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#1 in web hosting for small businesses. On top of that, they are offering WPBeginner users a special 65% discount, a free domain, free SSL, and a free site builder with templates.
Bluehost has become the biggest brand name when it comes to WordPress hosting. One of the oldest web hosts starting in 1996, They are an official ‘WordPress’ recommended hosting provider.
With Bluehost, you don’t have to worry about your website slowing down even if you have a lot of traffic. Their 24/7 expert support is always there to help when you need it, via phone, email, or live chat.
Bluehost Hosting Review from Our Experts
Bluehost is one of the largest web hosting companies in the world and is an official WordPress-recommended hosting provider.
Bluehost offers a variety of hosting plans for beginners and medium to large businesses with 24/7 customer support. Check out the full Bluehost review by our experts to find out if Bluehost is the right choice for you.
In this comprehensive Bluehost review, we’ll test their promises through rigorous analysis and industry-standard benchmarking tools.
The following are the areas we will be looking at:
- Speed: How fast will your website load with Bluehost? We will test their speed and server response time to assess this.
- Performance: How does Bluehost perform under traffic spikes? We will test it by doing a stress test and see how well it performs under traffic.
- Reliability: Will your website be available 24/7/365 with no downtime?
- Customer Support: Can you rely on Bluehost’s customer support when you need help with your website right away?
- Features: Do they provide all the features you would need to build your website?
- Pricing: Do they have the best pricing in the industry? Are there any Bluehost deals that could save you money?
This is our full Bluehost review and we will do an in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of Bluehost. In case you don’t want to read the full review, here’s Bluehost’s quick scorecard with our verdict.
About BlueHost
Let’s first take a look inside the company. Bluehost was established in 1996. It has grown steadily to be one of the most important web hosting companies worldwide.
Bluehost now hosts more than 2,000,000 websites around the globe. Bluehost has had a longstanding relationship with WordPress. Since 2006, Bluehost has been an official WordPress.org recommended web hosting provider.
They are known for their 24-hour customer support, great infrastructure, and support for open-source software such as WordPress.
The pros and cons
Each web hosting service has its pros and cons. Some are easy to live with, while others are impossible to ignore.
We have compiled a list of the Bluehost pros and cons.
Pros
Let’s first look at the benefits that make Bluehost the best choice.
- Pricing: The pricing for their hosting plans is very affordable, especially for those just starting.
- Reliability: With minimal downtime, they power many websites.
- No hidden fees: Signing up for an account is free of any hidden fees.
- Sign up now to get your domain name free of charge for the first year.
- Free SSL Certificate and Cloudflare CDN: Each website receives a free SSL certificate.
- Money-Back Guarantee: All plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee
Cons
There are always negative aspects to hosting companies, as we have already mentioned. Here are some of the disadvantages of choosing Bluehost as your hosting company.
- Higher domain renewal prices Their free domain renewal price exceeds the average
- Upselling Addons – They offer a highly aggressive upsell procedure during signup. SiteLock, and any other add-ons, can be unchecked if you don’t use them.
Bluehost Performance Testing
Speed is the most important performance metric you should be looking for. This not only impacts the user experience but also influences your WordPress SEO rankings.
Studies have shown that a 1second drop in website speed can reduce your conversion rate by 7%. A delay of 3 seconds can result in a 50% loss of traffic.
Let’s check out how fast Bluehost will load your website.
Bluehost Speed Results
You will need a website hosting company that is fast to make your website faster. To test Bluehost’s speed, we made a test website.
Our test site was built using WordPress and the default Twenty Twenty theme. For theme development, we imported dummy content including images. We then used Pingdom for website speed testing.
These are the results of our tests:
Our test site loaded in less than 2 seconds. This is remarkable considering that we didn’t use any speed optimization tips or caching plugins on our website.
The speed test is not enough, however, because the test site did not have a lot of traffic.
We used K6 (formerly LoadImpact), a tool to test the response of Bluehost servers to increased traffic. This allowed us to send virtual users (VU), to our test site.
It was used to slowly build up to 100 visitors, and to test how the server could handle more requests from multiple connections simultaneously.
Here’s a screenshot of the results.
The site’s active virtual users are shown in the green line. The server load time is shown in the blue line. You can see that the server load was stable even during peak traffic.
This test shows that Bluehost is a great choice if you’re looking for a fast website.
Important to mention that there was no downtime during testing.
Hosting companies often promise 99.9% uptime. For our test account, we set up an alert to monitor uptime. Bluehost server uptime can be viewed in detail in the screenshot below.
Bluehost Server Response Times
You can test a website live using tools such as Pingdom to see how it loads. Images take longer to load than plain text, so this is also important.
Bitcatcha is another tool that can be used to determine the server response time. You can test the server response time of your servers without having to load any data.
Bluehost servers in the US responded within a fraction of a second, as you can see. The response time was slightly slower in other locations but it was still less than one second.
Your website would be most beneficial if your target audience lives in the United States. If your visitors come from other countries, you can move your server.
Bluehost Hosting Plans & Features
Bluehost has a range of hosting plans to suit all budgets. These include shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, and cloud hosting.
Let’s have a look at Bluehost hosting packages and their features.
A great way to launch a website with low traffic is shared hosting. Your website can share server resources with other websites in a shared hosting environment.
Cloud Hosting: An upgrade to shared hosting plans that is more reliable. Cloud Hosting allows you to connect to multiple cloud servers. Your website can automatically switch to another server in the event of a hardware failure or high traffic.
WordPress Hosting: WordPress hosting plans are designed explicitly for WordPress-powered websites. It can run WordPress smoothly and protect your WordPress site against common threats.
WooCommerce Hosting: WooCommerce, the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress allows you to start an online shop with WordPress quickly. WooCommerce Hosting gives you all the features needed to launch your eCommerce store.
VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Server): This hosting upgrade allows you to have virtual resources in a shared environment.
Dedicated Hosting Server: You will be able to use all of the resources on the dedicated server for your website. However, you will need to manage the server yourself.
All Bluehost hosting plans let you install WordPress in just one click.
All plans include an easy-to-use hosting control panel that allows you to manage your hosting and create databases.
Bluehost offers a customized control panel which makes it easier for beginners to use. You can also access more advanced options through the customized cPanel hosting dashboard.
Bluehost’s Shared Hosting Plans
Bluehost offers shared hosting packages that are suitable for beginners. There are four levels to their shared hosting plan.
Let’s look at Bluehost pricing, and what is included in each plan.
Basic: You can only host one website with the basic plan. You can host one domain, 25 subdomains, and 50GB SSD storage. There are 5 email accounts with 100MB of disk space each. The first term costs $2.75 per month. You’ll need to pay $8.99 each month for renewal.
Plus: Unlimited websites, unlimited storage space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited bandwidth are all part of the Plus plan. Unlimited email accounts are also available. The cost for the first month starts at $4.95 per month. You’ll need to pay $11.99 each month for renewal.
Choice Plus: The Choice Plus plan has all the features of the Plus plan. Additionals worth more than $80/year include domain privacy and automated daily backups powered CodeGuard. The initial term costs $5.45 per month. You’ll need to renew your contract for $16.99 per month.
Pro: The Pro plan starts at $13.95 per month for the first term. After that, you’ll be charged $23.99 per month. This plan includes all the features mentioned above plus a dedicated IP address.
You can choose any plan if you’re just starting your site. As your website grows, you can easily upgrade your hosting plan.
Bluehost Customer Support and Service
Everybody needs help from time to time. It is important to find a web hosting company that offers support and help when you need it.
Bluehost has a large library of articles, step-by-step guides, and video tutorials that it maintains as part of its vast knowledge base. This is an invaluable resource for beginners, and the majority of common problems can be resolved quickly by doing a simple search.
Sometimes, however, you might need to speak to someone to get more assistance.
Bluehost provides 24/7 support, where you can chat with their representatives via live chat or telephone support. This is a great option if you need immediate assistance from technical support personnel and they are only a click away.
The ticket-based support system is one thing that’s missing. Bluehost has decided to discontinue ticket-based support to concentrate on live chat support and phone-based assistance.
Some users might still not be able to access the ticket-based support system. This is especially useful if you cannot resolve your issue in one chat or by phone.
Is Bluehost the right choice for you?
You must now be wondering if Bluehost is the right fit for your website after reading this review.
Many websites rank Bluehost as the #1 web host. Bluehost offers a variety of hosting options that will help you create your website quickly and easily.
All hosting plans come with expert 24/7 customer service from knowledgeable staff.
They offer affordable starter plans that can be customized to fit any budget.
Bluehost shared hosting plans are a great choice for those just starting. It’s affordable and includes all the necessary tools. As your site grows, you can upgrade your hosting plan easily.
Bluehost is ready to help you create your website. Click here to select your Bluehost plan.
