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!
Bluehost is just the easiest, most affordable wordpress hosting out there. I've used it with a number of clients and always find it easy to set up. It doesn't come with bells and whistles, but if you're using Wordpress, you probably don't want that anyway. It does its job simply and well.
The only issue I've had with bluehost is occasional system crashes. However, I have to say that I've always been able to resolve these within 24 hours by working with their service team.
It's super affordable (less than $5 per month), so it's a great choice for new businesses or freelancers to set up their sites at minimal costs. Use a free wordpress theme and you have a website for roughly $50 a year---it's a great deal.
Whenever I need help, I'm on the phone within 5 minutes with someone helping me walk through a tech issue.
There are so many features in Bluehost. To some, it's advanced and complicated. To others, it's nice to have so many options. It's isn't always easy to find what you're looking for after you log in.
Bluehost has been reliable for us for many years. We pay for the year and save a considerable amount this way. After a while, I began to learn their many other services and used them included in my current rate! (SSL, backup)
I like that Bluehost has very low downtime and some of the faster hosting speeds I've experienced among major web hosting providers. Bluehost offers a multitude of web products that allow you to consolidate all of your web assets in one place. Their standard email accounts that come with the basic hosting packages generally work very well.
There can be some speeds and connectivity issues when it comes to working CMS platforms like WordPress and Joomla. Though Bluehost's customer support is great overall, they can sometimes not be helpful when it comes to solving specific questions regarding our CMS setup. In those cases, they often refer us to third-party resources.
We can generally post reliable websites and landing pages for our various business services and promotions using Bluehost. Emails through Bluehost are typically delivered in a timely manner. Since the email accounts are sufficient, we save a significant amount of money by not having to purchase an additional email hosting plan on top of our regular web hosting plan.
Good Hosting Provider for small to medium sized businesses , reliable.
a tad more expensive than other hosting solutions on the market, still reasonable price point though
-Reliable load and up time for site -Security is good with them, protects against attacks/breaches -Keep costs down -Keeps implementation costs down
Their setup process is very easy, the service is reliable, and they have stand-out customer service. It's responsive and clear. They also have a large and helpful library of resources to make it easy to troubleshoot on your own. The service is reliable for the most part, and the interface/dashboard is clear and easy to use. If you use WordPress, Bluehost has a dedicated service for hosting WordPress sites.
Not much - does its job. There have been a few times where service has been down, but at most it's lasted a couple hours. Maybe once or twice last year.
Easy and reliable web hosting.
The simplicity of the service, because in just couple of clicks you have a basic WordPress site running
The lack of options in the dashboard administration and maybe they could allow more CMS options
Stationary sites that are more for information content of the company
I had started my first site with BlueHost and Now after passing more than two years, I am with them. They are awesome in this business that is why I recommend using BH to my blog readers. You can get wordpress hosting plans such as Shared, VPS and Dedicated as well as Cloud at very affordable prices.
In my experience, I had never faced any problem regarding hosting, support or any thing in BlueHost.
They are good and reliable hosting provider for wordpress sites and with their hosting servers you don't have worry about anything.
The characteristics as a shared or cloud hosting are perfect. I have 2 WordPress sites with them and they work very smoothly... All options I've needed for my WordPress have been perfectly achieved. I love the eaily way to update/change my plan... Just from Shared plan to Cloud plan was in minutes...
I began with a Shared hosting and now I'm into Cloud plan. It's very good although not perfect. Some months ago we had 3 weeks with service interruption. Anyway the support was clear about the problems they had but were some minutes with our sites down.
I wanted a reliable hosting for our WordPress sites and we found them via a WordPress official site recommendation.
- Very simple to sign up for - Works well with WordPress - Payment is easy - Great support documentation with videos
- User interface is good, but somewhat outdated and clunky at times - Other than that, met all of my needs for domain purchase and web hosting
I needed a website host that work well with Wordpress, and this met my need. No significant benefits as opposed to any other hosting service provider.
You don't need to have any experience to start your website. Also, they offer different plans for different websites. Support is really fast, no downtime in the 2 years I've been with them. Even the basic plans will give you more than enough disk space, databases, etc. About price: Even though its a bit pricier than most competitors, it becomes really affordable if you have to host more than one website.
Integrated email gets really slow sometimes. Not even near the email quota and you will experience slow navigation. There is not much documentation on simple functions (like subdomains), but you can get them done pretty easy if you contact customer support.
I'm starting to move my other websites to a single hosting plan. Its cheaper in the long term and with great support.
Simple interface and good pricing. I only log in once a year to renew but it's a simple process.
I have had issues getting my CC to work with auto pay.
Hosting a small website and database
Bluehost is a long time player in the ISP market and has a long history of fairly solid service. Today it offers many traditional hosting services and support for most publishing platforms. Like many ISPs today, Bluehost offers a nice range of services for everything from Drupal sites to online databases. It is also fairly easy to use and learn.
Like others had stated, Bluehost can sometimes have less than helpful service. However, they do offer many guides and online aids for navigating their services.
Hosting CMS sites, setting basic websites, and managing current sites.
I really like the never-ending promotion for new customers, having 50% discount on the first year!!
Limited payment options to credit/debit card. It would be great to pay via PayPal, Google Wallet or Amazon Payments.
I'm a game developer, blogger, and I'm on my way to start blogging for profit. Bluehost really helped me start my first blogs at an affordable price that first year when my budget was really tight.
Support Services is excellent. Their on-call support service is provided.
If I use so, I don't have any problems managing hosting and pointing the domain and access to file
I don't have any problem
I administered Bluehost for one of my previous employers. We managed our web hosting, emails, and several site builders through their platform. On its surface, Bluehost looked like an entry-level web hosting platform. But there was a ton of functionality and features hidden beneath its surface. It was straightforward to create and configure employee email addresses. We could easily apply company signatures, manage passwords and password resets, and specify different settings depending on the account we were adjusting. Although we had somebody else who physically managed our website through Bluehost, I recall from my limited experience in that area that there was plenty of room for technical adjustments to things like DNS settings, analytics, etc. This was great compared to products like Google Workspace, where many settings are either buried deep and impossible to find, or off-limits altogether. Bluehost seemed comfortable in allowing its users to exercise control!
I had one experience with Bluehost support. It was clear from our call that their support was outsourced. This is not actually an issue that bothers me, but there were communication barriers between the support staff and I that made resolving our ticket a little bit more complicated than it could have been otherwise. Additionally, from what I recall, neither the first-level nor escalated support staff was able to solve that issue (which was pertaining to DNS Settings). We had to work with a 3rd party technical team to correct this issue and bring our site back online. In summary, there are definitely settings in Bluehost that you should avoid if you're not well versed in web development!
Bluehost solved our problem of being able to host our domains, websites, and company email system all in one single place. They were also highly cost-effective, with very competitive monthly pricing. Additionally, in spite of the low pricing, we had a good deal of advanced features that other platforms reserve for more expensive plans. When I was using Bluehost, it was in the healthcare field. There are policies in place requiring certain documentation to be kept for several years. With Bluehost, we had unlimited email storage, and we were easily able to arrange our stored emails in compliant ways.
It has decent rates for hosting my Large website
It goes down abouut once a month which is far too much
It is a webhost with good customer service,
The Bluehost user interface is so easy to use that a nontechnical person can also build and deploy their website quickly. The support team of Bluehost is just brilliant, and they are available 24/7, They have chat, phone and email support team, who are ready to help you with most of the issues. Bluehost supports one click installation of most of the popular CMS such as WordPress, Weebly, Laravel etc. Shared Servers are available for reasonable cost and the up time is also superb!
The pricing for VPS hosting is quite costly, and they do not provide Windows hosting; they support only Linux web hosting. Other than this, I love Bluehost in all other aspects.
I was interested in creating a portfolio website and a couple of blogs. With the help of Bluehost and WordPress, I built my websites with ease, and I am earning well from my website. Also, I don't need to worry about security of my webistes, as Bluehost provides SSL, and malware scaning features as addon service.
Implementation with WordPress, really easy to use. The support is very good
Webmail is not so user friendly and doesn't have so much space. In the past it use to have some problem, but now seem fixed
Hosting wordpress site, domain webmail
Bluehost gives the best uptime in the market which is around 99.99 % throughout the year. Also, it has a great load speed which is 406 ms. The introductory pricing of bluehost is quite low and begins from only $2.75 per month. There are a lot of options regarding the security as well. You can also find a number of integrations, e-commerce features, and ready to start apps like Wordpress, Django etc. It is also one of the most recommended, official host of WordPress and many famous web apps.
One thing I dislike about this software is that they have very high renewal rates. The site migrations that are offered are not for free as well. One of the issue that I feel is, it's control panel shows ads very often.
It has helped me a lot with the great load speed it offers. Also, they have excellent customer support and if you have been facing any kind of problems, they can be solved really easily as well.
In terms of speed, bluehost is decent. It's slower than some competitors; however, those competitors are much more expensive. I love the pricing. Bluehost is very cheap when it comes to value vs price. I also find it awesome how Bluehost gives you a free domain with your plan.
I've had several times where our company website crashes and I take the blame. Bluehost's support is very good in fixing this; however, it shouldn't happen in the first place.
Hosting a website and domain on the internet at a cheap price.