Bluehost Review

Bluehost Web Hosting Review

Bluehost Review: A Comprehensive Summary

Why Is This Popular Web Hosting Company?

Have your read mixed reviews about Bluehost and can not determine if you need to register? The simple fact of the matter is that Bluehost hosts more than 2M sites so that they have to do something right. Bluehost review using pros-cons, latest deals, and prices. Go and See Bluehost.com

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General Information & Bluehost Hosting Overview

1. OUR FINDING: Best Overall Shared Hosting

2. SPEED: 405 ms (January 2017 to May 2020 average)

3. UPTIME: 99.99% (January 2017 to May 2020 average)

4. SUPPORT: 24/7 Live Chat

5. APPS: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and some website builders

6. FEATURES: Unmetered bandwidth and storage, email accounts, free domain 1st year

7. HOSTING PLANS: Shared, Cloud, VPS, and Dedicated Servers

8. SITE TRANSFER: Not free

9. PRICING: Starting at $2.95/mo (renews at $7.99/mo)

Bluehost is a Web hosting Firm Based by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Provo, Utah.  They've got a team of

750 individuals working round the clock. Being an experienced web hosting from Wordpress.org, they comprise

1-Click installations in each of their plans.

We Have been a paying Bluehost hosting Client from the last 10+ years.That means we have been tracking their

lowest-priced "basic" shared Hosting plan functionality (both typical load bandwidth and time) for 10+ years. This

Bluehost review depends heavily on information, in addition to the Overall experience with their hosting

features, services, and customer care support.

Similarly to many other web hosting companies, they also provide their brand new users a free domain name for

the initial year. Their plans start from $2.95/mo and include enhanced safety, backups, and free SSL certification.

These help to maintain your blog or site protected and secure.

In general, their past 24-month performance was great. Bluehost is obviously at the top using its own uptime

(99.99%) along with a quick Load time of 405ms (0.4seconds).

Bluehost Web Hosting Review

Bluehost Competitors

Key factors to consider when researching web hosting companies include uptime, speed, security, customer support, pricing, and user-friendliness. Here are some of the best Bluehost competitors on the market right now:

• SiteGround: Bluehost and SiteGround offer similar hosting plans and features, but SiteGround is known for its excellent customer support and high-performance servers. An in-depth comparison could focus on factors such as uptime, speed, security, customer support, pricing, and user-friendliness. SiteGround has better speed and security features than Bluehost, such as Google Cloud Platform infrastructure. Compare Bluehost and SiteGround here.

SiteGround: Bluehost offers similar plans and features to SiteGround, but SiteGround's high-performance servers and excellent customer service are its most notable assets. A detailed comparison would focus on uptime, security, support from customers, price, and ease of use. SiteGround offers better security and speed features, including Google Cloud Platform. Compare Bluehost and SiteGround here.

• Hostinger offers web hosting services that are affordable for both individuals and small businesses. Hostinger has over 29 millions users around the world. It is popular for its affordable prices, user-friendly platform and great customer service. Hostinger offers a wide range of hosting services, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting, and WordPress hosting. Hostinger's shared hosting plan starts at only $2.99 per monthly, making them one of the most cost-effective hosting providers on the market. Hostinger does not offer all of the features offered by other providers, but it's a great choice for people on a budget. Read my Bluehost vs Hostinger comparison here.

Hostinger: Hostinger is a web hosting provider that offers affordable hosting solutions for individuals and businesses. With over 29 million users worldwide, Hostinger is known for its low prices, easy-to-use platform, and excellent customer support. Hostinger provides a variety of services including WordPress, VPS, shared, and cloud hosting. Their shared hosting plans start at just $2.99 per month, making it one of the most affordable hosting providers in the market. Hostinger does not offer all of the features offered by other providers, but it's a great choice for people on a budget. Read my Bluehost vs Hostinger comparison here.

• HostGator: HostGator is another popular web hosting provider that offers similar plans and features to Bluehost. A detailed comparison would focus on uptime, customer service, speed, pricing, ease of use, and other features like website builders or domain registration. Read my Bluehost vs HostGator comparison here.

HostGator : HostGator, another popular hosting company that provides similar features and plans to Bluehost. An in-depth comparison could focus on areas such as uptime, speed, customer support, pricing, user-friendliness, and additional features such as website builders and domain registration. Read my Bluehost vs HostGator comparison here.

• DreamHost: DreamHost focuses on security and performance, offering a variety of hosting packages to meet different requirements. A detailed comparison would include areas like uptime, speed and security. It could also cover customer service, pricing and other features, such as domain registration and email hosting. Here's my Bluehost and DreamHost comparison.

DreamHost: DreamHost is known for its focus on performance and security, and it offers a range of hosting plans to suit different needs. An in-depth comparison could focus on areas such as uptime, speed, security, customer support, pricing, and features such as website builders, domain registration, and email hosting. Here's my Bluehost and DreamHost comparison.

• InMotion Hosting : InMotion Hosting, a leading web host provider is known for the focus it places on reliability and speed. A detailed comparison would include factors like uptime, support, price, ease of use, website builders, email hosting, domain registration and customer service. Here's my Bluehost and InMotion hosting comparison.

InMotion Hosting: InMotion Hosting is a web hosting provider that is known for its focus on speed and reliability. An in-depth comparison could focus on factors such as uptime, speed, customer support, pricing, user-friendliness, and additional features such as website builders, domain registration, and email hosting. Here's my Bluehost and InMotion hosting comparison.

• A2 Hosting: A2 Hosting is another popular web hosting provider that is known for its fast Turbo NVMe servers and developer-friendly features. A detailed comparison would focus on uptime, speed and customer service, as well as pricing and user-friendliness. It could also include additional features like website builders, email hosting, domain registration and other services. Read my Bluehost vs A2 Hosting comparison here.

A2 Hosting A2 hosting is another well-known web hoster that offers developer friendly features and fast Turbo NVMe server. A detailed comparison would focus on uptime, speed and customer service, as well as pricing and user-friendliness. It could also include additional features like website builders, email hosting, domain registration and other services. Here's my Bluehost and A2 hosting comparison.

• Bluehost offers an easy and simple way to manage and create your website.

• SiteGround's best feature is for advanced users, as it has more tools and features to optimize the speed, performance and security of your website.

• Hostinger offers users the lowest prices.

Can You Build A Web Store With Bluehost?

The Bluehost website builder offers a simple and low-cost route to building a web store, as we've discussed above.

The company also has a couple of WooCommerce hosting plans with even more features. (WooCommerce is a powerful WordPress plugin which gives access to every ecommerce feature you're ever likely to need.)

Standard Plan: Get unlimited payment processing as well as products at a very reasonable price of $12.95 per month for the first year, and $24.95 when you renew.

Bluehost's Premium plan is the highlight here. Spending $24.95 a month ($39.95 on renewal) adds more product listing options, allows customers to make reservations or appointments, adds support for selling subscriptions, automatically calculates sales tax by country, and more. There's also a 'Plugin Bundle', which Bluehost says 'includes access to over $200 in top WooCommerce plugins.'

If you're a Bluehost fan (or a current customer), its WooCommerce plans provide a capable way to build a quality web store. There's nothing to make these plans superior to other WooCommerce providers.

Consider InMotion Hosting for a wider range of WooCommerce plans, with more features and performance-boosting tweaks. A2 Hosting offers optimized Magento and OpenCart. But as we mentioned above, if you're just learning the basics, HostGator's Gator website builder supports a 3-product web store from $3.84 a month.

Performance matters in web hosting, even for the cheapest of plans. It is worse to have a slow website that's down all the time than no site at all.

The uptime is measured by creating a WordPress test site and hosting it on shared plans. We then use the monitoring service Uptime.com, which checks in every 5 minutes over a period of 14 days.

Bluehost achieved a 100% uptime. We expect that for a short test, but it doesn't always happen: four of our last 15 providers had some downtime during the monitoring period.

GTmetrix is used to test website performance. We then determine how long it takes for the page to fully load (known as LCP, Largest contentful Paint). A low LCP is good news, as it means your website appears snappier and more responsive to visitors.

Bluehost’s LCP is only 0.603 second, placing it in the top two of our 15 most recent tests and significantly ahead budget hosts such as Domain.com (1.50 seconds) and iPage (16.06 seconds).

The occasional download speed test is important but it doesn't show how the server will perform when multiple visitors are accessing the site simultaneously. We use k6 and 20 simultaneous users to measure the performance of our website. Bluehost was mid-range, but still acceptable. Our site handled an average of 15 requests per second.

Bluehost is ranked at the top for shared hosting performance. Keep in mind, we tested only one shared hosting plan. If you are looking for a VPS, dedicated or other hosting, the results may be very different.

Bluehost’s control panel makes getting started with your website easier than ever before.

WordPress is preinstalled. You don't need to install it. You can start working on your website immediately if you have never used WordPress. Alternatively, if you're more experienced, you can access the regular WordPress dashboard with a click.

Clicking 'Advanced' on the Bluehost sidebar gives you access to cPanel. You can use this tool to manage databases, create emails, or upload files.

Although Bluehost installs WordPress by default, it's not your only option. CPanel also includes Softaculous, a top-notch automated installer which can set up forums, ecommerce website builders, social networking platforms, wikis and hundreds of other apps, usually with just a click or two.

Even experts can struggle with web hosting. Bluehost, with its well-designed site and standard tools for the industry, is a better choice than the rest. It helps users to find what they are looking for and provides all of the necessary functionality.

Bluehost provides 24/7 customer service via live chat, telephone and its website. There's no ticket or email option, potentially a problem with ongoing issues as you may have to explain your problem all over again with every support session. (In one case, with a non-critical issue which was annoying but didn't affect our website, we've spent around six hours across seven support sessions, and it's still not been fixed.)

Bluehost's web knowledgebase has a huge range of detailed and helpful articles, neatly organized into sensibly-named categories: WordPress, Domains, Email, Control Panel and more.

The site doesn't always present these in the best order. If you choose the WordPress category for example, the first thing that appears is the WordPress 5.0 release notes, which was first published in 2018. This is not helpful to anyone.

Keywords are a better way to search, but you'll still get the same results. You'll still find the information you want, even though it takes a little more clicking and scrolling than we would like. Once you've found the right article, most do an excellent job explaining their problems and providing solutions.

Bluehost has a well-staffed live chat service. We've never had to wait more than two minutes before an agent appeared, and most of the time it was much less.

When agents were presented with an issue such as 'your dashboard displays the same Setting Up Backups messages for three weeks,' they focused on finding workarounds (accessing backups through this menu) instead of addressing the core concern (an area isn't functioning or usable).

Bluehost’s phone support was also very easy to use and connected us with an agent in a matter of seconds. He displayed more knowledge than the live chat team, did a better job of handling the Setting Up Backups question, and explaining to us how to perform a complex troubleshooting task.

Bluehost provides decent support for most users. We'd really, really, really like ticket support, but the current setup should help you solve most common problems without difficulty, and that's far better than we see with most of the competition.

Bluehost Review: Pricing and Features

Bluehost offers a variety of hosting packages and levels. Each one has a different feature set.

In this Bluehost review we will be focusing on the Basic Web Hosting plan, which is the lowest-cost option.

It's the most budget-friendly solution in the lineup and, for that reason, also the most popular one among customers.

This is a screenshot of the current pricing page:

Bluehost offers a great deal that begins at only $2.95/mo. However, the first thing you must know about this price is that you have to sign up for a three-year contract in order to get it. The price is paid in advance, so you will have to pay $106.20 from the first day.

You can start with shorter agreements, but prices increase with them. Here's the full picture:

• 36 month: Basic $2.95/mo; Plus, Choice Plus, and Plus Plus $5.45/mo. Pro $13.95/mo.

• 24-months: Basic $3.95/mo; Plus, Choice Plus, and Plus Plus, $6.95/mo. Pro, $15.95/mo.

• 12 months: Basic $4.95/mo, Plus and Choice Plus $7.45/mo, Pro $18.95/mo

• Bluehost doesn't offer month-to-month payment options

Okay, but what do you get for these prices?

Overall, Bluehost focuses on delivering two things:

• the basic set of features and server capabilities that most users will need,

• making those features easy to use and accessible.

On paper, all the plans at this level are similar. However, there are some small differences.

First of all, none is "more powerful" than the other. Speaking in terms of computing power and the "scale of website," they can all handle the same load. The differences are mainly in the size of website and number of websites you're allowed to run.

• On the Basic plan, you are allowed only one website. Your disk space is also limited to 50 GB.

• You can run as many websites as you want and use unlimited space on your disk.

Bluehost charges only $5.45/mo if you build more than 2 websites.

Here's what else you get.

The Basic plan:

• 24/7 customer support via phone and chat (more on the quality of that later in this Bluehost hosting review),

• access to custom themes from within the Bluehost panel,

• a free domain name for the first year(!) Plus, you get access to the domain manager.

• Email hosting is available, but it's hidden away in the control panel.

• a $100 Google Ads credit and Google My Business integration,

• Free CDN Integration - A "content delivery networks" connection means your data will be served by multiple machines across the internet instead of one. This improves site speed.

• free SSL certificates.

The Choice plan throws in a free Office 365 subscription for one month. Choice Plus offers free domain privacy so that your data is not visible to anyone else. It also includes free automatic backups. Lastly, the Pro plan offers an additional dedicated IP address (important when building web apps/tools, not so much for standard websites).

There's nothing missing. Bluehost's offering is a great example of how Bluehost thought about the features that are essential to web hosting and included them in their package.

The free domain is a huge deal in particular! A new domain registration would normally cost around $15. It's not much, but it adds to the cost of your website. The fact that Bluehost throws that in for free is great.

Note. Mind the renewal prices. Bluehost will, as do most other hosting companies, charge you differently when signing up initially compared to renewing your service after some time. Those renewal prices are higher. Look at the screenshot of pricing again. See the crossed off price below the main price? This is the price you will pay when your contract ends.