If you want to start a website or a blog, you need a reliable web hosting provider.
Bluehost is a big name in town when it comes to web hosting.
Most web developers, digital marketers, and bloggers highly recommend Bluehost.
Heck! Even WordPress, the most popular CMS in the market, recommends Bluehost to its users.
So, why Bluehost? What makes them so popular?
In this Bluehost review, I’ll help you find out if the web hosting company is worth your money. I’ll also cover:
- What are the pros and cons of using Bluehost
- How fast are Bluehost servers
- How good is their customer support
- If Bluehost is great for beginners.
To that end let’s dive in.
Introduction to Bluehost
Bluehost is an American worldwide web hosting company that provides website hosting and domain registration services.
It was founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton and Cliff Baltzley and then acquired by the EIG Group in 2011 which is the same company that owns HostGator and Ipage.
The company is based in Orem, Utah, the United States with its data centers located in Utah, London, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Hong Kong.
It has over 2 million customers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly each month with new features added to its services.
Bluehost Web Hosting Plans
Bluehost offers affordable shared hosting, VPS, and to Dedicated servers to its customers.
The Shared hosting plan which is one of their most popular hosting packages is offered under three tiers.
- Basic Plan: it is the cheapest Bluehost plan. It has all the essential features to get your website running and online.
- Plus: You get added features such as more space and hosting unlimited websites.
- Choice Plus: you get more resources, privacy, and security for your website. This includes domain privacy that protects your WHOIS information.
- Pro: this hosting plan gives you more resources, hardened security, and a performance boost. It includes optimized CPU resources and a dedicated IP.
Bluehost also offers WordPress-managed hosting at a competitive price.
If you want the WordPress management roles taken off your hands their team of experts makes sure that WordPress site optimized for perfomance.
Suppose you want to scale big?
Bluehost offers VPS and Dedicated servers. This enables you to improve the performance of your website and its security.
In each plan you use with Bluehost, you gain access to
- A free SSL certificate
- A free domain name
- Unmetered Bandwidth
- A good web hosting space
- Unlimited email accounts
- Around-the-clock customer support
- Ability to scale big
Bluehost Review: Value for Money
Bluehost is among the most affordable hosting providers for first-timers. They offer web hosting services for as low as $2.95/ month plus a free domain for your first year of hosting.
That’s rock bottom. But not cheap enough since, unlike Dreamhost, which gives you the option to pay for monthly pricing, for Bluehost, you need to pay for a whole year.
And to be honest, for most entrepreneurs who want to get their business off the ground with the smallest price, Bluehost pricing won’t be as great as it sounds.
Furthermore, you wouldn’t expect much from them with such pricing.
Your website would be allocated low resources. And this would, in turn, impact your website’s performance as its traffic grows.
The other downside of the Bluehost Pricing model is that it will shoot during renewals to the regular pricing.
So what’s the normal pricing for Bluehost you may ask?
Okay, do you remember me telling you that you will get a free domain in your first contract?
Okay, what happens when the 12 months or 36 months of your hosting ends? You won’t get a free domain anymore.
Renewal pricing for your domain will apply. And this will vary with the domain TLD.
For example, it would cost you $18.99 to renew a .com domain with Bluehost.
The same applies to their hosting plans. You pay $2.95 per month during your first year of hosting but during renewals, the price shoots to $10.99 per month.
Boy, that’s equally x3 more expensive than your first year of hosting.
Okay, don’t hate them yet.
Because that’s normal for most hosts. They lure you with a ridiculously cheap hosting price, only to surprise you during renewals.
As you can see, most hosts raise their prices during renewals. So this is not something new.
Bluehost Review: Speed Performance
Bluehost uses Apache web servers in all their hosting plans.
Apache has been a go-to web server software for most hosting companies because they are stable, flexible, and reliable.
The only downside with Apache is that it’s not effective for high-traffic websites.
That’s because they end up being slow and can cause downtime in case of sudden traffic spikes.
If you have a high-traffic blog or website, Bluehost wouldn’t be as good as you would want them to be.
In that case, it’ll be better to choose a hosting provider that uses a more effective web server like NGINX or LiteSpeed like Kinsta and A2 Hosting.
However, if you are just starting, Bluehost would be an ideal option. Apache is capable of being stable and reliable for small business websites which receive less than 300000 monthly visits.
Furthermore, Bluehost makes it simpler to configure a Cloudflare CDN to your website.
This in turn gives your website an incredible speed performance for your website by availing your website across a network of proxy servers.
Bluehost’s Speed Test
To find out how fast Bluehost’s web hosting services are, I decided to test the services myself.
So I created a demo site using Bluehost’s web hosting plans and ran a speed test using Pingdom.
Here’s what I got.
Honestly, 2.16 seconds isn’t bad for a new website considering that I had neither cached the pages nor minified the website code.
Furthermore, I ran a speed test using Bitcatcha to check how fast Bluehost servers are.
The results I got were quite impressive.
As you can see from the tests, Bluehost’s speed performance is great.
Their servers are quick and for a new website experiencing low traffic, Bluehost’s web hosting packages really stand out.
Bluehost Customer Support: How Do They Fair?
Bluehost is reputable for having excellent customer support. They offer support via live chat and phone.
On their website, they claim to offer 24/7 support to their customers.
Unlike most hosts that hide their live chat widget, Bluehost makes it easy to contact them. Their livechat widget is located on most of their pages at effective positions.
Now the question is, how good is their support team? I wanted to find out and so I hopped into a live chat with their team.
Surprisingly, in less than a minute I had received a response.
As you can see, their team was to help.
Pros and cons of Using Bluehost
Bluehost is an excellent hosting company that you can use to get your website online in minutes.
But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect for everyone.
And as any company has its advantages and drawbacks so is Bluehost.
Here are the pros and cons of using Bluehost.
Pros
- You’ll receive a free domain, SSL certificate, and a CDN via Cloudflare.
- Bluehost is a WordPress-recommended hosting provider. That being said, you won’t be using any host to create a website but the largest Content Management System trusts.
- Bluehost’s introduction costs and renewal prices are favorable compared to its competitors.
- Bluehost has a 99.98% uptime guarantee. That minimizes any chance of your website going offline. Also, Bluehost’s speed performance is satisfactory.
- Outstanding customer support
- They have a beginner-friendly dashboard and even automatically install WordPress for you in your primary domain.
- Their hosting is scalable.
- 30 -days money-back guarantee in case their hosting was not satisfying.
Cons
- Bluehost does not offer free migrations. You’ll need to migrate the site yourself. Otherwise, if you want their team to help, you have to pay a $149.99 fee.
- Extra hidden add-ons during checkout. If you’re not careful, Bluehost automatically adds some premium add-ons when checking out your order. Which, in most cases, you won’t need.
- Prices shoot during renewals.
Should You Use Bluehost?
It doesn’t matter whether it is your first time launching a website, the Bluehost interface makes creating a website for beginners a breeze. They have a great support team that is ready to help you in case you are stuck.
Furthermore, the company offers hosting at a competitive price. And in case you are not happy with their hosting, you can cancel the contract before 30 days elapse.
Although it is not the most perfect, it’s a great company that offers awesome hosting services in value for your money.
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