Bluehost - Does it worth Money

A shared hosting Bluehost plan is hands down one of the easiest ways to get started building your site. You can start with the Basic plan for $2.95, which is good to create one site with 50 GBs of space. That’s generous when you consider they also include free CDN and a free SSL certificate.

You don’t even have to know what a CDN or SSL certificate does–enable them with one click to get a faster, more secure site.

It doesn’t stop there. Are you running a few websites? Then you’ll want to try the Plus tier at $5.45 per month. It includes everything in the basic plan tier, plus the ability to host and manage an unlimited number of sites, and you’ll get access to Microsoft 365 for 30 days.

Not bad. It’s the most convenient tier if you want to reliably start more than one site from scratch without too much overhead cost.

Their most recommended tier, and the one that gets you the most bang for your buck under the shared hosting plan, is the Choice Plus tier at $5.45 per month with added security features.

You get everything in the first and second tier, plus free domain privacy and free automated backup for a whole year. Since internet security is a growing concern in the online world and the price for this tier is the same as the Plus option, this is the clear winner in my book as far as affordable shared hosting plans are concerned. Added security features can only ever be a plus.

Finally, if you’re looking for a bit more than that, consider the Pro tier, sitting at $13.95 a month. With this plan, you’ll get additional CPU resources as well as a free dedicated IP.

As you can see, Bluehost goes out of their way to personalize each tier, so they’re useful in covering what you need. I recommend you take some time to comprehensively look through each tier and its offerings to get the best deal according to your goals.

VPS Hosting

VPS, or virtual private server hosting, is when hosting is within a shared server but acts as a dedicated virtual space for your site. VPS hosting has become very popular, as it is less expensive than dedicated hosting but gives you better security and potentially better performance than shared hosting.

Guaranteed resources are the name of the game when it comes to Bluehost’s VPS Hosting options. They stack up against competitors well, as they charge you only $18.99 for the standard VPN feature. This includes 2 GB of RAM and an additional 1 TB of bandwidth.

Guaranteed resources are the name of the game when it comes to Bluehost’s VPS Hosting options. They stack up against competitors well, as they charge you only $18.99 for the standard VPN feature. This includes 2 GB of RAM and an additional 1 TB of bandwidth.

Looking through each Bluehost offering, it’s clear they’ve positioned themselves as a beginner-friendly web host, but they also burn the candle at both ends by offering affordable dedicated and VPS hosting. That’s a double win as far as hosting you can rely on if you ask me.

Dedicated Hosting

The standout benefits of dedicated hosting are security, privacy, and even more control all around. If you know you’ll want the best of the best to host your site for scale and reliability, then a Bluehost dedicated hosting plan is the way to go.

Is your site growing rapidly? Do you see more traffic coming in day after day? Here’s where you’ll want to look into dedicated hosting, yet another reliable Bluehost plan.

Managed WordPress Hosting

This is an all-in-one managed platform that scales to any demand your website has. All pricing plans for managed WordPress hosting through Bluehost include incredibly fast speeds, marketing tools, and multi-tiered security features.

The Features Bluehost Offers You

1. Good Up Time (99.79%)

Uptime is one of the most critical aspects when choosing a web host – after all, if your site is down, your users can’t access it. So, consistent uptime should be one of your top priorities when looking at hosting services.

After reviewing many web hosts, our benchmark for “good” uptime is between 99.91% and 99.93%. So ideally, we don’t want to see anything less than that.

The good news is that Bluehost easily surpasses this benchmark, comfortably keeping our test site live for 99.97% of the time during the last 6 months. The total downtime was a bit over an hour. There were some poor months (November 2021) where the uptime was below average but overall Bluehost kept our site up and running without any bigger outages.

Here’s the breakdown of Bluehost’s average uptime in the past 6 months:

• May 2022: 99.66%

• April 2022:99.92%

• March 2022:100%

• February 2022:99.99%

• January 2022:99.99%

• December 2021:99.95%

• November 2021: 90.63%

2. Decent Page Loading Speed (673 ms)

Research conducted by Google found:

“As page load time goes from 1s to 3s the probability of bounce increases 32%.”

This translates to your visitors being 32% more likely to leave your site. And it only gets worse with longer page load times.

Furthermore, Google is more geared towards mobile-first indexing. This means that your site also needs to be optimized for mobile users, or otherwise, you’re losing traffic.

Either way, a slow website almost always means less traffic and, therefore, lower sales numbers. So right after uptime, page loading time is the second most important thing that can make or break your website’s success.

Our test site with Bluehost has offered an average load speed of 673 ms over the past half a year. This isn’t the fastest speed we’ve seen among other hosts, but it’s still good enough to keep visitors on your site.

3. Low Introductory Pricing ($2.95/mo)

Bluehost’s default pricing starts at $3.95/month, which is an introductory price from the regular $9.99/month rate.

However, the good news is that we’ve been able to work out a deal with Bluehost for our readers that takes the starting price down even further to $2.75/month.

For this price, you get pretty much everything you need for a single website. That includes 50 GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, and more. So you’d be getting a pretty good value for the price, plus their consistent uptime and page loading speeds.

Still, the cheapest plan does have a few restrictions that we’re not entirely happy with – but more about this later on.

4. Packed with Security Options and Features

Since Bluehost is one of the “cheapest” options on the market, we are pleased to see that they don’t cut too many corners on critical security options and features.

Already with the cheapest plan, Bluehost provides your site with a free SSL certificate. You also get access to great features like a free CDN (Cloudflare), a one-click WordPress install, multiple CMS integrations, and additional eCommerce plugins.

Higher-tier plans come with the Spam Experts add-on, domain privacy protection, and server backups. Also, you get more advanced security features such as SiteLock, which helps prevent malware attacks.

Codeguard is another form of protection, which provides daily backups so you can roll back previous versions of a site, should it get hacked.

Postini, from Google, is the final security tool worth noting. It provides spam protection for your email, so anything suspicious is prevented from getting into your inbox.

5. Easy to Use for Beginners

Some of the web hosts we’ve seen can be considered the best only if you’re an advanced user. But, Bluehost is great for beginners, too.

Their customer portal is intuitive and clean (although, we have experienced it is a bit slow at times). And the layout of the cPanel control panel makes Bluehost even easier to use. Beginners can easily install and start WordPress through cPanel. All you need to do is a point and click in most cases.

If you don’t want to use WordPress, you can also begin creating a website with a website builder tool (such as Weebly or Drupal). You can then customize a template by just dragging and dropping elements on your page.

Bluehost also has features for advanced users who want to use their code to create their site.

6. 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee with all of its hosting plans.

You can try out the service to see their performance for yourself and ask for a refund if you’re not completely satisfied. We have a few words of caution, though.

According to Bluehost’s terms, here’s what does and doesn’t fall under that guarantee:

• You can only get refunds on the web hosting cost, not any other products like domains or other add-ons.

• Bluehost would deduct $15.99 if you received a free domain name in your plan.

• Bluehost does not refund any requests after 30 days.

It’s not precisely a no-questions-asked policy like we’ve seen from some hosts. So make sure you agree with these points before signing up.

7. 24/7 Customer Support

Bluehost provides 24/7 customer support over live chat, phone, and an email ticketing system. On top of that, they have a vast knowledge base packed with answers to frequent questions and useful information.

We went ahead and tested their live chat option, and the experience was overall pleasant.

To start their live chat, you have to verify yourself by giving your first and last name, and then choose a topic you want to discuss. For our case it is pre-sales. We asked a simple question about site migrations and were first offered knowledge base articles by the bot. In case you can’t find the answer to your question, you can start a chat with a customer support rep.

8. One Free Wordpress Site Transfer

If you already have a site and want to switch to Bluehost’s hosting plan, then this perk is for you.

Bluehost only recently started offering a free site transfer with all of their plans.

There are a couple of terms to this free service, though. First, the site needs to be a WordPress site. And secondly, you have to request the migration within the first 30 days after signing up with a hosting plan.

All you need to do is contact their customer support team and follow their directions. The migration usually takes around 1-3 business days to complete.

If you don’t have a WordPress website or have more than one then it costs $149.99. This gets you up to 5 website migrations and 20 email account migrations.

Tip: It’s a good idea to check with their customer support whether your site built by any other builder than WordPress is supported by their servers for migration. For example, we know that sites built with Wix are not eligible for transfer.

9. The Official WordPress.org Recommended Host

WordPress only officially recommends bluehost as hosting partners to use with a WordPress site. You can use almost any web hosting provider to create a WordPress site. But the fact that Bluehost is one of the few officially recognized partners is encouraging.