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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bluehost offers quite a few pricing plans for individual website goals and needs. Let’s break it down into each level.
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.
Bluehost is a great option to consider if you plan to build your website with WordPress and if you know you want to commit to a multi-year web hosting plan. The company has been recommended by WordPress since 2005 and is one of the most integrated services for building WordPress websites.