Hey guys, welcome to my review today of Bluehost. Bluehost is known for being one of the more popular web hosting companies because of its affordability, excellent value, great performance, and being really newbie-friendly.
It’s also one of the three hosting services that are officially recommended by WordPress along with Namecheap and Ipage hosting but it’s not going to be the perfect choice for everyone.
After using Bluehost myself for over 10 years now I’ve learned what it’s best at as well as the things it’s not so great for.
Today I’ll not only explain the different features of Bluehost, and how will they perform in the real world, but I will also compare them to the competition and ultimately help you to decide whether Bluehost would be the best hosting company for you or not.
User-friendliness
Regarding user-friendliness, this is one of the features that sets Bluehost apart as they make it really easy for anyone to manage a website even if this is the first time you’ve ever had a website.
Web hosting control panel
Bluehost uses cPanel which is a web hosting control panel that offers a ton of options for integration. For example, you can add email autoresponders, apps to track marketing metrics such as the number of clicks on your website, and Apps for automatic billing.
Content management systems
You can also install content management systems other than WordPress such as Joomla and Drupal. Basically, Bluehost makes it simple and easy to add any additional apps and plugins which gives your site more features and can help to improve the experience of visitors to your website.
On the performance section, you can change the cache settings which basically allows you to delete the data stored on your website so that it loads faster.
And in the settings page, gives you an overview of any updates that have happened are yet to happen.
You can also manage content such as your blog, for example, you can moderate comments you’ve received on your blog pages rather than having to log in to each of your sites individually. and then regarding performance, this is an extremely important and one of the most important features of a good web hosting company.
Performance is basically measured onto metrics that you have the loading time of your website and the uptime. The loading time is how fast your website loads when a user opens your website page. A fast page loading time is ideally one that is less than three seconds.
This ultimately means a better user experience which means Google will give you more favor in the search results and as result means your website will get more visitors.
Bluehost has one of the fastest loading times compared to other hosting companies which is 2.89 seconds on average. Then the second factor is uptime. This measures the amount of time for which your website is up and running and is generally shown as a percentage.
Here Again, Bluehost is one of the best as well with an uptime of 99.98% over the course of the year, and although each hosting company experiences some downtime Bluehost is one of the best in this regard.
Hosting plan
But in addition to the performance, there are several other things Bluehost does which makes it a great value of for example the matter which hosting plan you choose, they all include at least; one free domain name for the first year, a free SSL certificate, and five free email accounts.
One-click WordPress installation
Bluehost also has a one-click WordPress installation option which is simple and easy to use. and in addition to this another thing that makes Bluehost great for beginners is that it gives you a checklist of all the things that you may need to complete like; organize your sites navigation or customize your design.
Unmetered bandwidth
Also, everyone is given unmetered bandwidth which means that you won’t be charged based on the amount of bandwidth that you use.
However, you will be asked to reduce your usage if you exceed the limits set in blue host terms and service. This limit is 5000 database tables and 10 GB of total database usage. Fortunately, it’s not likely you’ll ever have to worry about this as most websites never exceed these limits.
Customer support
One of my favorite things about Bluehost is its customer support. out of all the hosting companies I’ve been with, Bluehost has impressed me the most so far with how great their support is particularly over the phone.
I’ve had some of the most legendary support situations that literally prompted me to write letters to the upper management because of how impressed I was.
Because it’s particularly unique these days to find a company that not only hires great people who genuinely care about helping you, but then that company also empowers those people to do everything they can do to take care of you. and if you’ve ever been in a situation where you’re stuck trying to figure out what’s wrong with your website you know how valuable that type of support can be.
So their customer support team is available 24/7 by phone or you can email or chat with them if you prefer.
Pricing
Pricing is another area where Bluehost demonstrates its value as a hosting company. I’ll highlight some of the key and most important points here in this review.
Choosing the right plan
When it comes to choosing the right plan it’s important to understand that your pricing plan will be greatly affected by whether it’s a shared hosting plan or a dedicated hosting plan.
Shared hosting basically means that you share your hosting space with other websites, whereas dedicated hosting means that you get to have your own hosting space.
The benefit of shared hosting is that it’s cheaper than dedicated hosting the downside is that it doesn’t have as much speed, security, or performance.
But keep in mind these shared hosting plans are with 95% of people use with Bluehost and these are the plans I continue to use for the past 10 years work dozens and dozens of my own sites as they still perform really well especially for how little they cost.
The cheapest shared hosting plan that Bluehost offers starts at $2.95 per month. There’s also a plus and choice plan which costs $5.45 per month. The main difference is that the choice plus will give you a little more protection for your websites.
Although they cost the same initially the renewal price for choice plus is a few dollars more per month. so what I recommend doing is starting with choice plus and then you can always downgrade to the plus plan when your renewal happens if you don’t pay the extra few bucks per month for additional security.
Also keep in mind that when you see anything from Bluehost that talks about their shared WordPress hosting plans, this is the exact same thing as their regular hosting plans. they just use this for marketing purposes in order to appeal to those who strictly use WordPress. But again whichever you sign up for, they’re exactly the same.
Bluehost does have other more expensive plans as well which I’ll discuss in detail in a separate article. This would include their VPS or virtual private server plans or their dedicated hosting plans. I don’t recommend these plans for most people and especially anyone just starting out. and shall be responsible for managing everything yourself and you will not have Bluehost to help you with any issues that might come up along the way.
They certainly have their purpose though but since it only affects about 5% of the people reading this, I’m going to write a more detailed discussion of those plans for another article.
Ultimately the plan I recommend most people start with is either the basic or choice plus plan. if you just want to host for one website or want to spend the least amount possible then I’d go with the basic plan.
Otherwise, choice plus let you have unlimited websites, unlimited email accounts, unlimited email storage, and unmetered website space for only $1.50 more per month. and of course, whatever plan you start with you can very easily upgrade or downgrade whenever it might make sense for you to do so.
As great as Bluehost is, there are some reasons you may want to choose a different hosting service.
First, if you’re a more advanced user then you may find phone support with Bluehost at times not be as knowledgeable as you may like. If you’re the type of person who knows more than most when it comes to web hosting, then you may want to go with a different option like Namecheap.
While Namecheap isn’t as friendly and helpful to those who are less experienced especially compared to Bluehost, they are more knowledgeable on average which can make them better for those who know what questions to ask.
Website migrations
Bluehost isn’t currently offering any free site migrations. But you can do this yourself or have someone do it for you. paying Bluehost to do this will cost you a one-time fee of $550 which will cover up to five different sites been migrated to Bluehost from a different web hosting company.
Finally, Bluehost doesn’t offer automatic site backups the good news is that this is easy enough to get through third-party apps or services. but if it’s something you want your hosting service to automatically provide then you may want to go with a different option such as Namecheap.
Otherwise, the reason I’ve continued to use Bluehost myself for so many years is because of the incredible value and exceptional support they offer. and when my mom wanted to start her own WordPress sites, Bluehost was the one I recommended to her not only because of how cost-effective it was but at the end of the day and that if she ever had problems or got stuck not knowing what to do, that there would be someone friendly and helpful she could talk to, who could patiently walk her step by step through getting her site working properly again.
That’s why I love to recommend Bluehost. It’s especially great for beginners, it has an extremely user-friendly interface which makes it easy to manage your website.
You have outstanding customer support that’s truly the best I’ve experienced in this industry so far and the performance you get for even the most basic plans is truly a great value. which is ultimately the reason I continue to use and recommend them to this day.
Hopefully, you find this review helpful. If so please leave a thumbs up as I always appreciate that and if you do decide to get started with Bluehost Check the link below to help you take advantage of any of the current best deals and promotional offers that I can find.
And if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments below as I love getting to help answer as many questions as I can. otherwise, I appreciate you guys taking the time to read and I look forward to seeing you in the next article.
