More than two million websites are powered by Bluehost, one of the top providers of website hosting. It does an excellent job of demystifying the process of setting up a website for newbies, which is one of the reasons it is so well-liked. This is especially true if you plan to develop your website using WordPress.
All Bluehost plans are simple to use and come with free domain registration for the first year, excellent uptime (based on real-world data), a free CDN, a simple website builder, and a free SSL certificate.
You can get everything you require from our hosting service in a single location. However, is it the best hosting option for you? Let’s explore.
Bluehost Quick Highlights
| Our Rating: | 9.9/10  |
| SPEED: | 420 ms approx. |
| UPTIME: | 99.98% |
| SUPPORT: | 24/7 Live Chat, Phone, Email, Knowledge Base |
| APPS: | WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, and More Than 75+ Open Source Projects |
| FEATURES: | Unmetered bandwidth, one Website, 10 GB Storage, Free Domain 1st Year, Free SSL Certificate and CDN, Spam Experts, Domain Privacy, 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee, WordPress 1-Click Install |
| HOSTING PLANS: | Shared, WordPress, VPS, Reseller, and Dedicated Servers |
| SITE TRANSFER: | Single WordPress Site for Free |
| PRICING: | Starting at $2.95/mon (renews at $9.99/mo) |
Bluehost Pros and Cons
The top web hosting providers all have advantages and disadvantages. Some of them you can accept, while others you cannot. The features and disadvantages of Bluehost are listed below:
Pros (Advantages):
Let’s first explore the benefits that make Bluehost the best option.
Pricing: Most users can afford their hosting plans, especially those who are just getting started.
Reliability: With little downtime, they run a lot of websites.
No Hidden Charges: No further fees will be added when you register for an account.
Free domain: When you register, you receive a free domain name for the first year.
Free CDN + SSL: To prevent malware and strengthen security, you receive a free SSL certificate and a free Cloudflare CDN for each website.
Money-Back Guarantee: All plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Cons (Disadvantages):
There are always downsides with every hosting firm, as we just discussed. These are a few cons of using Bluehost as your hosting.
Higher domain renewal cost: The cost of their free domain renewal is higher than the industry standard.
Upselling Addons: During signup, they conduct an aggressive upselling process. However, if you don’t use SiteLock or any other add-ons, you may just uncheck them.
Top Security Features
One of the top security measures available is offered by Bluehost. All of Bluehost’s security tools are effective and will save you hours of website tinkering. Additionally, it will provide you with peace of mind, which is very important for newcomers.
Resource protection is included in every Bluehost plan, and CodeGuard Backup Basic can be added for $2.99 more each month. Everyday backups and monitoring are handled for you by CodeGuard, which also notifies you of any changes.
The least expensive version of this protection function includes three monthly restorations, daily backup and monitoring, and 1GB of storage space. However, you can anticipate free automatic backups for a year and round-the-clock network monitoring with more expensive services like Choice Plus and Pro.
Easy to Use
Bluehost is the most well-liked web hosting service available not just due to its excellent features and goods, but also due to how incredibly simple it is to use. Because some people find web hosting to be confusing already, it isn’t necessary for the onboarding process to be challenging as well. Ease of use is a crucial quality to have.
But don’t worry, Bluehost features a quick and simple onboarding procedure that will have your website up and running in no time. It will prompt you to complete a form with an easy-to-use interface where you may list your website’s objectives, what you want to feature on it, and what you want the name and tagline to be.
Following the completion of these questions, you are given the option to select a theme from the Bluehost Marketplace, and WordPress is then installed for your convenience. You only need to be concerned with customization; Bluehost will handle the backend and all technical details.
Compatible with E-Commerce Tools
Bluehost is compatible with DaDa Mail, an email-marketing tool that enables you to send email-based newsletters to a subscriber list and costs $34.95 per year. You must spend money on an e-commerce platform like Magento, ShopSite, or TransFirst if you wish to have an online store or the capacity to accept payments online. We used Magento to drag and drop website pieces to produce an appealing store.
Magento has more flexibility than ShopSite, but if you don’t need a complex online storefront, ShopSite’s more straightforward interface will help you get started more quickly. The time that small enterprises would save might be valuable.
In addition to the widely used MySQL data management system, Bluehost also supports PostgreSQL. This makes it possible to use non-MySQL software like AgileBase (a tool for building bespoke apps) and Bacula (backup software).
Bluehost Performance (Speed) Tests
Speed is the most significant performance metric you should be looking for. It has an impact on your website’s user experience as well as your WordPress SEO rankings. According to studies, a 1-second delay in website speed can lower conversion rates by 10%. 50% of your traffic can be lost in a 3-4-second delay.
Let’s check how quickly Bluehost can load your website. You must pick a quick website hosting business if you want a quicker website. In order to determine Bluehost’s actual speed, we built a test site with this in mind. WordPress was used to develop our test site, and the Twenty-Twenty theme was used by default. For the construction of the theme, we imported dummy material with photos. After that, we checked the website’s speed using Pingdom.
Here are the outcomes of our tests:
As you can see, it takes less than two seconds for our test site to load. This result is impressive given that our website wasn’t employing any cache plugins or speed optimization techniques.
However, because there wasn’t much activity on this test site, the speed test alone isn’t sufficient.
We sent virtual users (VU) to our test site using a testing application called K6 (formerly LoadImpact) to see how Bluehost servers would react to an increase in traffic.
We used it to progressively increase the number of visitors to 100 to test the server’s ability to handle more requests from many simultaneous connections.
The green line represents the number of online users who are actively using the site, and the blue line represents the server load time. As you can see, even during periods of high traffic, the server load stayed constant throughout the test.
This test suggests that Bluehost may be the ideal choice for you if you want a highly fast website.
It’s also crucial to highlight that during our testing, there was no downtime recorded.
A 99.99% uptime guarantee is frequently made by hosting firms. For our test account, we configured an uptime monitoring alert. For a full analysis of the uptime of Bluehost servers, see the screenshot below.
Best Server Response Time
When you use tools like Pingdom to test a live website, you are essentially checking how quickly everything loads. This also applies to graphics, which load significantly more slowly than simple text.
Another program called BitCatcha was utilized to obtain a more precise server response time. It enables data loading-free server response time testing.
Response Times | ||||||
US | Canada | London | Singapore | Bangalore | Japan | Germany |
| 35 ms | 47 ms | 107 ms | 212 ms | 226 ms | 159 ms | 116 ms |
Performance: A+ | ||||||
As you can see, the US Bluehost server completed the task in a very small amount of time. In other places, the response time was slightly longer but still under a second.
This might be advantageous for your website if the US is your target market. If more of your users originate from different parts of the world, you can relocate your server.
Excellent Customer Support and Service
We all occasionally require assistance. It is crucial that you pick a web hosting provider that provides assistance and support when required.
As part of their broad knowledge base, Bluehost maintains a sizable library of articles, step-by-step instructions, and video tutorials. Beginners can greatly benefit from this, and the majority of frequent problems may be swiftly fixed with a fast search.
To get more assistance, you might, nevertheless, occasionally need to speak with a person.
You can contact a member of Bluehost’s support team through live chat or phone at any time of the day or night. When you require immediate assistance from technical support personnel, knowing that they are only a click away is quite useful.
The support system that relies on tickets is one thing that is absent. Bluehost recently made the decision to stop offering ticket-based support in favour of a more individualized live chat and phone-based strategy.
The ticket-based help system, which is especially useful if your problem cannot be resolved in a single live chat or phone session, may be missed by certain users, though.
Bluehost plans and features
For all sizes and price ranges, Bluehost offers a selection of hosting packages. This covers a variety of hosting options, such as managed WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, managed WooCommerce hosting, and shared hosting.
Let’s look at the benefits of Bluehost’s hosting packages.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is ideal for launching a new website with minimal traffic volume. Your website shares server facilities with other websites in a shared hosting environment.
Cloud Hosting
A more reliable and better upgrade to the shared hosting package. It enables you to use many cloud servers, allowing your website to switch to a different server automatically in the event of a hardware breakdown or significant demand.
WordPress Hosting
Their WordPress plans are specifically built for WordPress-powered websites. It is WordPress-optimized and can even safeguard your WordPress site from typical threats.
Woo-commerce Hosting
WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress, and it enables you to simply launch an online store using WordPress. WooCommerce hosting includes all of the necessary functionality to get your eCommerce business up and running.
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting is an upgrade to shared WordPress hosting that allows you to have virtual dedicated resources in a shared environment.
Dedicated Hosting Server
A dedicated hosting server for your website means that you will have complete access to the server’s resources. The disadvantage is that you will be responsible for managing the server on your own.
All Bluehost hosting plans provide 1-click WordPress installation. All plans have an easy-to-use hosting control panel from which you can manage your hosting, build databases, and so on.
Bluehost features a bespoke control panel that makes it easier for newbies to utilize. For more complex options, it also employs a customized version of the cPanel hosting dashboard.
Bluehost Pricing
The best part about Bluehost is how many alternatives it offers at a reasonable cost. It offers three main business niches, each with unique pricing structures. These consist of managed WordPress, online shops, and shared hosting:
Recommended: Bluehost Shared Hosting Plan Pricing
Bluehost offers a shared hosting option suitable for beginning websites. There are four main levels of their Shared hosting plan.
Let’s review Bluehost’s pricing and features offered by each plan.
- Basic
You can only host one website with the basic plan. It supports one domain and 25 subdomains, 50GB SSD storage, and five email accounts with 100 MB of disc space each. You will pay $2.95 per month for the first term. When you renew the account, you must pay $8.99 every month.
- Plus
The Plus plan includes truly unlimited bandwidth and unlimited websites with unlimited storage space. You’ll also get an unlimited number of email addresses. The first term’s price starts at $5.45 per month. When you renew your account, you must pay $11.99 every month.
- Choice Plus
The Choice Plus plan provides all of the benefits of the Plus plan. As bonuses worth more than $80 a year, you will also receive free domain privacy and automated daily backups provided by CodeGuard. The initial term costs $5.45 per month. When you renew, you must pay $16.99 per month.
- Pro
The Pro plan starts at $13.95 per month for the first term, then increases to $23.99 per month. It offers all of the features of the previous options as well as a dedicated IP address.
If you are just getting started with your website, you can choose from any of these plans. As your website expands, you may easily upgrade your hosting package.
Bluehost Online Store Plan Pricing
In comparison to its shared hosting plans, Bluehost’s online shop package appears to be much simpler. These particular plans work ideal for e-commerce websites where you can create, market, and start making sales using a WooCommerce-equipped store.
For the 12-month and 36-month periods of this plan, there are two pricing choices, which include:
Standard: $15.95/month with the 12-month plan and $12.95/month with a 36-month plan
Premium: $32.95/month with 12-month plan; $24.95/month with 36-month plan
Both options include limitless products, WooCommerce installed, live customer service every single day of the year, payment processing, promotional codes, and CodeGuard Backup Basic.
Bluehost Managed WordPress Plan Pricing
This effective strategy is geared toward people who are using WordPress to create their websites. It enables you to select a plan that gives your expert WordPress website scalability, security, speed, and support.
There are three pricing levels for this plan, all with 36-month periods, including:
Build Plan: $9.95/month
Grow Plan: $14.95/month
Scale Plan: $27.95/month
All plans come with premium features including a single WordPress website, 200+ global edge servers, free SSL, built-in high availability, a staging environment, and the best for up to 50,000 monthly visitors.
Additionally, you should count on malware detection and eradication, daily scheduled backups, and domain privacy and protection.
The Takeaways
Numerous websites frequently rate Bluehost as the best hosting service. They provide a variety of hosting solutions with a tonne of features that make it simple to create your website.
All of their hosting packages come with knowledgeable staff offering professional 24/7 customer support. Most significantly, they provide starter programs that are inexpensive and meet all financial needs.
You cannot go wrong by signing up for a Bluehost shared hosting plan if you are just starting off. It is inexpensive and equipped with all the necessary tools. You can quickly upgrade your hosting package as needed if your website gets more traffic.
Are you prepared to launch your website with Bluehost? To choose your Bluehost plan, click here.