Bluehost is a website building tool that is meant to help businesses create and manage WordPress websites from a single platform. Using the software allows companies to streamline numerous critical operations including migrating business files, streamlining shared web hosting operations, and managing domains.
Capabilities |
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Segment |
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based |
Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
Bluehost is famous for its cheap web hosting, especially for WordPress websites and WooCommerce stores. But hype aside, is Bluehost a good choice for your website or online store?
So buckle in, and let’s find out. Here, in this Bluehost review, we’re uncovering everything you need to know about the service.
Global Performance Grade | A |
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Uptime Guarantee | ✔ |
Free SSL | ✔ |
Hosting Types | Shared, Dedicated, WordPress, VPS |
Basic Plan Features | 1 Website, 50 GB SSD Storage, 24/7 Support |
Starting Price | $ 2.95 |
Learn more at Bluehost.com |
Bluehost is one of the largest web hosting providers in the world. At the time of writing, they host over two million web domains. The company was founded in 2003 in Utah. But, Bluehost really gained momentum in 2009 when the company introduced CPU throttling technology to increase the efficiency and speed of its servers.
Fast forward to 2010, and they joined a conglomerate of other web service providers under the Endurance International Group. Since then, Bluehost has become a significant player in the web hosting industry, with an estimated market share of 3.4%.
Now that we’ve covered a bit about who Bluehost is, let’s look closer at its features and functionality…
Bluehost’s easy-to-use interface is one of its many appeals.
In fact, there are two interface options available:
Within your Bluehost dashboard, you’ll find a one-click setup for WordPress. Installing WordPress is as simple as logging in, finding the website section on your dashboard, and hitting “Install WordPress.”
You’ll then be asked to choose your domain name. At this point, you also need to provide an email address and create a username and password for your new installation.
SEO or (AKA Search Engine Optimization) refers to how easily findable your website is on search engines. Bluehost analyze your website and provides you with an online marketing report that’s divided into easy-to-read sections:
Overall, Bluehost provides a wealth of information to help you improve your website’s SEO.
Using Microsoft 365, Bluehost lets you create a custom professional email address where your domain name is simply transferred to your new email. If you already own a web domain, you can add it to your Office 365 subscription through its management dashboard (which you can access via your Bluehost control panel).
There are three email hosting plans to choose from:
All plans include:
You’re free to upgrade or cancel your subscription whenever you want (with no cancellation fees). Before canceling your subscription, be sure to download any data you require; however, you can still access this up to 30 days after canceling.
Bluehost claims to always be on hand to support its customers. So regardless of your chosen pricing plan, you’re entitled to 24/7 telephone and live chat support. To utilize the latter, hit the “chat now” button on Bluehost’s website. You’ll be asked if you’re a new or existing customer and a way to identify you, such as your web domain, phone number, or email address.
Bluehost also offers a blog, online knowledge base, and resource center. Here you can find answers to questions, how-to guides, and gather more info on topics about business, creating a website, and marketing. An interesting feature in the resource center is that you can filter by skill level: basic, intermediate, or advanced to ensure access to the information you’ll actually understand.
CPanel (AKA Control Panel) is Bluehost’s website management platform. You can access this via the advanced section of your Bluehost dashboard. From here, you can manage integrations and access a range of applications where you can add useful scripts to your website, such as:
The Bluehost Marketplace is where you browse, purchase, install, and manage your WordPress plugins, add-ons, and themes. You can choose from over 900 themes and tons of plugins.
Simply log into your Bluehost account and locate the marketplace button on the left-hand side menu to access the marketplace. To give you an idea of the kinds of plugins on offer, let’s focus on WooCommerce specifically. There are 18 WooCommerce-related extensions (plugins) covering shipping, scheduling, and payment processing functionality.
More specifically:
…to name a few.
Performance is imperative when picking the right web hosting service.
The key metrics here are twofold:
BlueHost boasts an impressive 99.99% uptime. In theory, this means your website should only experience (roughly) less than an hour (52.56 minutes) of downtime per year, which is a pretty good standard.
When compared to other hosts, Bluehost’s uptime ranks pretty competitively:
(According to tooltester and uptime.is).
As we’ve already hinted, site speed refers to the number of seconds it takes for a web page to load. Needless to say, the quicker, the better. According to tooltester and Pingdom, here’s how Bluehost fares against its competitors:
As you can see, Bluehost takes a lower ranking for this mark as it needs c. 0.91s to fully load the website while the best tested host (iPage) needs just c. 0.30s. It’s not the worst, but it’s certainly not the best either. However, there are remedies to this issue. If you expect high traffic volumes, there’s a cache setting you can utilize to improve your website’s performance. Caching allows you to store assets in a temporary storage location to load your site faster. You can find this feature in your Bluehost portal under ‘My Site’ and then “Performance.”
We’re living in an age where digital fraud is rife, and, as such, secure web hosting is essential. With that in mind, let’s see what Bluehost offers:
WordPress website creation can be a daunting task, but Bluehost tries to make the process as easy and quick as possible:
For the uninitiated, web hosting refers to a website’s allotted space on a web server. The website’s files are stored here: code, images, etc. This enables your website to be accessible on the web.
In contrast, a web domain is simply your website’s URL address. The issue that many great domain names are already taken so you have to be quite creative when choosing one.
Give it a go and see if the domain name you like is available:
You need both web hosting and domain name to launch a website. To hit the ground running with this, click “Get Started” or “Start Building.” From there, choose the plan you want. Bluehost offers three pricing plans and makes it easy to understand what’s included in each.
But, in a nutshell:
Basic at $2.95 per month: This is “Perfect for bloggers and personal websites.”
Plus at $5.95 per month: is considered “Perfect for business sites.”
Online Store at $15.95 per month: as the name suggests, this is “perfect for online stores with product shipping.”
All plans include web hosting, unlimited websites (which means you can host as many websites as you need), and over 300 templates. You also have unlimited access to their image library, email marketing tools, and blog post management features.
The Plus and Online Store options unlock additional features, including extra premium template designs, domain privacy, and online selling features.
Once you’ve chosen your plan, if you already have a web domain name, enter it now. Or you can skip this step if you want to tackle this later. If you’re creating a new web domain, enter your desired URL, and Bluehost will tell you whether it’s available. If it is, then you can proceed. It’s worth noting that your web domain is free for only a year; after that, you’ll need to pay.
Next, you’ll be asked to enter your personal details and agree to their terms and conditions.
Bluehost wants to tailor the user experience as much as possible. So they’ll ask a few short questions about the type of website you intend to make, your goals, and how comfortable you are with website creation.
Bluehost automatically provides a default website design for you, which you can view by clicking “visit site.”
However, you’ll probably want to change this as it’s very simplistic. WordPress is pre-installed to save you the hassle of doing this yourself.
To create, edit, and design your website, head to your WordPress dashboard. First, you’ll most likely want to select a theme for your website. To do this, click on “Appearance,” then “Themes,” and finally, “Add a new theme.” From here, you can search for a theme. Scrolling through the vast array of options can seem overwhelming. But you can use the filters to help narrow down your search.
Some themes are free, while others have a price tag. The best theme for your website comes down to what you visualize your website looking like. You may find it worthwhile paying a little bit for the look you want, but the choice is yours. When you find a template you’re happy with, simply install it and then hit “Activate.”
After logging onto your Bluehost control panel, go to “My site” found on the left-hand menu, followed by the “manage site” button. This takes you to your WordPress dashboard, where you can click “website builder.”
From there, you can begin editing as you like. You can click on any web page and select the different elements you want to change. For example, you can edit text, text on buttons, images, color preferences, and background. You can also edit the pictures by searching through Bluehost’s vast library of images or uploading your own.
Whatever aesthetic you’re after, WordPress can help you achieve it. You can even change the headers and logos using the “customize” button.
To add new pages, simply click on the “pages” tab on the left menu and then locate “add new” by the “Pages” title.
Bluehost’s drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to edit your template and add features to your website. Overall, creating and editing your website with Bluehost is really that simple. What it really takes is a bit of exploration and an idea of what you want your finished product to look like.
Bluehost provides many different web hosting plans to choose from. We’ve made a short summary table so you can get your head around all of them.
Shared Hosting | Yes |
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WordPress Hosting | Yes |
Cloud Hosting | No |
VPS Hosting | Yes |
Dedicated Hosting | Yes |
Reseller Hosting | Yes |
Linux Servers | Yes |
Windows Servers | No |
In this review we will focus on three most popular options, namely:
Let’s take a look at what these mean:
In shared hosting you share server resources with other customers. It’s by far the most popular hosting plan thanks its affordability and it’s perfect for those creating a website or blog for the first time. When considering shared hosting, there are a further four 12 month plans to pick from:
Please note: All above presented prices are promotional for the first term only and renew at the regular rates.
Besides the above mentioned key features all plans also include:
Considered perfect for expanding websites needing more control. There are three plans available: Standard, Enhanced and Ultimate.
All plans come with 24/7 customer support, and each program runs on a 36-month basis.
Please note: All above presented prices are promotional for the first term only and renew at the regular rates.
Aptly named, the Dedicated plan provides a dedicated server for just one individual, application, or organization. In other words, you won’t be sharing a server with anyone else. If you’re running a business or your website’s snowballing, you may want to consider this option. But, ultimately, you have to decide whether it makes sense for your budget and business plans.
There are three plans to choose from:
Please note: All above presented prices are promotional for the first term only and renew at the regular rates.
We’ve covered lots of information here, so let’s condense what we’ve discussed into a quick pro-cons list:
Bluehost also offers an affiliate program. You can find Bluehost’s affiliate program by scrolling to the bottom of their home page and clicking ‘Affiliates’. The affiliate scheme is free to join. You just have to sign up, and you’re immediately provided with a unique tracking code and affiliate links or custom banners (or both).
Then, for every visitor who clicks on the link and signs up to Bluehost, you receive a commission starting at $65 and increasing with a volume of referred customers. From there, you can earn an unlimited amount: the more people who sign up to Bluehost via your link, the more money you’ll make.
Overall, this affiliate marketing scheme is pretty decent and has one of the better payouts in the web hosting space. What’s more, Bluehost provides you with support and promotional resources to give you the best shot at earning as much as possible.
If you decide Bluehost isn’t for you, don’t fret. There are plenty of other great options to choose from:
Hostinger is a European-based web hosting company boasting decent website speeds and affordable hosting plans. Their shared hosting package starts at $1.99 a month (for a 12-month subscription and a renewal rate of $5.99). You can host up to 100 websites with this plan, and you’ll get a free web domain. Other freebies include an SSL certificate, Google Ad credit, and weekly site backups. On the downside, they have a lower uptime score than Bluehost, and they don’t have their own website builder.
Hostgator is a popular US-based web hosting solution. They’ve been around since 2002 and have made their mark, offering low, competitive prices. From $2.75 a month, you can expect to host one website, connect a custom domain, and have an SSL certificate. In addition, Hostgator boasts good uptime speed, so you can be sure of its reliability. You’ll also have access to an AI-fuelled website builder, so you can set up a WordPress site in just a few clicks.
Hostgator’s drawbacks lie in its poor customer service. For example, they have notoriously long waiting times for their support chats. In addition, customers have complained that their team didn’t have a good technical understanding of website management. Also, as noted above, they have one of the slowest website speeds of all the competitors listed here.
SiteGround is an excellent choice if you’re looking for quick website speeds and reliable uptime as they reign supreme in both areas. They’re another European-based provider gradually gaining popularity for their well-priced and fast hosting services.
Their Starter plan of $2.99 (per month) gives you one website, SSL, and CDN certificate. You also receive free daily backups, access to their website builder tool, and free firewall security built into your website. Finally, they also have WooCommerce integration options available.
On the downside, Siteground only offers shared hosting plans. They don’t provide VPS hosting or dedicated servers. Your resource space is also considerably limited (10 GB) compared to competitors. Moreover, it doesn’t offer a free domain name.
So, there you have it. This concludes our Bluehost review. We hope we’ve provided everything you need to decide whether they’re a good choice for your website. There are many aspects to consider, from security to functionality to ease of use. But, Bluehost is regarded as one of the best overall hosting providers on the market.
As we’ve discussed, it allows you to design, optimize and host your website for a reasonably low price. The price hike for renewing your subscription is still pretty reasonable for beginners looking to get their business off the ground.
All in all, Bluehost provides everything you need to kickstart your online business, from an intuitive website builder to web domains to helpful plugins – and tons more to boot!
Is Bluehost the right choice for your business? Tell us your thoughts in the comments box below!
We hope this review was useful. Click below to let us know what you think or leave a comment in the comment section!
Easy to use interface, Inbuild WordPress Site management features, Cpanel Access and 24x7 Support
Shared hosting sometimes has the risk of getting malware, has limitation of number of files stored in on the server
Using WordPress Sites management one can mange all the WordPress websites from one place. Sitelock secures the website code from hackers.
Blue host has everything all in one place, they have domain registration, Wordpress, website hosting and emails. It also is a very easy platform to use and get your head around.
Unless if you are spending a large amount of money on a VPS server, the servers are quite slow! Your website loading time will be quite long as a result of the cheap prices.
Blue host is a super easy to use platform with everything in one place. Instead of having to keep switching between platforms, we do everything in one place. This saves us a lot of time.
Popular web host Bluehost is renowned for its dependable service, inexpensive pricing, and user-friendly platform. They provide a comprehensive selection of hosting packages, including shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting, and their packages are appropriate for both novice and expert users. In addition, Bluehost provides a user-friendly control panel, numerous tools to assist users in creating and maintaining their websites, and round-the-clock customer service. Overall, Bluehost is a solid choice for anybody searching for a trustworthy and reasonably priced web hosting company.
Price Increase: After the initial time of discounting, prices skyrocket. Limited backups: There are no daily backups included in the Basic shared hosting plan, and the backups that are supplied are only kept for a short time.
A user-friendly control panel, several tools to assist users in creating and managing their websites, and round-the-clock customer service are all provided by Bluehost. Overall, Bluehost is a solid choice for anybody searching for a trustworthy and reasonably priced web hosting company.
Thousands of website templates and easy customization of themes or templates to create and design the website without taking help from a developer. Also, Bluehost provide too many out of the box plugin that helps us to connect with different tools for chatbot, form and reporting.
Nothing as of now...everything is awesome.
Easy website designing and hosting. Helping millions of people to bring their business online. Low maintenance and budget-friendly service.
The price is affordable and easy to use. The service is also good and fast reply us.
A bit to find the primary domain or subdomain.
I can host many sites for my clients and it is easy to contact to support.
Easy to use cpanel and good extra software. There are options to start your blog and shopping cart for free and the updates keep your sites compatible with social networks to get more traffic
Cpanel functionality and logos for using applications are not customized for each type of membership. Applications are shown but are not clear which are free and which are required to buy.
Web hosting, I can manage multiple websites with the same account and use extra application to improve each site's performance. Python is not available for shared server accounts
Used Bluehost for hosting WordPress site; it has 99.9% uptime. Their plans are cheap; You can get the essential website running for INR 200 also; you can buy a domain name at a reasonable price. Apart from that if you need, they have good support 27X7. Bonus part, they offer SSL also.
Although their hosting plans are cheap compared to other hosting providers, if you purchase a domain, the renewal charges are a bit high. Also, if you want to migrate to the cloud server, you have to look for another hosting provider.
We are hosting our website on Bluehost. They are providing Cpanel for website management, so it was fast and easy to deploy our website, and in significantly less time and money, our website was live.
One of the main benefits of using Bluehost is that you can save time and worry less about your website, Bluehost is the most popular name in web hosting. With their free domain name, free CDN + SSL, 24/7 customer support, easy-to-use control panel, High-Performance servers, and amazing security features, you will never have to worry about your website again.
There are four main things that I dislike about Bluehost: -Higher domain renewal price -No Monthly Payments -Website Migration Fees -Only Linux Hosting, No Windows Hosting Available
I never found any problem during the use of this hosting platform. It is not really hard to set up your site on their platform. Moreover, it is so easy to work with them that I have made many changes to my site without any issues at all.
Bluehosg is really good. They had a not very good reputation for many years, but they have improved to the point where I prefer them over all other shared hostings. Bluehost pricing varies largely based on Country. I bought it in India, where it's really inexpensive. But regardless of location they are extremely good. I liked the Bluehost Builder, which is similar to other page builders, but allows easy switching between default WordPress edits and Page Builder. Those using some other CMS or no CMS at all also have advantage. I had some experience with a friend who used it without CMS, and it worked perfectly. There customer support was fairly good too. They provide free domains, and incase you already own a domain, you can use the free domain coupon to renew the domain for another year. I have tried multiple hostings including Siteground and GoDaddy, but none of them had the simple yet easy to use UI as Bluehost. They had lots of tools to manage site directly from the Bluehost Dashboard which is really good.
The customer support of Bluehost India is a bit slow and has an outdated UI. The Bluehost American support is relatively fast, and my god it's really good UI. I do not like Bluehost's Cloud Plans. I shall recommend Kinara or some other Cloud Server instead of Bluehost if you are looking for Cloud Plans. However they are the best for Shared Hostings. Bluehost site transfers are something to avoid. If you are using CMS any sort of custom code or even a basic child theme (in WordPrees), there site transfer service will screw you up. It's better to use some migration service instead.
They are giving me excellent loading times, impressive speeds, free domain and a lot of storage. My site is more than 10GB in total size and there SSD storage handles it with ease. Unlike other hostings, they don't accurately inform the system resources alloted to us, but they are plenty for a decent traffic sit3.
They have a long-standing relationship with the WordPress community. There are many things like price, reliability, money-back guarantee that are excellent, apart from those, I saw no hidden charges when signing up for an account.
The only concern is when we have to renew the free domain, the renewal price is significantly higher. Another thing is, there is an aggressive upsell process during signup.
I was very new initially with websites and all and had minimal traffic volume. Thus there was an option called shared hosting, which helped me significantly in reducing my costs. And new developers should always use this.
It is one of the trusted partners of WordPress. It has a fantastic user interface to start with your hosting. Website hosting is seamless with Bluehost. They offer 99.95% uptime with better performance. They offer unmetered bandwidth, which will help to scale your server with traffic. They offered various hosting plans like shared, WordPress, VPS, reseller, and dedicated servers. They offered free domain for 1 year with their hosting plan. They have cPanel for backend operations and 24x7 customer support.
They charge heavily for the renewal of your domain which is far more than your initial purchase.
I have hosted my blogs on Bluehost as it cost me less than others with the feature Bluehost offers. My WordPress site becomes live effortlessly with one click. I got a free domain for one year. I can operate my site and mails service using the cPanel offered by Bluehost. I have hosted three blogs currently, which are very much easy to manage with Bluehost. For any query, the support team is there 24x7.
Bluehost hosting plans provide quick loading times for websites with medium traffic. The shared hosting plans use SSD storage which results in improved performance and quick loading time. All the shared hosting plans come with unmetered bandwidth, which plays an important role when scaling your websites. The backend file management is provided by cPanel and that is a big advantage. Moreover, all annual hosting plans provide you with a free domain name for 1 year.
Earlier I used the Cloud Hosting plans from Bluehost India portal, which provided excellent performance. However, due to some reaons, the cloud hosting plans are not available for new customers. Existing customers are still able to continue with their cloud hosting plans. Would be good if Bluehost can re-introduce the Cloud Hosting Plans.
Using Bluehost shared hosting plans as well as their cloud hosting plans for hosting client websites.
I like bluehost for its easy to use dashboard and portal. In addition, it is fairly cheap and easy to budget with compared to other services like Hostgator.
When starting a new account or domain, it takes a while to get started.
I'm using Bluehost for my own website and webcomic, as well as using it as a service for my clients and their websites.
I've built several websites through Bluehost. They offer great customer service - which was especially helpful when I was just getting started.
The related email account was a little difficult to set up.
If there is a glitch with an imported template/software, they'll help you solve it even though they're not responsible for the problem.
I like that Bluehost has a terribly low period of time and a few of the quicker hosting speeds I've full-fledged among major net hosting suppliers. Bluehost offers a large number of net merchandise that permit you to consolidate all of your net assets in one place. Their normal email accounts that associate with the fundamental hosting packages typically work ok.
There will be some speeds and property problems once it involves operating CMS platforms like WordPress and Joomla. although Bluehost's client support is nice overall, they will typically not be useful once it involves resolution-specific queries concerning our CMS setup. In those cases, they typically refer to the United States to third-party resources.
We develop websites and custom digital selling methods for businesses of all shapes and sizes. we've used Bluehost within the past once a consumer was searching for a price priced hosting arrange. For the value, it's an honest hosting arrange, however, we've recently created a transition to a better battery-powered, dearer platform.
I like that Bluehost offers a full range of domain registration and web hosting services all in one place. The performance of most of the services I've used with them, particularly hosting and email, has been quite smooth and fast. I haven't experienced many negative issues, but when I do, the customer support team at Bluehost has been very helpful and easy to reach. I usually don't wait too long to get someone on the phone. The fact that Bluehost has been around a while and is still going strong with good reviews from many customers gives me confidence in doing business with them.
Though Bluehost provides just about everything I need for my web assets, I think their pricing could be lower. There are other similar companies out there with nice packages and deals that I wish Bluehost could provide. Some other companies offer things like domain privacy, more databases and increased server space at lower prices.
Bluehost gives me a reliable platform to host websites that I can use for promotions and data processing. The server speeds have generally been fast and I haven't had to deal with many malware issues. It's great that Bluehost has a wealth of information online that I can search to walk through various account processes on my own.
I appreciated that Bluehost walked me through step by step in creating my own domain. It linked directly with wordpress so I could create my own blog that I wanted.
I dislike that there is no video tutorial at the beginning to explain some of the details. It took my several days of using the software to understand some of the nuances.
I am creating my own blog - and I have realized that it has allowed me to achieve my dream of creating my own blog!
They have multiplatform hosting - Linux and Windows. Support is friendly and knowledgeable. Easy to setup and navigate email. Unlimited email accounts and bandwidth. Ability to create mailing lists. Can add subscribers and moderators. They also offer VPS and dedicated hosting. You may register up to three free domain names. They have different options for customer support including live chat, phone support and online ticket submitting system.
Old cPanel interface and lack of Wordpress support. Don't have access to the second level of support. Some time the waiting time for phone support is long.
You can utilize your needs for Linux and Windows hosting under one account. Easy to obtain private IP address for your hosting. I can create virtually unlimited amount mailing lists and have hundredth of subscribers.
I use BlueHost for web publication hosting using WordPress. I also use BlueHost for email. Both work very well, and it's simple and straightforward for those inexperienced with self-hosting to learn and gain experience.
There's a little bit of lag in the email hosting at times. I use a third-party email host/reader and sometimes they don't come through or send right away - I usually experience lags of 20-40 minutes between server refreshes or updates.
The business itself is a web publication company, so our main product is the website hosted here.
BlueHost is a good hosting option for small businesses, small to medium traffic websites, and everything in between. Its relatively simple to set up. What I like best is the help videos and informative articles. Basically everything I've needed to do I've had step by step instructions to assist me.
BlueHost offers great initial deals to sign up. After that first contract is up though, they offer no other promotions and you are left to decide to transfers your sites to another hosting company or to pay the increased costs. It's kind of frustrating when you see the deals they offer new people but you cannot get the deals because you are a loyal non-new customer.
We host many websites, emails and domains through BlueHost. They are easy to work with and simple steps to set up.