Bluehost Review: Is This Web Hosting Company Worth Paying For?

Welcome to the Bluehost Review, and if you have a business I'm pretty sure that you already have a website for your business by now, if not you should at least be planning on getting one created for your business or brand.

Having a good business website goes way beyond just setting up a WordPress site listed with your products and services and hoping to attract the relevant client base for your business.

which brings me to my next point of this Bluehost Review.

In this Bluehost Review, I will be going into detail about Bluehost and the products and services it offers to its clients. I will also cover the features and pricing so that you are able to make a well-informed decision in case you plan on having a website created and hosted for your business or brand.

Another good thing I like about Bluehost is that the company does way more than just provide website and domain hosting, Bluehost actually provides a handful of other services that help in making your web presence an absolute powerhouse online which I will also cover in this Bluehost Review.

What Is Bluehost?

Bluehost is a professional website and domain hosting company that was founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth and was later bought out by Endurance International Group (EIG) but this strategic business acquisition move was only made known to the public in October 2013.

With over 1 million domains registered on Bluehost since June 2008, the founders aimed to deliver comprehensive web solutions by creating a custom platform that paired technologically advanced features with a simple, no-nonsense experience. Since then, Bluehost's dedication to quality has earned the respect of customers and partners all over the world.

So from the get-go, you already know that you are dealing with a reputable company with years of extensive experience that has been in business long enough and is genuinely trusted by millions of website professionals and business owners.

Bluehost Review: Hosting Facts about Bluehost

Looking at the data You can clearly see that Bluehost has had an uptime of 100% along with an average response time of 770ms in the month of January 2021.

One of the most important things to look at when deciding which web hosting platform to choose is the uptime because if your host's site is down or slow, so will yours.

When looking at the response time, you can see that the response time is averaging between 500 and 1000 ms which is very good.

Then when looking at the duration for the past 12 months we can see that the uptime has been consistent throughout and only went below the 100% mark a few times but overall the uptime of Bluehost was impressive.

Bluehost Review: Features

Domains:

Using Bluehost, you are able to search and see if your desired domain name is available, and if it is you would be able to reserve it by paying for it right within the Bluehost platform. In the event that your chosen domain name is not available or has already been taken then Bluehost will offer you alternative domain names to choose from that are still similar to what you wanted.

A domain is basically the address of your website on the internet and your domain will always be associated with your website or blog. Your domain name will only be unique to your website and nobody else can use the exact same domain name as you unless you decide to sell your domain completely to another website/business owner.

For example, if Betty has a cake business and she is looking to establish her digital presence online, she will have to choose a domain name along the lines of bettycakes.com or bettycakes.online and that is known as a domain name that will redirect people to her website if they type in the domain into their browsers.

Domains differ in prices as they are able to be sold and bought in the market depending on their domain authority and reputation, this is determined by the number of quality backlinks the domain has.

Here I have typed in Bettycakes as a domain into the Bluehost domain search bar and I will choose a dot com extension.

Next, I will see if this domain name is available by clicking on the green search button and Bluehost will search the internet and all its archive directories to see if there is nobody that has already bought this domain name.

Bluehost alerts me that the chosen domain name I typed into the search bar is currently unavailable, meaning someone out there who also has a cake business has already bought this domain name.

This does not mean that it's the end of it though, as you can Bluehost has given me some alternative domains to choose from and they all differ in pricing. This is what I like about Bluehost, everything is on one platform making it super easy and convenient.

Since you already know that domain extensions differ, so shall they differ in pricing as well. Other domains will be more costly than others because they are what we call premium domains. Premium domains cost more because they have a positive history that is linked to bringing in more organic traffic to your website.

It is also because the domain name you chose has a keyword included in it that is of a certain industry that PPC advertisers are competing for which is highly searched for in the Google search bars.

Choosing a premium domain such as a dot com will make your website or business a more memorable brand online, the costs of marketing won't be that much and your domain won't need that much promotion as it is already an industry name that already exists and is highly searched.

Once you have decided which domain name you want to go for and you have made the purchase, you will be the rightful owner of a domain that you will be able to manage within your Bluehost control panel, including administrating and changing the DNS records and this applies to all of the domains that you own.

Bluehost has an autorenewal function within their platform that prevents your domain from getting expired, this function also protects your domain name from being mistakenly unrecognized. A domain name lives for 1 year then has to be renewed thereafter.

To prevent unauthorized transfers of your domain name you have the option to lock it, then unlock it when you want to transfer it for whatever reason you may have. In the case that you happen not to be ready to use the domain yet but would like to safeguard it, Bluehost can do that for you by securing it for you using the domain lock function.

In order to keep your personal information private, your domain name will have all your personal contact information registered to it and can be accessed through the WHOIS database directory with that said, I highly recommend that you get Bluehost's domain privacy protection which will also prevent all sorts of spamming, protect your website from harmful malware and alert you from any changes or suspicious activities on your site.

If you have other domains that you bought from a different hosting company you can easily do a transfer of your domain to Bluehost directly from your Cpanel in your Bluehost account.

Website Hosting:

Bluehost Review: Shared Hosting:

Shared hosting is perfect for you if you want to build up a website for your small business or as an entrepreneur. Shared hosting can be looked at as a group of friends sharing the same flat building. Meaning everybody has their own flat within the same building. Well, that is the same way you can think of shared hosting except that it is a bunch of websites that are sharing the same server provided by the hosting provider which is Bluehost.

You get access to the same great features, Like secure and automatic WordPress installation, Plus tons of available tools and services to help you easily create the website you want. Choose the right plan for you, From Basic for a single website up to Pro with its high-performance servers for when you’re ready to expand.

If you happen to already have a website but would like to use a web hosting company like Bluehost then there is no need for you to research on how to do it, the team of experts from Bluehost will help you to migrate your website safe and securely by retrieving all of your web files on your behalf in their original formats.

The cheapest most affordable type of hosting from Bluehost is their shared hosting plan which also comes with WordPress automatically installed which is fully integrated along with automatic installation updates for your WordPress.

When you take up a shared hosting plan with Bluehost, they will include a free SSL certificate a free domain name, and a couple of other extras depending on what promotions they have at that time.

Shared Hosting Prices:

To have just one website on a shared hosting plan will cost around $3,95 per month. And all the hosting plans include a domain manager that makes it easy to update, buy and transfer all of your domain names in one platform.

If you plan on having an eCommerce website where you will be selling products and goods and accepting payments through your website, it means that you will be handling very sensitive data with an encrypted connection that belongs to your customers and if you are found in violation of a breach of data you might end up paying a hefty fine from the authorities or imprisonment, and that is where the SSL certificate comes in handy, and this is included in your shared hosting plan too.

Taking up a Bluehost shared hosting plan does not mean that your website's performance will be slow or anything like that regardless of whether there are other websites on the same server as you, as a matter of fact, your website's performance will remain unaffected and will always be protected with the help of Resource Protection function.

Did you know that with Bluehost you get a free $100 for running any Google Ads campaign of your choice but you have to have already spent your first $25 first before you get the $100 ads credit.

Getting your business listed on Google is a complicated process if you don't know what you are doing. Getting your business listed on Google is the best thing that could ever happen to you because that is where and how all of your new customers and clients around your area will find you and share your business details to their networks. Bluehost simplifies the process by including a free Google My Business listing function. This is perfect for your past clients and customers to go ahead and leave a review, check your working hours and location.

Bluehost Review: Dedicated Hosting:

Dedicated hosting is a very high level of website hosting that provides better quality allocation of resources, allows for better control as well as increased secured privacy. What differentiates dedicated hosting from shared hosting is the level of independence and isolation of the servers. With dedicated hosting, you can customize and configure your server the way you want without anyone else being impacted because of your actions.

Some of the benefits associated with using dedicated hosting are obviously the high level of privacy and the fact that you are not sharing any server with other server users out there and that is what makes a dedicated server perform way better making it thus more stable and reliable especially if you are planning on having high amounts of traffic to your website.

If you decide to go for the Bluehost dedicated hosting plan, you will also get a free domain name valid for 1 year including an SSL Certificate that serves to give a secure connection to your website, allows for eCommerce functionalities, and more, after that, you will have to renew them according to the market price at that time.

Dedicated Hosting Prices:

I guess they named it dedicated hosting for a reason being that it also comes with an enhanced cPanel interface which makes the website management process so much easier.

From secure shell (SSH) access, server-side, log file access, web-based managers for files, databases, and email. Even customize your own .htaccess files, cron jobs, and php.ini files.

Bluehost Review: VPS Hosting:

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and what it basically does is to somehow find a way to equip your account with RAM (Random Access Memory) and CPU (Central Processing Unit) resources by means of using a dedicated virtualized server sharing the resources amongst the server users.

One of the guarantees that you get from using VPS hosting is the resources that come with your account, meaning the RAM, CPU, and disk space allowing for better website performance. And the fact that you don't share an Operating system with any one of the users on the server means better security for your website.

With the VPS hosting plan you also get 1 free domain for 1 year and thereafter it will be subject to market price once renewed.

VPS Hosting Prices:.

Bluehost Review: Managed WordPress Hosting:

A managed WordPress hosted site has some really cool exclusive features from the marketing center that you won't find on any other hosting plan from Bluehost.

For instance having the ability to manage your search engine optimization, email traffic channels including your social media accounts all in the same dashboard area. You can keep track of how your traffic to your website is doing be it yearly, monthly or weekly timeframes.

Solid State Drives (SSD) are what help improve your website speed and are what all of Bluehost's Managed WordPress Hosting servers are built with, making them way more efficient than other normal websites that are being hosted on Hard Disk Drives (HDD). Whenever you need additional resources they will be readily available to you.

The term ''Managed WordPress Hosting'' basically means that the Bluehost WordPress platform is in a fully managed hosting environment where all the server maintenance and applications that keep your website healthy are already taken care of for you so that you can focus on the other areas of building your business.

Multi-layer caching loads all of your content to your website much faster and also optimizes the overall speed of your website.

Auto backups help you to restore all of the lost and corrupt data files, if it is an eCommerce site then you can also retrieve all of your customer's lost information.

Multi-tiered security protects your business website with Web Application Firewall and keeps defenders in place such as bot blocking, brute force attack protection, and DDoS.

Comes with online store features that allow you to manage payment processing on an international level using PayPal integration. If you did not know, PayPal is the world's most leading and trusted online money merchant that gives you a platform to send and receive money to anybody who has a working email address and a registered PayPal account over the internet for a small transaction fee.

You won't have to worry about how and if your products are going to get to your customers even though they are halfway across the globe, choose amongst the most reliable top shipping carriers that are only recommended by Bluehost specially for you.

When having a Bluehost Managed WordPress Hosted account you will be able to sell as many unlimited products as you want online and increase your sales.

Akismet is a WordPress plugin that stops unwanted or harmful data, especially comment from getting onto your site using the power of Spam Protection.

In the event that you would like to switch things up a little by testing out a new layout for your website, you can do so without affecting your website even before it goes live using the site staging function.

Bluehost Review: Managed WordPress Hosting Prices:

Managed WordPress accounts provide an all in one platform for those who wish to grow and expand their business website to a scalable level in order to achieve the desired outcomes of generating more sales and revenue.

Professional marketing services from Bluehost

Bluehost also offers additional professional marketing services where they have their dedicated professional web experts to help you out with the design of your business website and with your marketing needs, they also do the content creation for you .

The Bluehost designers will build you a brand new website from scratch that is already mobile friendly. They will also help you to get to the top of the search results by having your website optimized with targeted keywords for you.

This saves you all the time on doing endless keyword research which you might not even get right. I like the fact that Bluehost will also have their web designers post articles on your behalf on different blog articles, Twitter and Facebook.

With all your custom content created for you along with your website optimized for the relevant high ranking keywords ,all that will be left for you to do is just log into your Bluehost cPanel dashboard and begin to review all the data analytics such as the amount of website visitors you are getting every day as well as checking up on all your weekly reports on potential new SEO keywords to be targeted.

But that is not where it ends yet, expect even more functionalities from such a customized plan from Bluehost's services pack.

For instance, Bluehost will have their digital marketing team of experts create PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns set out for you as a way to better market your website all over the internet, all you have to do is to decide and choose on which demographic location you would like your ads to be seen and get guaranteed high quality traffic that is ready to convert coming right back to your business website consistently every now and again.

Bluehost Review: Professional marketing services from Bluehost Prices:

Unfortunately, Bluehost does not have a specified price list for this kind of service, so you will be required to request and schedule a free consultation with a Bluehost consultant so that you may explain to them directly in detail what it is that you would like and I am sure they would also have a few questions to ask you too. This is good because you will be knowing exactly what you are paying for.

So all you have to do is to fill out a free consultation form like this which can be found on the Bluehost website and you will be contacted by a Bluehost customer support agent via phonecall or email in no time.

Blue Sky

Blue sky is another one of Bluehost's professional services that they provide to their clients. When you take up a Blue sky service you get to have access to a premium WordPress support from WordPress experts from starting from the very basics from creation of your website to its complete creation, this will obviously include themes, website edits and all the nitty gritty aspects involved in website creation.

What is cool about Blue sky is that you get email support for literally any issue you may encounter, they will even give you extra tools to make your job easier if you request it from them. If you prefer phone support then Blue sky Pro is the better option to go for.

Get all the advice with regards to themes and plugins that will be best suited for your business website's performance.

What differentiates Blue sky services from managed WordPress services is that your website coding is handled by WordPress developers that have years of expertise and it involves more of a hands on approach, this is especially helpful if you would like your website to look and operate in a specific way that you desire, a process like that involves alot of coding.

Get it up and running by having it optimized for mobile, search engine optimization and lead capture pages. A lead capture page is otherwise known as a landing page and it helps to capture the email addresses of subscribers in exchange for an incentive like an eBook or free course.

Bluehost Review: Blue Sky Prices:

WORDPRESS E-COMMERCE

If you want to be able to sell products and services online then you could do so by using Woo Commerce. Woo Commerce is a plugin from WordPress that makes it possible for you to legitimately sell physical or digital products and services safely through your website.

Using Woo Commerce you can customize your store and build it according to how you want your business needs to be served.

Woo Commerce even has the ability to manage the shipping, apply tax, managing your inventory, and take secure payments.

Customizing your Woo Commerce online store is much easier when you have different tools that are available for you inside of the Woo Commerce themes section. Within the customizer, you can customize your theme along with making all the changes that would reflect your business or brand. Things like changing the font, adding a logo, and more.

If you are familiar with HTML then you can become even more flexible with the customization of the website. If you are not that tech-savvy with coding then you can always learn a thing or two by heading over to the knowledge base articles and making use of the community forum and get to know how other people find a way to solve the same problems.

Bluehost makes it easy to get started with Woo Commerce hosting, all you do is choose the hosting plan that you prefer then connect your domain name to it, after that Bluehost will automatically install Woo Commerce within your WordPress website that also comes with a free SSL certificate to secure all of your money transactions online via your website. Once This is done you can then start adding products to your new store and start selling.

From calculating quotes to catering to your customer by state and different shipping methods, Woo Commerce is the perfect solution for having a fully functional online store that will allow your visitors to add products to their carts before leaving your store.

Xero is a function that administrates all the accounting functions, the tracking of payroll as well as the financial reporting. Easily add products to your store using Bluehost's CSV import suit to get Google brand products, custom data bookings.

You can also allow your customers to pay for products with their amazon accounts using Amazon pay without them having to leave your website.

prices in real-time with a Currency converter widget that uses an exchange rate API that converts the currency from different countries for you.

Bluehost Review: WordPress WooCommerce Prices:

Bluehost Review: Frequently asked questions

Is Bluehost a good host?

Bluehost is a professional web hosting platform with one of the most reasonable and affordable price ranges in the market. Bluehost is a good host especially if you are looking for a reliable domain and web hosting company for the long run.

Bluehost is the type of company that you grow into loving, the more you use their services and get helped by their customer support agents, Bluehost is even convenient for beginners because they have a good technical support system even if you are on the cheapest hosting plan.

Bluehost also has a huge knowledge base directory that is packed with informative guides, article answers, and instructions to the most common complex and most asked questions.

Is Bluehost good for beginners?

Yes, Bluehost is a beginner-friendly web host that makes getting a domain and creating a professional business website an easy seamless process just within a few simple steps.

What is better than Bluehost?

Bluehost is currently the best web hosting platform out there because they have a great customer support system, great products, and services as well as the most affordable competitive pricing in the market.

Is Bluehost good for blogging?

Yes, Bluehost is good for blogging too, you can choose to start a blog and start creating valuable content for your readers. Keyword research is the most important aspect of blogging since you want to get a lot of visitors to your website. Bluehost comes with a ton of free wordpress plugins like Yoast SEO that guide you with on-page SEO.

Is WordPress free with Bluehost?

Yes, WordPress is completely free for all Bluehost account holders. Your Wordpress will be downloaded onto your computer using a 1-click installation that is optimized for Google along with the freedom of designing and insightful analytics.

Which Bluehost plan is best?

The best Bluehost plan to choose is the shared hosting plan if you are planning on starting up a blog or a small business website. Depending on your budget and website needs, you might need to take an upgrade to a Dedicated hosting account plan which will offer you a more secure reliable hosting server as well as slightly more features that come with it. Overall the Shared hosting plan is perfect to get started with for your online store, business website, or blog.

Do you need Bluehost for WordPress?

No, necessarily, it is possible to use WordPress without having a Bluehost account by using a wordpress.org platform or a wordpress.com platform, but you will not have all the added benefits of using a WordPress from Bluehost that comes with optimized features including their customer support.

Can you cancel Bluehost at any time?

Yes, you can cancel your Bluehost account at any time only if you chose to pay on a month-to-month basis. If you decide to opt-in for paying for a yearly plan, 12-month or 36-month plan, you will not be able to cancel your account at any time and will have to wait until your plan is finished for that year or term then you can take up a monthly plan to be eligible to be able to cancel your account at any time. Also, keep in mind that choosing to pay on a monthly basis will cost you slightly a bit more as compared to paying for a yearly plan and saving a few dollars.

Does Bluehost give free domain?

Yes, Bluehost does give you a free domain with your account as all of Bluehost's plans include:

1 free domain

Domain Manager

SSL Certificates

Resource Protection

Google Ads

Scalability

Google My Business

Can I buy a domain name through Bluehost?

Yes, you are able to buy a domain name directly within your Bluehost account. Bluehost can even transfer the existing website that you are using on a different hosting platform for you free of charge so that it could be hosted by them. Within your Bluehost account, you can start deciding on a domain name that you would like to use and type it into the domain checker search box and get back results of whether your domain name exists or has already been bought by someone else.

If your chosen domain name you entered is not available it means that it has been bought by someone else and you would have to choose a different alternative domain name that Bluehost will recommend to you in the dropdown list from the returned searched results.

Right next to the recommended domain name you will see the different types of extensions to use for the domain like a .org, .com, or a .online, as well as its's price. All domain names are valid only for one year then you must have it renewed or risk losing it to someone else. Once you have selected your domain name you can then proceed to purchase it and reserve it as yours officially.

Your domain name will then be processed and found available within your Bluehost cPanel dashboard under the ''domain names'' tab and you can purchase and own as many domain names as you want as long as they are available. To pay for the domain name Bluehost accepts payments via PayPal, Visa Mastercards, debit cards, and Payoneer accounts.

Bluehost Customer Support Service:

The Bluehost customer support service is great. They have one of the best technical support you could find and go with you through every step of the way. Here is a chat I had with Swathi from Bluehost, the response was fast as usual without second-guessing.

The chat feature is the best one to use for faster more person to person assistance, using chat will save you a lot of time.

As you can see, I enquired about domain changes. I waited between 1 and a half and 2 minutes before I got back a reply, which is the average chat reply time especially if its an international chat.

You can then go ahead and rate the service and the level of assistance you got from the agent, including leaving a recommendation for ways on how they could improve the way they help you as a Bluehost Client.

Bluehost Customer Reviews:

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse