think Bluehost is an amazing web hosting provider.
| Pros | Cons |
| A wide range of options available for every type of website | Higher domain renewal charges |
| Officially recommended by WordPress.org | Charges for site migration if does not fit a few conditions |
| Easy to upgrade to VPS or Dedicated hosting without migrating in case your website grows larger | Does not offer a month-to-month shared hosting option |
| Free Domain for a year with any plan registration | |
| Free SSL+CDN with each plan included | |
| Beginner Friendly | |
| 24*7 great customer support |
Is Bluehost Best for your Website?
Bluehost offers hosting plans in all the different categories. The cheapest plans start from the shared hosting category. Then there is the managed hosting category and then the Dedicated, Cloud and VPS hosting for the large websites.
If you are creating a website for the first time and is not at all acquainted with any of the web hosting tools and service provider then I would surely recommend Bluehost to you. Bluehost is an affordable option and the easy on-boarding process makes it welcoming for everyone.
Ideal web hosting service providers for a beginner. If you are creating a small blogging website and just want to get it live in a few steps Bluehost is the way to go.
If you are looking to create an e-commerce store with lots of products and need great site specs then you might want to look somewhere else.
The customer service that they provide is up to the mark and they are reliable. You won’t have to break a sweat to get in touch with customer service.
They have a simple navigation panel which makes it easier for everyone to understand what is going inside the back-end of your website. You will get the c-panel access too. Bluehost surely works hard to make life easier for anyone hosting their website with them.
The features you get are great, but do they work the same as they promise? Lets find out. Following are the areas we will look into:
Bluehost Plans and Offerings: There are many options to choose from. What are the available plans and which plan will suit you best?
Speed and Performance Test: How your website will load? Remember that the server speed matter. We will check the performance of websites hosted in the Bluehost server.
Reliability and Uptime: we will tell how Bluehost fairs in uptime guarantee. Can you rely on your web host to be up 24*7*365 without any downtime?
Security: This is a critical thing to look at. You want your website to be highly secure and safe from any web attack threats.
Customer Support: How the customer support responds and is it reliable?
We will be doing a full in-depth analysis of each and every factor of the web hosting service they provide. This will be enough to let you know every feature of the utility you will get if you sigh up for the Bluehost hosting services.
Bluehost Plans and Offerings
Bluehost offers a ton of plans and a variety of hosting options to choose from. You can opt for the plan and hosting type that is best suited for your website. They provide Shared Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Managed WordPress Hosting, VPS Hosting, and WooCommerce Hosting.
This is a lot of options to choose from. Bluehost wins from every other hosting service provider in terms of a wide range of options they provide. They have tailor-made plans available for every type of website you can think of.
A major upside with every plan is that they provide one-click WordPress install in all the plans you choose from.
Shared Hosting Plan:
Shared Hosting Plan is best suited for small websites. This plan is best for those who are just getting started with a website. The shared hosting plans have every feature and resource available for any small website.
In Shared Hosting Plan multiple websites are hosted on a single server. So that is why this is best for small and low-traffic websites. When getting started this is the best option to choose from and then upgrade with time.
The best part is that they are cheap and you can upgrade them anytime when you see your website is growing and you want more resources. Bluehost does not charge any extra cost for up-gradation and will adjust the amount that you have already paid in the previous plan.
The resources that you get with the Shared Hosting plan from Bluehost surely beat any other web hosting service provider. For any small website and also if you are running a number of small websites or blogs, Bluehost has plans available.
The cheapest plan is the Basic plan which will cost you a mere $2.95 a month. The plan comes with 50 GBs of storage space which is more than enough of a small website. You are also getting a domain name registration free for a year. The cost that you are paying is already cheap and with the free domain included this makes it even cheaper.
With the Basic plan you choose from Bluehost, you will be getting free CDN and a free SSL certificate. You know how important an SSL is for the security of your website. On the other hand, CDN will be proving vital in giving your website an even improved page loading speed.
With some other web hosting providers you may have to pay for an SSL or CDN or sometimes but Bluehost has included these free with the plan.
Are you excited already to sign up with Bluehost? Well, this is not it. The Shared Hosting plan has a few more options available.
For people who are running more than one website, there is the PLUS tier available. You have two options here. The Plus and Choice Plus. If you sign up now then you have the offer to choose any of both plans at $4.95 a month.
The Plus plan is great for running multiple websites. You can host unlimited websites under this plan. The difference between Plus and Choice Plus is that Choice Plus comes with added security feature and a free backup option. At the same price, Choice Plus brings a lot to the table for you.
You will have everything from the Basic Plan plus option to host unlimited websites. You will also have unlimited bandwidth in place of 50 GB. As your website grows the bandwidth will matter. Or if you have an online store then you surely need large bandwidth. The added security feature is an amazing feature added.
Now as you know these will be hosted on a shared server. But what if you want special attention to your websites, then you have this option available for you too with the Pro plan. The Pro plan will cost you $13.95 a month. This will come with an additional CPU resource and a free dedicated IP for your websites.
As you can see you have options available for each type of website. Bluehost is known to bring personalized plans for every user. They are great at it and this is why they are the most popular web host around the globe.
Dedicated Hosting:
As the name says Dedicated, the plan stands up to it. Dedicated Hosting is a standout option to consider in terms of additional security, personalized features, privacy, and very large traffic.
You will get a server solely dedicated to your website. To buy this plan you must as a few questions yourself. Does your website have a huge amount of traffic? Is it growing rapidly? If yes then Dedicated hosting is the way to go.
If you know that your website wants a dedicated server and tons of resources to keep up and running without getting affected then a Bluehost Dedicated Hosting Plan is your best option.
To have a glimpse of what you will get with a Dedicated Hosting Plan let’s see at the Standard Plan specs. You will be paying $79.99 a month for this plan. But this payment will be more than worth it as it will give you 500 GB of storage space, 4GB of RAM and 5 TB of bandwidth for a start.
On top of this, there will be 3 dedicated IPs for your website. All the resources will be working for your website and the whole server will host only your website.
This plan puts Bluehost among the top service providers for the costlier hosting plans. You have two more options to choose from if the Standard plan is not enough. This will be the case only if your website is having millions of traffic every month.
Managed WordPress Hosting:
Managed WordPress Hosting plans are tailor-made for WordPress websites. You won’t need to worry about any updates or backups everything is automated and managed by Bluehost. All the plans of the Managed WordPress Hosting plan come with tools needed for the WordPress website including marketing tools, incredible speed, and top-notch security features.
They have plans ranging in three categories namely Build, Grow and Scale. All the plans come with increased hosting features and package to fit your website needs.
The plans include a Staging environment, a minimum of 20 GB of web storage, 200+ global edge servers, automated scheduled backups, free SSL certificate are to name a few features included with every plan. You also get business marketing tools and SEO tools with Grow and Scale plans.
For choosing the best plan for your Managed WordPress website you will have to look at the amount of traffic you are looking to manage. The traffic amount is the most distinguished feature in all these three plans.
Build – $9.95 a month with a capacity best for 50,000 monthly visitors
Grow – $14.95 a month with capacity best for 150,000 monthly visitors
Scale – $27.95 a month with capacity best for 500,000 monthly visitors
Looking in terms of the traffic to be managed every month makes it easier to choose the plan which will be the best fit for your WordPress website. Sign up for the Dedicated WordPress Hosting plan for your WordPress website solely in terms of the monthly traffic and your website will run fine.
VPS Hosting:
VPS Hosting or Virtual Private Server hosting is getting more and more popular. This is an upgrade to the Shared Hosting feature. In this, the website hosting is within a shared server but it acts as a dedicated virtual space for your website. This allows you virtual dedicated resources inside a shared environment.
They are getting popular as they are a lot cheaper than the Dedicated hosting plans and are more secure and potentially give better performance than the Shared Hosting plans. For any mid-size which does not have a hundred of thousands of monthly visitors but is growing slowly this is a great option to consider.
For enterprise websites, VPS hosting will be the best choice to choose from. They do not cost as much as dedicated hosting and also gives you the features like them. The VPS server is also better in performance than the Shared hosting. So for any enterprise business, this would be the best choice without costing a large sum and also getting all the requisite benefits that you are looking for from your web host.
The Bluehost VPS Hosting service stacks up well against its competitors. They give great performance and do not let their customers down. They charge you $19.99 a month for the Standard Plan. The plans included 2 GB of RAM with an additional 1 TB of bandwidth. You will also have 30 GB of SSD Storage with 1 IP Address. This is quite a lot more than you get from the Shared Hosting and not to forget the additional security feature that you get with the VPS hosting.
Bluehost hosting plans are made to suit every kind of web host. They are clearly a winner in terms of the options you are getting. Added on top of this is the pricing they offer for all their plans. This is better than the competitors for the level of service Bluehost providers.
WooCommerce Hosting:
If you want to create an E-Commerce store then you can choose for Shared or Managed WordPress hosting and create using WordPress and plugins. But you will have to do a ton of modifications and management for running an E-commerce store. For the same reason, Bluehost has a dedicated plan for the WooCommerce platform.
The plan is solely made for creating online stores and making it easier to maintain them. You get the WooCommerce store pre-installed with the plan. Many features are needed for any online store like E-mail marketing, Dedicated IP for better security and service, adding an unlimited number of products, discount codes to name a few. You will get all these with any of the two plans you opt for.
In addition to this, you will have an onboarding call by the Bluehost agent to walk you through the feature. The SSL certificate is also included with the plan. With the Premium plan, you also get the Local and Country Tax Management feature as this can be needed for any online store.
The WooCommerce Standard plan will cost you $15.95 a month and the Premium plan will cost you $32.95 a month. Both the plans will help you to customize your online store and additional features will help you run your WooCommerce business better.
The WooCommerece plan provided by Bluehost is good. But if you want to buy a WooCommerce plan I will suggest looking for a few more options. For E-commerce websites I have seen Nexcess: A Liquidweb Company performs better in all aspects.
Speed and Performance Test:
The most important aspect you will need from your web hosting service provider is that they deliver on the Performance. You would like your website to load pretty fast and the server to respond in seconds to load the webpage at the users-end without any delay in time.
I have hosted my website with Bluehost. I tested my website using the GTMetrix tool. As you can see my website has lots of content and also many images. I also use many different plugins to make my tasks easier. All these factors will surely add up to page sizes and a lot of JS and CSS scripts which is vital when page loading comes.
Above is the performance report generated. Page loading within 1s is pretty awesome, isn’t it? As you know speed matters. For every 3 sec delay in loading speed, you lose around 50% of the visitors, and also the conversion rate decreases by around 7%.
An ideal website must load in under 3 sec. The website speed will not only be the factor of server response time but also how well you have optimized your website elements. If your website has tons of large images and you are using many unnecessary plugins or CSS which is adding up to the server requests then it will obviously add up to making the website slow.
Server response time is only one of the major factors which result in website speed. Bluehost has servers across different continents to make your websites load faster. There is a test done for the server response time for different locations.
As we can see that the server response time is great for the different locations which are at all parts of the globe.
Apart from the server response time the additional CDN that you get also helps a lot in loading the websites faster. Bluehost provides you with CloudFlare CDN with every plan you opt for.
CDN spreads out your content to all the server locations of Cloudflare. When a user requests for your page then the nearest server sends out the content to the user’s system. This response time becomes faster as the distance between the user and the server decreases from the use of CDN.
Bluehost’s speed and performance come out to be top-notch. As a first-hand user of the Bluehost hosting service, I feel they provide a pretty good server speed. With good website optimization and keeping the size of your pages under 1 MB, you can achieve a loading speed time of under 3 sec.
Reliability and Uptime:
Uptime refers to the duration for which a server is fully functional and running. Bluehost guarantees an uptime of over 99% for their servers.
As per our tests and experience, Bluehost has an average uptime of 99.97% which is amazing. This means your website servers are running to their full capacity 99.97% of the time. There are times when Bluehost outdoes itself by maintaining a 100% uptime.
The slightly less perfect score is due to maintenance sometimes. The servers have to be maintained for better performance and to keep the websites up and running. Bluehost does a fantastic job in doing so.
The Bluehost servers are tested and reliable for all kinds of websites. They will keep your website up and running without hampering the performance. Many hosting companies guarantee an uptime of over 99%. Only one hosting provider guarantees an uptime of 100%, i.e. Hostgator. Although an uptime of 99.97% is no less and more than enough for your website to give a great performance.
Security:
Security is an integral part that you cannot ignore. There are numerous attacks that keep happening around the web. They are either trying to get data or send malware or many other possible ways to hamper your website or the server.
Bluehost does well in securing your website. They use SiteLock to scan your website daily for malware and viruses. They keep a close look into your website server so that they can be secure from any form of external attacks.
Bluehost also allows you to take any security measures you want to make sure your website is secure. You can create an IP address blacklist, password-protection directories, manage private keys and digital certificates, create filters for e-mail accounts and users, and many more to keep your website threat free.
You also have an option to buy premium security services from vendors like Jetpack or CodeGuard. This you can buy if you are not satisfied with the in-house security features. This is opted only in the case of enterprise websites when there is a ton of data sharing or there is an employee directory or any other similar data transmission. In such a case, you can opt for a premium security service.
You also have an SSL certificate for your website which tells the user that your website is secure and malware-free to browse. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer is an encryption protocol. In simple terms, they serve the purpose to bind together the identifier (domain name, server or hostname) and the identity of an organization. They tell that the recipient of the file is who they are.
In terms of security, Bluehost does a good job and also gives you enough options and methods to keep your website secure.
Customer Support:
Every now and then there may arise a situation when you might need help. Then the role of Customer support becomes a lot more important. In dire need of support in terms of your website server issue, you would like them to respond quickly and resolve the issues in the least of time.
Bluehost has made their Customer support system in such a way that they can be reached every hour through more than one medium. They have Chat, Call, and Email options to reach out to them. The Chat service responds in under a minute as per my experience with them. In case of reaching out through calls, the Customer service representative responds within a few minutes.
They offer you a 24/7 support system where you can talk to them and get your queries resolved. Through email, you can get a personalized reply to your query within a few working hours.
Apart from reaching out to them they also have a huge directory of articles, step-by-step guides, tutorials, and a large knowledge base. There can be many small issues arising to any of the users which can be resolved just by looking into those guides.
There was ticket base support also provided by Bluehost but now it is being discontinued. Bluehost said that they want to focus on the personal approach of the customer support system. They are dedicated to helping customers and can be easily reached out via calls and chat mode anytime.
Conclusion
The bottom line is Bluehost is an amazing web hosting service provider. They have plans tailored for all kinds of needs of the user. They provide a great service in terms of speed and uptime. The performance of your website hosted will be top-notch from the server’s end.
The question is if it is suitable for you? When starting with any new website I will surely recommend you to go with Bluehost. They are reliable and make it extremely easy for any new user to come onboard.
If you are creating a WooCommerce store then I have already given another suggestion to you. Bluehost will be your second choice in that case for sure. For any WordPress website and small blogs, Bluehost is the first choice to consider from.
The pricing that they provide is obviously cheaper than most of their competitors. With this price having the best service provider in the industry is a blessing in disguise. You can rely on them for your website.
They are one of the oldest in the business. They must be doing something right then only they are still among the top service provider even in this highly competitive industry. Sign up now and try their amazing services for yourself.
