One of the oldest web hosts that started in 1996, Bluehost has become one of the biggest brand names when it comes to WordPress hosting. They are an official ‘WordPress’ recommended hosting provider. With Bluehost, you don’t have to worry about your website slowing down even with heavy traffic. Their 24/7 expert support is always there to help when you need it via phone, email, or live chat. They are rated #1 in web hosting for small businesses. Plus, they’re offering WPBeginner users an exclusive 63% discount, a free domain, free SSL, and a free site builder with templates.
1. Good Speed Time (99.98%)
Uptime is one of the most important aspects when choosing a web host – after all, if your site is down, your users can’t access it. Therefore, 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 want to see nothing less.
The good news is that BlueHost easily beats this benchmark, comfortably keeping our test site up 99.98% of the time over the past 6 months. Total downtime was one hour. There were a few bad months (May and July 2022) where uptime was below average but overall BlueHost kept our site running without any major outages.
2. Bluehost Server Response Time
When you’re testing a live website using tools like Pingdom, you’re basically looking at how everything loads on your website. This includes images, which take longer to load than plain text.
To get a more accurate server response time, we used another tool called Bitcatcha. This allows you to test the server’s response time without loading any data.
As you can see the Bluehost server in the US performs under a fraction of a second. At other points, the response was slightly longer but still less than a second.
If your target audience is in the United States, this will benefit your website. However, if most of your users come from other parts of the world, you can change your server location.
3. Security Options and Features
Bluehost Review, Since Bluehost is one of the “cheapest” options on the market, we’re glad to see that they don’t cut too many corners on important 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 e-commerce plugins.
Advanced plans come with spam expert add-ons, domain privacy protection, and server backup. In addition, you get more advanced security features like SiteLock, which helps prevent malware attacks.
CodeGuard is another form of protection, providing daily backups so you can roll back previous versions of a site if it gets hacked.
Postini, from Google, is a noteworthy security tool. It provides spam protection for your email, so anything suspicious is prevented from reaching your inbox.
4. Easy to Use for Beginners
Some of the web hosts we’ve looked at can only be considered the best if you’re an advanced user. But, BlueHost is also great for beginners.
Their customer portal is intuitive and clean (although, we’ve experienced that it’s a bit slow at times). You can access your site under “My Sites” and get add-ons from the Marketplace. Everything is made very simple and the client area is very beginner friendly.
If you don’t want to use WordPress, you can also start building a website with a website building tool (like Weebly or Drupal). You can then customize the template by dragging and dropping elements onto your page.
Bluehost also has features for advanced users who want to use their own code to build their own site.
5. 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Bluehost Review, offers a 30-day money-back guarantee with all of its hosting plans.
You can try the service to see their performance for yourself and ask for a refund if you are not completely satisfied. We do have a few words of caution, though.
According to Bluehost’s terms, what this guarantee does and doesn’t cover:
- You can only get refunds on web hosting costs, not on other products like domains or other add-ons.
- Bluehost will deduct $15.99 if you receive a free domain name in your plan.
- Bluehost does not return any requests after 30 days.
It’s not exactly a no-questions-asked policy like we’ve seen from some hosts. So make sure you agree with these points before signing up.
6. 24/7 Customer Support
Bluehost offers 24/7 customer support on live chat, phone, and email ticketing systems. On top of that, they have an extensive knowledge base filled with answers to frequently asked 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 need to authenticate yourself by providing your first and last name, and then choose the topic you want to discuss. For our case it is pre-sales. We asked a simple question about site migration and were first presented with knowledge base articles by the bot. If you don’t get an answer to your question, you can start a chat with a customer support representative.
Bluehost Hosting Plans and Features
Bluehost offers a variety of hosting plans for all budgets and sizes. This includes shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, cloud hosting, WooCommerce hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and more.
Let’s take a look at Bluehost hosting plans and their features:
Shared Hosting: Shared hosting is the best way to start a new website with low traffic volume. In a shared hosting environment, your website shares server resources with other websites.
Cloud Hosting: A more reliable upgrade to a shared hosting plan. It allows you to use multiple cloud servers, allowing your website to automatically switch to another server in case of hardware failure or high traffic.
WordPress Hosting: Their WordPress plans are specially designed for WordPress powered websites. It is optimized for running WordPress and can also protect your WordPress site from common threats.
WooCommerce Hosting: WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress, it allows you to easily start an online store with WordPress.
WooCommerce hosting offers you all the features you need to launch your e-commerce store.
VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting: An upgrade to shared WordPress hosting, VPS hosting allows you virtual dedicated resources in a shared environment.
Dedicated Hosting Server: A dedicated hosting server for your website, means you will have all the resources of a dedicated server to yourself. The downside is that you will have to manage the server yourself.
All Bluehost hosting plans allow you to install WordPress with 1 click.
All plans come with an easy-to-use hosting control panel where you can manage your hosting, create databases, and more.
Bluehost has a customizable control panel that improves ease of use for beginners. It also uses a customized version of the cPanel hosting dashboard for more advanced options.
Conclusion
After reading this review, you may be wondering if Bluehost is the right choice for your website.
Bluehost is often rated the #1 web hosting provider. They offer a wide range of hosting options with lots of features that help you build your website with ease.
All their hosting plans include customer support from expert 24/7 expert staff.
Most importantly, they offer affordable starter plans that meet the needs of any budget.
If you’re just starting out, you can’t go wrong signing up for BlueHost’s shared hosting plan. It’s easy on your pocket and comes with all the right tools. As your site grows you can easily upgrade your hosting plan accordingly.
FAQs About Bluehost hosting
1. Is Bluehost good for beginners?
Yes. Bluehost is the most beginner-friendly WordPress hosting company on the market. They automatically install WordPress for you when you sign up. They also have an easy-to-use control panel that allows you to manage your hosting account yourself.
Plenty of support is available with detailed guides, video tutorials and articles. You have 24/7 access to their expert support via live chat and phone.
2. Do I need a credit card to sign up with Bluehost?
BlueHost accepts credit cards but you can choose to show more payment options during checkout and select PayPal as your payment method if you prefer.
3. Can Bluehost handle high traffic?
Their shared hosting plans are suitable for starter websites and small businesses. In our stress test, their shared hosting plan was able to handle 100 virtual users without any slowdowns.
These plans can handle reasonable and sudden traffic surges. However, they are still quite limited in server resources. If you are expecting more traffic you will need to upgrade your hosting plan.
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