.Bluehost – Best Web Host for Beginners

Honest review — Bluehost.com review

Honest review — Bluehost.com review

Pros-

It gives low introductory pricing.

BlueHost offers 5 types of services, shared, VPS, WordPress, Dedicated hosting and cloud sites. The plans are of 3 types, basic, $3.49/mo, plus, $5.95/mo, and pro, $13.95/mo. And for most users, even the basic plan is sufficient, which I use, it includes one website, 100GB of space, unmetered bandwidth, 5 parked domains, 25 subdomains, plus 100 email accounts with 500MB of storage for each. That sounds really good right. And still, if you are not satisfied, there is the 30-day money-back guarantee too. And for those who feel the prices to be on the higher side, there are always the options of using Discount Coupons.

Good Security options-

BlueHost has robust security. They offer 3 levels of Anti-spam protection in SpamAssassin’s, SpamExperts, SpamHammer Plus your inbox to get protected. All the directories are password protected. You can create IP address blacklists, manage digital certificates and private keys. Another top-notch feature is the secure shell (SSH), which allows us to conduct secure web sessions. They also offer single-click integration with CloudFare which helps prevent the dreaded DDoS attacks that can bring a whole site down. They give SiteLock protection too.

Many Integrations and Apps.

BlueHost uses cPanel which is feature-packed with CloudFare, Page Speed Grader, Google apps, and many others. The cPanel UI is very easy to use. You can take care of everything in one central location and can customize it according to your needs.

Recommended by WordPress.org

The WordPress people recently released these 3 web hosts on their site as recommended. Which included BlueHost. Apart from SiteGround and DreamHost. No wonder BlueHost gives WordPress based customized plans too, with the 4 Linux based packages, and the WordPress CMS comes preinstalled. There is also a dedicated support team of WordPress experts for you.

E-Commerce features.

These are the features mainly because of which I came here. BlueHost makes it so easy to set up an online host, offering many different shopping carts, Zen, Cube, Agora, and OS commerce. Apps to accept payments, offered are ShopSite (for shopping cart software), Magento and TransFirst payment gateway. plus they give an SSL certificate for your transactions, generated for free, open PGP/GPG encryption. With the more popular MySQL, they also support PostgreSQL.

Customer Service.

This is one big plus point of BlueHost I have experienced in all the past 6 months. They offer 24×7 support via a knowledge-base, a ticket-based system, online webchat and Telephone. Every time I had any issues and doubts, they cleared all within minutes. Not many web hosts can boast of this. The people are also very much knowledgeable.

Bluehost Extra Add-ons.

Multiple user-access control mechanism to assign multiples users and restrict their access to specific sections of the same hosting account. Account Isolation technology. Highly configured servers. Regular hardware upgrades. Replacement parts always ready for quick replacement in case of failed hardware. Automatic daily backups for all your stored files and website data. So many databases are available, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, CGI-BIN, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, and much more. Hundreds of free website scripts are available, including blog support, mailing lists, message forums, social networking scripts, Drupal, Joomla, Tikiwiki.

Cons-

Below Average Uptime.

I don’t know whether this issue has only been for the last 6 months since I started using it. But when I tested, I got the average up-time of only 99.93% which is lower than most other web hosts. Even the page loading times are lower than the other web hosts. It was almost twice! Very disappointing that was to me.

The migration from the other web hosts is not free. They charge a whopping $149 for that. That too they will not transfer more than 5 sites and 20 email accounts.

Even though there are so many useful add-ons available, to get the full functionality, you need to install them manually.

One thing I totally hate about BlueHost is that their Customer Support just loves to try to upsell you always, even when I said no, they still keep pestering with that. Since I am on a tight budget.Hope they improve in this area.

The WordPress plans are a bit expensive as compared to the other web hosts.

Okay so after all the Pros and Cons considered, I say that this web host is a decent one, I will not completely recommend it, nor I will denounce it. But then the final decision is always yours. I may stay a few months at least, or migrate later, let’s see. Hopefully, this review was at least somewhat useful to you all.

Pros of Bluehost:

• Most plans include unlimited disk storage, domain hosting, email addresses, and bandwidth.

• You get a free domain name for a year included with your purchase.

• The enhanced cPanel is really easy to use and offers fast access to features.

• The security features on Bluehost are flat-out excellent.

• Numerous databases are available, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, CGI-BIN, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, and much more.

• Tons of free website scripts are available, including social networking scripts, blog support, mailing lists, message forums, Joomla and Drupal and Tikiwiki.

• eCommerce features are good with multiple shopping carts available and SSL security.

• Most customers report that Bluehost is fast. Integrate with CloudFlare, and you’ll get even better performance.

• If you can afford it, the WordPress hosting on Bluehost is considered to be top-notch.

Cons of Bluehost:

• While there are many useful add-ons available, unfortunately, you need to install many of them to get the full functionality you need.

• The customer service team gets mixed reviews.

• Bluehost loves to try to up-sell its customers, which can get to be annoying if you are on a tight budget.

• The WordPress plans, while very nice regarding features, are also very expensive compared to plans offered by many competitors. Inmotion, for example, has an excellent plan starting at just $2.95 monthly. That’s less than half of the starting price for the lowest tier WP plan offered by Bluehost.

Conclusion

There are plenty of exciting features and extras included at every price point, and the diversity of plans provides a lot of flexibility for every budget. Whatever your needs, Bluehost delivers regarding its packages.

Despite some negative feedback, the majority of customers are quite happy with Bluehost’s services. There is a reason that this company has such a strong reputation over 20 years of online business!

In summation, Bluehost is literally one of the top few that I would recommend to anyone and everyone. If you’re looking for a web host with a rock-solid reputation, then look no further than Bluehost. With cheap and scalable plans you can customize your solution, and in just a couple of moments, you’ll be up and running.