A Comprehensive Review of BlueHost

If you are thinking that this is another run-of-the-mill review of BlueHost that is going to award them the first rank automatically, you are heavily mistaken. Once you go through this review’s contents, you will realize that this is nothing but a brutally honest assessment of the services provided by this company.

Bluehost is a reliable company. It is amongst the best web hosting companies to offer automatic WordPress installation. Bluehost is great for those who are starting out with WordPress. They have some great features and even offer a free domain name for all its customers.

If you are thinking about signing up with BlueHost to serve your web hosting needs, allow us to give you a detailed evaluation of their features. We will provide a list with a detailed description of BlueHost’s pros and cons, covering all the roadblocks that you might have to overcome upon signing up with them. We will also provide you with a thorough description of the different plans they have to offer while lining out the important features each of them carry. Finally, we will tell you if we think BlueHost is a service worth recommending to users.

We are pretty sure that our attention to detail will help you make a decision.

BlueHost is one of the top web hosting solution companies in the market. Since it’s inception in 2003, Matt Heaton and his entire team have worked tirelessly to provide premium services to their customers all around the world. Based out of Provo in Utah, they have comprehensive tools to secure a seamless experience for users everywhere. All of their plans provide unlimited disk space as well as unmetered bandwidth. Most of their plans offer a free domain name for a year. They have a new in-house cPanel called Bluerock that claims to enhance speed and security. All shared hosting plans provide free SSD drives to the subscribers. Solid State Drives ensure that your data is protected and can be transferred at lightning-fast speeds.

All BlueHost servers run on the latest programming languages and software, optimized for better performance. In this case, they are PHP7, HTTP/2, and NGINX caching. You can also expect free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates as well as a free subscription to Cloudflare CDN.

To allay any concerns about the quality of services as well as compatibility issues, BlueHost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.

On top of all of this, BlueHost is endorsed by WordPress. For those of you who are not familiar with WordPress, it is possibly the best CMS platform currently present in the market. A large chunk of good content available on the internet is created and handled on WordPress. When a trusted platform endorses a web hosting company, you know that it has something good to provide.

The BlueHost community strongly supports the open-source community. They wish to create “a better safer web for everyone”. They regularly invest in projects that seek to enhance the open-source experience. Being strong proponents of web civility, they strive to make their service accessible to all age groups. If you are familiar with programming, you can make good use of their advanced developer tools such as a completely customized Linux kernel, SSH access, and FTP.

While opting for a web hosting company to take care of your online business needs, it is important to choose a reliable company. Any web hosting company worth its salt will have to provide a basic compatible service. Along with this, they will have to provide reliable customer support. These provisions are the bare minimum required from any decent company. You have to keep in mind that you are not the final customer. The goal is to provide your website visitors with a seamless service. The moment your website seems glitchy to your visitors, your revenue will come crashing down.

Make sure that you research properly before investing in a subscription. While doing so, keep an eye out for the pros and cons of the service provided. The idea is simple, no web hosting service is perfect. You will have to take your call based upon what your plan or vision dictates. There will be compromises to make everywhere. However, it is important to see which ones are worth making to make your site a success.

BlueHost has been a force to reckon with since its inception in 2003. Currently, they are responsible for hosting over 2 million websites around the world. BlueHost is also known for its cheap shared hosting options. Initially, they offered shared hosting plans only. With time, they have gone on to include various services such as cloud hosting and domains. They also have tailored options for WordPress and  WooCommerce.

BlueHost has been praised for its interactive and smooth interface which makes it easy to use. Their cPanel also makes installing WordPress extremely easy. Even though they rank pretty highly on Consumer ratings, it would be a folly to expect that BlueHost does not have any cons. Take a look at the information provided below to judge for yourself if this is the solution to your web hosting problems.

Here is a list of things that are going well for BlueHost –

BlueHost offers some really inexpensive plans for everyone to enjoy web hosting services. Take a look at two of their simple plans. You will see that the features offered at that price range are nothing short of a steal.

Here is an outline of the basic plan –

The BlueHost plus plan offers features such as this –

These are inherently great plans to make use of when it comes to set up hosting for your website. However, to get a good price with BlueHost, you have to pay in advance for 36 months.

Bluehost is heavily compatible with WordPress. If you are looking to use WordPress for hosting your website, you can rely on their brand new Bluerock platform. It is a control panel made for WordPress. You can enjoy an integrated experience with your WordPress websites.

Installing WordPress is not a headache anymore. You can opt for the one-click automatic WordPress installation process. You can also have WordPress installed directly on your account, right when you are signing up.

With Bluerock, expect WordPress pages to be loaded quicker than ever before. The technical stack used by BlueHost before this pales in comparison. BlueRock comes with an in-built NGINX page caching mechanism.

Your WordPress websites will enjoy the benefits of all the latest security and performance features such as:

BlueHost sticks to its 30-day money-back guarantee. It would not have been a feasible idea if BlueHost did not believe in its products truly. Do not worry, even if you miss the deadline of 30 days, you are still eligible for a prorated refund. This is obviously valid in the hosting package that you chose to subscribe to. There are no hidden fees or penalties that will suddenly appear when you try to leave behind their services.

While looking for a web hosting service, it is important to keep an eye out for the uptime provided by the servers. Uptime percentage indicates the time for which you can expect your website to be available to your visitors.

Server uptimes heavily depend on issues such as client activity, traffic, hardware malfunction, hard-drive failure as well as corrupted files. BlueHost makes it a point to resolve these issues within15 minutes of you reporting the problem. However, in certain cases, 15 minutes is not a realistic timeline to fix the problem and get your website running. In such scenarios, BlueHost can take additional time to reach and take care of the issue promptly.

If a web host promises to provide you 100 % uptime, they are probably fibbing. Due to the list of reasons mentioned above and many more such issues, promising complete uptime is nothing but fanciful. However, Bluehost guarantees an uptime of 99.94%. This means that you can expect your website to be down for four and a half hours in a year. Now that is some crazy reliable uptime right there.

BlueHost is known for its ability to provide great security features for your websites.
They offer Secure Shell Access to their customers. SSH allows web developers and admins to access the configuration files in a secure manner. Simultaneously, they also offer an IP address blacklist, account filters ( email and user), along with access to digital certificates and private keys.

An SSL certificate is a great indicator of a secure website. SSL certificates ensure that the information shared by users on your website will remain secure. This is indicated by the padlock sign followed by a ‘https’ at the beginning of your website address. All BlueHost plans come with a free SSL certificate. You will not have to worry about your users feeling unsafe while logging on to your website.

BlueHost uses anti-spam tools such as SpamExperts, Apache SpamAssassin, and Spam Hammer to keep your site protected at all times. If you want to add extra security features to your website, you will have to spend a little more.

If you get a Bluehost subscription, technical support will be provided round the clock, throughout the week. You will not be on your own while hosting a website with BlueHost. Make sure that you put their knowledge database to good use. You can check out tutorial videos and glance at supportive documentations.

Use the knowledge database smartly. Before trying to contact the customer support via phone calls or live chat, try and find out if others have faced similar problems. If they have, you will definitely find the solution to your problem in the wide selection of tutorial videos on the Youtube channel.

In 2018, BlueHost raked $11 million in through affiliate commissions. This is a clear indicator that BlueHost is one of the most popular web hosting affiliate programs currently present in the market.

Signing up for the BlueHost affiliate program is easy. You do not have to pay anything to become a member of the program. You do not need to meet any particular requirement criteria as well. BlueHost does not cap their commissions. You get $65 for every referral you manage to make.

If you start your online business journey with BlueHost, it is quite possible you might want to stick with them. However, if you are worried about BlueHost restricting your growth, there is a simple solution to the problem. BlueHost has four major plans to offer to all users along with a couple of others. You will not have to switch hosting companies to accommodate your growth.

BlueHost has shared hosting, cloud hosting, WordPress hosting PS, dedicated server hosting as well as reseller hosting.

Bluehost has a Quick Start plan for those who are new to the online business game.
The plan offers a 45-minute long session with 1 on 1 training, guided by a company expert.

Use this plan to familiarize yourself with the basics of website management. Learn to use the tools made available by Bluehost such as the cPanel, check out the site builder recommendations, make the most of theme and plugin installation assistance, email account guidance, and other such services.

There are a lot of hosting providers who offer free training to their customers. Paying for this one might seem to be a little overboard. However, if you think you need help and want to finish all of the training in one session, this will be a good deal for you.

If you choose to subscribe to a Bluehost plan, you will be given a domain name for free for your first year. They also offer advertising credits valid on Google Adwords as well as Bing, and other search engines.

The most expensive plan that Bluehost has to offer is The WordPress Pro. It is priced at $19.95. It delivers greatly on speed and security. Along with this, it provides regular WordPress core and plug-in updates.  This plan also takes care of your backup concerns and allows you to stage your website.

With plans like the WordPress Pro, Bluehost offers live customer support. They also offer hands-on help with design and functionality. All your questions are answered by WordPress experts.

Now that we have taken a look at the positive features of Bluehost, it is time to turn our attention towards the drawbacks.

The introductory price seems pretty cheap at $2.95 per month. The fact that it is applicable only on a 36-month subscription makes it an expensive affair. You can select the 12-month or 24-month plans, but the monthly prices are significantly higher.

Selecting the Bluehost Plus plan for 36 months will peg the per month price at $4.45. The moment you switch to the 24 months or 12-month plan, the monthly rates increase to $5.45 and $6.45 respectively. That is a significant hike. Bluehost does not offer 3-month or 6-month subscriptions for your benefit.

Bluehost extends the backup feature as a courtesy. They are not liable to regularly backup your data. You are responsible for making sure that you keep regular backups of your website. Subscribers have to use the cPanel to run individual backups and store them on their local devices.

Bluehost overwrites backed up data every 30 days. This means that you are restricted to access only recent backups. It does not matter if that is the point you want your website to be restored to, your options are extremely limited. According to their terms, Bluehost cannot be held responsible for any problems arising due to this.

If you wish to keep regular backups of your website data, you will have to purchase an add-on from Bluehost. Site Backup Pro is a paid feature that regularly creates and stores backups of your website.

A plethora of Bluehost plans such as Plus, Choice Plus, and Business Pro, claim to provide unlimited everything. They claim to have unlimited hosting, storage, email accounts, and subdomains.

While this might seem enticing, it would be wise to go through their user agreement. In the section marked Usage Policies and Definitions, under clause 7, it is specified that the adjective unlimited is restricted to a certain number or level.

In that regard, the unlimited services offered by Bluehost aren’t any different from other hosting services that claim to offer the same things.

All shared web hosting services regularly restrict subscribers from over-using resources. This is to make sure that everyone has equal access to the resources and no one suffers from a lack of speed in a shared hosting speed. Shared hosting services by freezing CPU usage.

Bluehost introduced CPU throttling back in 2009. It was a sudden move that had many subscribers baffled. In order to find out if this is happening with you at Bluehost, you will have to log on to your cPanel. Although this is not unique to Bluehost, it is still something you should be wary about while subscribing to their services.

Bluehost hosting plans offer access to Linux based servers only. They will not provide you Windows hosting at all. To be fair, Linux is the preferred and more popular operating system when it comes to selecting web servers.

This will only be a problem if you want to access Windows hosting.

Bluehost does not provide an uptime guarantee for its users. While searching for a hosting provider, it is advisable to get a service that is close to the 100% uptime mark. Although Bluehost does not provide a guarantee, its Uptime Agreement mentions that issues are generally solved in about 15 minutes.

Bluehost averages at about 99.94% uptime. The .06% outage would mean that in a year you can expect your site to be down for at least 4.4 hours. Although Bluehost provides pretty reliable uptime, the lack of a guarantee is what makes it seem a little bit shaky.

Bluehost does not have the fastest load times. Considering that this is an important metric for the visitors of your site, it is important to fare well in this aspect. Studies have found that nearly 47% of consumers think that a website should not take longer than 2 seconds to load. It has also been found that around 40% of users tend to leave the page if the site takes more than 3 seconds to load. Even a one-second delay to load a page on mobile devices has a visible impact on your conversion rates.

You have to regularly optimize the speed and performance of your website. If you do not do so, you are bound to lose out on traffic. Selecting a hosting provider that takes care of this problem is nothing short of a blessing.

Bluehost regularly uses up-selling practices to make you purchase more products from them. Annoying pop-ups, alerts, and intrusive ads will constantly re-appear so that you are forced to buy more. These are visible right before checking out to sign up with Bluehost. These are super annoying and irritating. Bluehost also has prices tagged for different add-ons that are generally free with other hosting providers.

Bluehost provides round the clock customer support. However, this does not translate into the fact that the responses are always made in a timely fashion. You can expect customer support to get back to you anytime between 10 minutes to an hour. Sometimes the first response might be an auto-generated one as well.

However, Bluehost has been listening to customer complaints. It is evident from the fact that they have made major investments to alleviate their customer support. The development is directed towards customer experience and success. This has done wonders for Bluehost’s customer satisfaction scores.

Although Bluehost has interesting introductory offers, they are always applicable for long term contracts. These offers can be very misleading because, by the time you want to renew services, there is a hike of nearly 90%. We suggest that you sign up for a 24 or 36-month introductory pricing plan. That way you can make the most of their discounted offers.

Bluehost offers site migration for a price. They will not transfer your site to their hosting for free. Compared to other providers, they charge a hefty fee to transfer 5 websites and 20 email accounts. This does not do Bluehost any favors.

Now that we are done with glossing over the pros and cons of a Bluehost subscription, let us quickly go over the plans that they have to offer. Bluehost has the Basic plan, the Plus plan, the Choice Plus plan, and the Business Pro plan.

Our suggestion would be, to begin with the Basic plan. Not only is it the cheapest plan they have, but it is also the easiest one to operate. Depending on your vision and growth, you can always upgrade to a higher plan to get more features.

The Bluehost Basic Plan is available for $2.95 per month. An ideal plan for beginners, it allows you to host one website. This plan comes with 50 GB of storage space and a100 MB of e-mail storage. You are free to get 5 email accounts and 25 sub domains. They also offer a basic site backup service.

This plan is geared towards bloggers and those who wish to run a personal website or a small business. The features in this plan are great for you to sustain yourself and grow. The plan can be renewed at $7.99 per month if you sign up for a 24 month subscription scheme.

The Bluehost Plus Plan is available at $4.45 per month. This is Bluehost’s most popular plan. It allows you to host unlimited websites and email accounts. You have access to unlimited SSD storage, email space, as well as unlimited subdomains.

These unlimited deals and extra features help you save nearly $24 a year. You also get access to SpamExperts. The renewal rate for this plan starts at $10.99 per month. This is an excellent deal for visionary new comers and hardened veterans alike. The freedom that accompanies this plan will definitely help you shape your dream and take it to new heights.

The Bluehost Choice Plus Plan is available at $6.95 a month. Although It is packed with more resources than the other two plans mentioned above, it is still not a popular choice amongst customers. This is probably due to the fact that there are more enticing hosting deals at a similar price range available from other companies.

This plan includes unlimited SSD storage space, email accounts, and unlimited subdomains. It also allows you to host unlimited websites. The Choice Plus Plan helps you save $80 a year simply in extra features. Site Backup Pro and domain name privacy are two key features available to customers. This plan can be renewed at $14.99 a month.

The Bluehost Business Pro Plan starts at $13.95 a month. Think of this as a plan that provides everything that the Choice Plus Plan has to offer, only with more features and two domains. Your unlimited website hosting, bandwidth, and email account capabilities remain unchanged. The unlimited SSD storage space still exists.

The Business Pro Plan includes a dedicated IP and provides up to 300,000 inodes. They also provide you with a subscription of Spam Experts. All of these features are available for two domains. If you subscribe to this plan, you will also get an SSL certificate along with a subscripton to their Site Backup Pro service. With a lot of other service perks, The Business Pro plan can be renewed at $23.99.

If you are looking to host a single website and have no use for a lot of features, my advice to you would be to go for the Basic plan. If you have no intention of running multiple websites simultaneously, there is not reason why you should be paying for a plan that charges you more money for exactly that.

However, If your vision incorporates building a strong online presence, you might need to host multiple websites. It is the same for those who wish to branch out continously and find different trades to simultaneously dabble in. If this is applicable to you and your plans, definitely go for the Choice Plus or the Business Pro Plan. If you have a subscription to either, there will rarely be anything that you would be left wanting for.

In this section we will go into the details of each plan and see how each one of them fares when pitted against each other. We will be making three major comparisons here. The first one will be between the Bluehost Basic Plan and the Bluehost Plus plan. The second one will be between the Bluehost Plus plan and the Bluehost Choice Plus plan. The last comparison will be between the Bluehost Choice Plus plan and the Bluehost Business Pro plan.

The objective of these comparisons is to collect well rounded responses about which plan is suitable when. Let us begin. about which

The Bluehost Basic plan is the cheapest one that they have to offer. This plan allows you to host just one website. With the Bluehost Plus plan, you can host as many websites as you want to. However, it would be unwise to simply rush for the Plus plan simply because they offer unlimited website hosting. The number of websites you require is dependent on the plan of action you have in mind. If multiple websites do not feature in that, it is absolutely okay.

The two plans are differentiated also on the basis of storage space allocated to each of them. The Basic plan sports a 50 GB storage space. The Plus plan on the other other hand provides you access to unlimited storage space. If your website is image and video heavy, it will definitely do you good to opt for the Plus plan. However, this does not mean you should totally disregard the Basic plan and its 50 GB storage space. It is sufficient for those who want to build a text heavy single website.

Lastly, the number of email accounts you can create and the amount you can store on these accounts varies majorly between both plans. On one hand, there might not be a lot of use for unlimited email accounts. People rarely use more than five email accounts for their online business activity. On the other hand however, 100 MB of storage space for emails is pretty less even for 5 email accounts. To be honest, it might not even be enough for 2 email accounts to function properly.

There aren’t too many differences that set the Bluehost Plus plan from the Bluehost Choice Plus plans. Both of these plans sport unlimited email accounts, website hosting, and unlimited storage space. Thus, there are no significant differences to be traced between the two plans and their base features.

The difference is visible in the add-on and extra features. While the Plus plan provides you access to SpamExperts as a major add-on feature, the Choice Plus plan has a couple of crucial things to offer. Subscribing the Choice Plus plan offers you whois privacy, a domain privacy service. It also provides access to SiteBackup Pro, that ensures automatic and regular data backup along with easy restoration services.

The basic difference between the Bluehost Choice Plus plan and the Bluehost Business Pro plan is the fact that they are geared towards catering to very different customer bases. The Business Pro plan is tailor made for e-commerce enterprises that require resource-heavy WordPress hosting. To enable and ensure this, websites on the Business Pro plan are hosted on  high performance servers. This gives the plan an edge over the others.

The high-performance servers used to host websites on the Pro plan are more sable. They see an 80% reduction in the number of accounts per server. This allows members of the Business Pro plan to use more resources such as unfettered CPU and disk usage, along with a stable bandwidth. The Business Pro plan clearly offers more speed and power owing to the low density of users on these servers. This plan also provides you with a dedicated IP address along with a private SSL certificate.

Before answering this rather important question, let us take a look at what the Bluerock platform has to offer. Bluerock is a contorl panel that is completely focused on offering WordPress solutions and facilitate seamless integration. It is due to Bluerock that Bluehost can deliver WordPress pages with more efficiency and speed than before. All websites hosted on Bluehost will enjoy the following features:

Now that you are informed about the plans that Bluehost has to offer, you are better suited to choose a hosting plan according to your own needs. You can always upgrade to a plan that is higher than your current one, whenever you think your website needs more resources to function smoothly.

My reccomendation about which plan would be suitable for you is based on the kind of usage you want :

I will use this section to answer a couple of questions that constantly plague the mind of customers.

Bluehost is a premium web hosting company. It has a wide array of hosting services to offer such as shared hosting, cloud hosting, and VPS hosting. They also offer dedicated hosting services such as WordPress hosting and WooCommerce hosting. Bluehost also handles domain registration for you. It is great for all kinds of web hosting, starting from personal blogs to enterprises that want a solid brand presence on the internet.

This question can be answered depending on the plan you have subscribed to. The four plans available are Basic, Plus, Choice Plus, and Business Pro. The Basic plan allows you to host one domain or website. Whereas, on the Plus, Choice Plus, and Business Pro panels you can host multiple domains and websites. This is obviously due to a visible difference in the prices and availability. For better clarity, let us try and look at the details of different domains available.

Bluehost is based out of Provo, Utah, in the United States. Matt Heaton founded this web hosting company back in 2003. His motivation to create a good web hosting service was to fix the inadequacies of services offered back then.

Bluehost and Hostgator are not only separate brands but are also separate companies. However both of these companies are subsidiaries of Endurance International Group (EIG). The Endurance International Group owns other small web hosting companies such as FatCow, JustHost, HostMonster, and A Small Orange.

They have robust customer support. They offer round the clock service to their clients. You can contact them via telephone, email, as well as live chat. You will receive the help you are looking for.

To check if your Website is down, you need to visit bluehost.com/hosting/serverstatus.
You will shortly receive an update on the condition of your website and if it is working.

Currently the Bluehost tech support offers solutions only and only in English. At the time of writing this review, Bluehost does not support multiple languages. This is something that could be integrated or worked upon in the future.

No, Bluehost does not house a site builder for their customers. They encourage customers to access services of proper CMS sites. WordPress and Weebly are great options for building a website pretty quickly. Their site wizard will take you through the steps and you just have to pick what you like.

Follow these simple steps to buy or renew SSL certificates –

Endurance International Group is the parent company of Bluehost. EIG has launched a mobile app to help small and medium business owners connect with customers and other entrepreneurs. Take a look at few of the apps’ features –

Yes, Bluehost has Cloudflare CDN and offers access to all their customers for free. Why do you need a CDN though? It is to ensure that if traffic on your site fluctuates, your website does not come crashing down or become extremely slow. CDN prevents this from happening by storing your content on multiple servers all across the world. So, when users are accessing your site, they are downloading the data from the server located closest to them. This prevents a single server from bearing too much traffic load.

The Search Engine Jumpstart package is a Search Engine Optimizer. It is an add-on that is available for $1.99 per month. It makes sure that your websites appear quickly when being searched for in various search engines such as Google, and Bing. You will need to invest in SEO to boost your business anyways, and this is a pretty good investment.

SiteLock is a website protection add-on from Bluehost. It can be purchased for $1.99 a month. It provides and handles standard protection procedures such as:

Postini is a Google powered industrial strength spam filter. It claims to filter your email via advanced spam filters. For $1 a month, free your email inbox of all kinds of junk mails and messages.

Site Backup Pro is an add-on that takes the responsibility of creating regular and automatic backups of your website. You can download a compressed file with all of your site’s features and resources necessary for restoration. All you have to do is select a backup version that is desirable, and click on the restart button.

Follow the steps:

iOS

Android

Information about who owns a domain is pretty easily available to anyone who is familiar with the ways of the internet. This can be prevented by purchasing domain privacy. For $11.88 per year per domain, you can get domain privacy. This will alter your contact information to Bluehost on the database. This will ensure that your personal information is not accessible to random individuals on the internet.

Bluehost accepts all major payment oprtions. Let us take a look at all that they have to offer.

You could simultaneously also place a purchase order. This can be paid for by both money order as well as checks. Remember that once you have paid for a purchase order, you will have to stick to this method lest you create an entirely new account.

Finally, let me try and answer if Bluehost is the right web hosting service for you. While there is no straight forward answer to this question, I will attempt this as neutrally as possible.

I would suggest that you do go for a subscription with Bluehost if you wish to create a small business site or a personal blog. This is because Bluehost is an extremely cheap and is very user friendly. If you have not stepped into the web hosting zone before, Bluehost is the ideal partner to start this journey with.

However, on the other hand, I would ask you to think carefully before getting a subscription, if –

If you are confused about whether or not this is the right web hosting service for you, do make use of Bluehost’s 30-day money-back guarantee. This feature will allow you to get a taste of what is in store for you if you become a subscriber. It will also help you make a more informed decision.