Bluehost review! You will find tons of Bluehost reviews on the internet, Then why do you think I am writing this Bluehost review again? Frankly speaking, this article can’t be optimized for any keyword to come on top of the google search engine due to heavy competition.
Then why do you think I am wasting my time writing this Bluehost review again when I know that it is difficult that get even a single visitor to this article from the Google search engine.
Every blogger or webmaster owning a website knows Bluehost. Last year in November after reading tons of reviews about Bluehost I also decided to migrate my website to Bluehost.
I was getting a huge discount on Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals on Bluehost and finally decided to migrate my website. But after migrating it came as a nightmare and I had almost 15 days of downtime for my website bloggersutra.com.
That was the only reason I never wanted to host my website on Bluehost but recently I received many emails from my readers asking about Bluehost web hosting service. So for our readers, after almost a year, I thought to write an unbiased Bluehost review.
Bluehost Review 2023 by Experts
Bluehost is one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world. They are also the hosting provider officially recommended by WordPress.
The best part of Bluehost is they offer tons of hosting plans for beginners to large businesses with 24/7 customer support. Today our unbiased Bluehost review will help you find out if they are the right choice for you.
There are a few important things that need to be kept in mind while choosing a hosting provider and Bluehost promises to be the best in providing them.
In this complete Bluehost review, we will put their promises to test. These are the areas we will look into:
- Performance: How fast will your website load with Bluehost? We will test their speed and server response time to assess that.
- Reliability: Will your website be available 24/7/365 without any downtime?
- Customer Support: Can you count on their technical support as a customer?
- Features: Do they offer all the features you will need to build your website?
- Pricing: Do they have the best pricing in the industry? Are there any Bluehost deals that can save you money?
Bluehost Review Bottom Line – Don’t want to read all the details? Let us give it to you straight. In our Bluehost review, we found them to be reliable, fast, and affordable with friendly 24/7 customer support.
They have really improved in their commitment and services. To check their customer support I took their hosting plan and was amazed to see their response in resolving the issues.
That’s why we’ve chosen to recommend Bluehost as one of the best WordPress hosting companies.
Now let’s dive into our detailed Bluehost review so that you can decide for yourself.
About Bluehost
Bluehost was started in 1996 by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Provo, Utah, and steadily grew up to become the most popular and largest web hosting company in the world powering almost 2 million websites all across.
They have a long-standing relationship with the WordPress community and that is the reason that they are officially recommended by WordPress too since 2006.
At Bloggersutra, we don’t recommend any product or service to our readers without testing and using them. You will find tons of Bluehost review over the web without providing the facts and figures for their recommendation.
They pride themselves on their 24/7 customer support, great hosting infrastructure, and support for free open-source software like WordPress.
Bluehost Pros
Before we go further with the Bluehost review it is important to know the best features for which Bluehost is recommended by everyone including the WordPress community and features that require improvement.
First, let us take a look at Bluehost’s advantages that make it so special.
1. Cheap Pricing & No Hidden Charges
Bluehost was never cheap but recently they have come up with really cheap web hosting plans starting from $2.65 per month. They offer various types of hosting like shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server, cloud hosting, WooCommerce hosting, WordPress hosting, and more.
The regular price for the Bluehost web hosting plan is $3.95pm, however, we approached the hosting provider to give some extra discounts for our readers. Bluehost is also offering additional discounts during Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals.
Well, in comparison with the other web hosting providers Bluehost is not the cheapest web host. But of course, they are in competition with the cheap web hosting providers and the best SEO-optimized hosting.
The best part of Bluehost is that they don’t have any hidden charges. They will charge you for what they are offering and not for something which they don’t mention in their initial contract.
2. Easy To Use
Bluehost has its own cPanel interface to take over full control of your website. The simple and easy-to-use graphical interface facilitates you to configure the website setting and access them including emails from one place.
The control panel offers one-click installation for many scripts including WordPress. Plus, you can customize how you want to layout the cPanel to fit your specific needs so that you can quickly reach the features you use the most.
3. Recommended By WordPress.org
The WordPress content management system is powering almost 45% of websites over the internet. Many big companies also have their website hosted on WordPress.
If you see the WordPress official page(wordrpess.org) you will find WordPress is officially recommending its web hosting providers. They are Siteground, Dreamhost, and the third one Bluehost.
Bluehost suits all the requirements to start your website on WordPress. If you still planning to start your blog or migrate to a new hosting provider then you must take WordPress into consideration.
4. Bluehost Uptime Of 99.99%
From past year Bluehost has made many changes to its hosting and servers, With these major changes, they could achieve an uptime of 99.99%, which is among the industry’s best uptime levels.
A slow website with less uptime will hit directly your traffic and of course the overall ranking of the website. To avoid that you must go with hosting services having very little or no downtime. Bluehost is one of them.
To test the uptime of the Bluehost servers we created a test site. The test site is not only used to check the Bluehost server uptime but also the load impact on the server when the traffic on the website increases.
Although their uptimes took a serious hit in August last year, Bluehost claims that the problems were due to various DDoS attacks directed at their servers and the numbers have been trending up ever since.
During our testing phase of Bluehost servers, we have not observed any downtime. The results below will give you the monthly uptime data of Bluehost servers.
Overall, it’s the best uptime we’ve seen over the past 8 months after monitoring more than 33 hosts:
- June 2021 Average uptime: 99.98%
- July 2021 Average uptime: 99.99%
- August 2021 average uptime: 100%
- September 2021 average uptime: 99.98%
- October 2021 average uptime: 99.86%
- November 2021 average uptime: 100%
- December 2021 average uptime: 100%
- January 2022 average uptime: 99.99%
- February 2022 average uptime: 100%
- March 2022 average uptime: 100%
- April 2022 average uptime: 100%
Conclusion? Bluehost has improved drastically and is currently the most reliable hosting provider as per our research. You must give it a try.
5. Fast Page Loading Speed
Till last year Bluehost host was not top 10 lists for page loading speed. Their page loading speed was approx 1500ms, which is considered to be very slow.
However, since the summer, Bluehost has improved its load times… By nearly 300%. With the recent changes and up-gradation of their blue rock server park, they have achieved the average fastest page loading speed of 419ms and currently rank in the top 3 positions.
The drastic change in the page loading speed of Bluehost servers speaks for itself.
Last 8 month average load times:
- September average speed: 401ms
- October average speed: 411ms
- November average speed: 405ms
- December average speed: 399ms
- January average speed: 415ms
- February average speed: 463ms
- March average speed: 429ms
- April average speed: 409ms
- May average speed: 411ms
- June average speed: 416ms
- July average speed: 402ms
Conclusion? Bluehost is 3rd fastest in speed.
6. Reliability
Bluehost is powering almost lakhs of websites, So it is important that they should not have downtime or almost negligible downtime. Downtime means loss of customers and finally loss of revenue.
In the previous test, we have seen that Bluehost has drastically improved the page load speed and server uptime when compared to the last year. This shows that Bluehost understands the importance of its customers and delivers what they promise.
Bluehost finally comes in the category of a reliable web hosting provider. Previously, I use to tell my readers to avoid Bluehost, but now they have really upgraded themselves professionally and technically.
If you are still wondering about the best web hosting provider then you should go for Bluehost.
7. Security Features
With the major data breach and cyber-attacks that are proliferating the marketplace, the security of your website becomes the most important. So it is difficult to find web hosting providers offering sufficient security features.
Well, Bluehost offers some great tools to tackle and prevent the most common cyber attacks to safeguard your website from hackers. Alternatively, you must go for some additional security options and WordPress security plugins to make your website completely hackproof.
For example, you can prevent spam with tools like SpamAssassin, Spam Experts, and Spam Hammer. They also support CloudFlare, which helps prevent pesky DDoS attacks that can bring a site down by sending an overwhelming amount of “fake” traffic from different sources.
You can also password-protect your directories, create blacklists for IP addresses, and manage digital certificates and private keys right from Bluehost cPanel.
They also offer hotlink protection (which prevents people from stealing your images and content), IP address blacklists to block problematic individuals, SSH access for secure web sessions, and optional filters that you can use for specific users and email accounts.
Apart from the embedded security features with your hosting they also offer token validation security while contacting their customer care. You have to provide 6 digit code to the customer care representative before you give your password.
This ensures that your password is not in the wrong hands. Thus Bluehost comes with plenty of security features to safeguard your website. Well, they also take the security feature very seriously and keep on updating them as per the requirement.
8. Easy Integration & Apps
In addition to the security features, they also offer integration of many apps from your website control panel. Like we have discussed earlier Bluehost offers a very powerful and feature-rich control panel.
The application-rich dashboard allows you to integrate Google apps and Cloudflare directly from the control panel. By integrating Google Apps into the Bluehost platform, you’ll be able to bring all of the perks of Google to your business right from the heart of your hosting account.
Cloudflare is again a free CDN service offering additional speed and security features to your website. Bluehost makes it simple to integrate Cloudflare directly from their control panel.
Furthermore, Bluehost has radically simplified its eCommerce features, allowing customers to seamlessly set up an online store with an endless number of shopping cart options. Simply click “Install” and get down to business.
Bluehost also says that you can use MOJO Marketplace to install shopping cart software, manually install software on your own, or hire a developer to install and/or manage it for you.
Bluehost is also offering free SSL certificates for every plan for the website hosted with them. SSL also provides additional security to your website and also it is important for the e-commerce website.
9. Free Domain Name
Bluehost is offering a free domain name with all hosting plans purchased for one year or more than one year. The main disadvantage is that if you plan to terminate the hosting plan with Bluehost within 30 days then Bluehost will deduct the charges for the domain name before processing your refund.
Well,, I don’t think that will be required because Bluehost has come up tremendously well on all our tests and they can be considered among the best web hosting providers.
10. 24/7 Customer Support
When I had purchased Bluehost web hosting last year to migrate my website bloggersutra.com, I had lots of issues with customer care. They were not technically qualified enough to find out the reason why HTTPS installation for my website was unsuccessful.
This time while writing the review I was more concerned about their customer support and their issue-resolving capabilities. I tried to provide many challenges and I am happy to say that they have actually improved a lot with their customer support experience and knowledge.
While the customer support team can now handle inquiries with lightning-fast speed, I found that some of the more technical questions eluded support representatives and required multiple inquiries to resolve.
However one positive is that their YouTube channel DOES contain tons of helpful tutorial videos. So if you don’t mind rolling up your sleeves you can probably resolve 90% of your potential problems by yourself.
11. 30 Days Free Trial & Money Back Guarantee
Bluehost is offering a 30-day money-back guarantee to use their services extensively and get satisfied before they commit your hard-earned money. Of course, this facility is almost offered by all the web hosting providers. But offering a money-back guarantee doesn’t make them good.
While they could have increased the number of days for offering the free trial like Dreamhost which offers a 97-day money-back guarantee or A2hosting offering a 45-day money-back guarantee, even 30 days is enough to take the hand on their service and to take the decision to continue it.
However, it’s important to note that some terms apply if you want to claim your refund:
Namely….
- The money-back-guarantee doesn’t apply to add-on products like the domain name.
- If you cancel within 30 days but your plan includes a free domain, Bluehost will deduct $15.99 from the total amount of your refund as a domain fee. The company claims that this is to “cover their costs” while ensuring that your chosen domain name isn’t lost. It’s important to note that newly registered domains can’t be transferred until a 60-day registration period has passed.
Bluehost Cons
1. Higher Domain Renewal Price
I mentioned earlier that Bluehost is deducting $15.99 for the domain name if you are planning to withdraw their service within the money-back guarantee period. Apart from that, they are charging $15.99 as the domain renewal fee from the next year.
However, the domain renewal fee is higher compared to other hosting providers. Other web hosting providers generally charge between $10.99 to $13.99. The cost of domain renewal is acceptable compared to the service they are providing in return.
2. Discount On Hosting Plans
Is Bluehost cheap?
Definitely, Bluehost is among the cheap web hosting offering great services, but the Bluehost pricing comes with a string attached. Mainly it requires a three-year commitment from the user for maximum discount.
The super-low introductory rate of only $2.75 a month comes with three years of commitment with Bluehost.
If you only want 12 months of service, your rate jumps up to $4.95 per month.
And at this point, only HostGator Cloud & Cloudways managed hosting allows for hosting periods as short as 1-3 months.
Personally, I’d recommend going for the three-year commitment with Bluehost as part of their introductory offer because their post 12 monthly renewal price jumps to $8.99pm after the offer.
3. Upselling Addons
If you are a beginner and planning to start your first blog and buy hosting for the first time then you have to be very cautious. Mostly, all the hosting providers have an aggressive upsell process during signup. The same is the case with Bluehost.
You have to carefully decide which all services are required for your blog. You can easily uncheck the boxes if you are not interested in buying any additional add-ons. In addition, you can buy those addons directly from the Bluehost control panel in the future if you felt their requirement.
But personally, I would recommend you buy Bluehost 3-year hosting with the free domain name and Free SSL certificate. You actually don’t require anything else.
4. No Free Site Migration
Most of the hosting providers we have reviewed and interacted with are offering free website migration services to their new customers as part of an introductory offer only. After all, they are getting a loyal customer for the next few years at the cost of nothing.
Frankly speaking, there are tons of free and paid plugins and websites offering you this service. But getting this service as part of your web hosting plans is much better. The web hosting company takes all the responsibility to migrate your website to its own server with minimum downtime.
Unfortunately, Bluehost is not one of those companies.
They charge a ‘migration fee’ of $149.99 to do something that most provide gratis. And they will not transfer more than 5 sites and 20 email accounts.
Speaking of extra fees, a simple 45-minute introductory walkthrough of their services will set you back $79.99.
Again, something most hosting providers is all too happy to provide is complementary because you’re signing up for their service for the long term.
Bluehost Hosting Plans & Pricing
Bluehost offers a variety of hosting plans for all budgets and sizes. This includes shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server, cloud hosting, WooCommerce hosting, WordPress hosting, and more.
Let’s take a look at Bluehost hosting plans, their features, and their pricing.
- Shared hosting: If you planning to start a new website then Bluehost shared hosting is the perfect plan for you. It is cheap and reliable, the only flaw is that you will be sharing the server resources. But that doesn’t matter much with beginners.
- Cloud hosting: A more reliable upgrade to the shared hosting plan. It is not costlier than the shared hosting plans but is more reliable. In case of hardware failure or high traffic, your website will be automatically shifted to another server.
- WordPress hosting: A hosting package designed specifically for WordPress-powered websites. It is optimized to run WordPress and can even protect your WordPress site against common threats.
- WooCommerce hosting: WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress, it allows you to easily start an online store with WordPress. WooCommerce hosting offers you all the essential features to kick-start your eCommerce store.
- VPS hosting: An upgrade to shared WordPress hosting, VPS hosting allows you to virtual dedicated resources in a shared environment. The amount of websites hosted on the VPS is far less than that of a normal shared hosting server.
- Dedicated server hosting: A dedicated server for your website, means you will have all the resources of the server to yourself. The downside is that you will have to manage the server on your own. But many of the dedicated hosting providers come with an easy control panel to manage the server from the graphical interface.
All Bluehost hosting plans allow you to install WordPress with one click.
All plans come with an easy-to-use hosting control panel where you can manage your domain, hosting, create databases, etc.
If you are new and planning to start your first website then Bluehost shared hosting plan will suit you the most. The plans are cheap and give you complete control of the website from the easy-to-use control panel.
Let’s now discuss the Bluehost shared hosting plans in detail…
If you are a starter then Bluehost shared hosting plans are best for you. It is better if you buy the Bluehost plans for the period of three years as they are offering a huge discount on them. Bluehost shared hosting plans come in three different levels.
Let’s take a look at what Bluehost is offering in each plan.
Basic Plan
For $2.75 per month, the Bluehost basic shared hosting plan allows you to host only one website with unlimited bandwidth. It hosts only one domain and 25 subdomains with a storage capacity of 50GB. Additionally, it also gives 5 email accounts with 100Mb storage for each. For the first term you will $2.75 as part of the introductory offer and after that, you will pay $7.99 per month for renewal.
Plus Plan
For $5.45 per month, Bluehost plus shared hosting plan includes unlimited website hosting with unlimited web space and unlimited bandwidth. Additionally, you will get unlimited email accounts and subdomains. Bluehost is also offering $200 marketing offers and one spam expert with this plan. For the first term you will $5.45 as part of the introductory offer and after that, you will pay $10.99 per month for renewal.
Choice Plus/Prime Plan
For $5.45 per month, the Bluehost prime shared hosting plan includes everything of the plus plan. You will also get domain privacy and site backup Pro as extras worth over $80/year. Prime also has the same first-term price as Plus, $5.45 per month. When renewing, you’ll have to pay $14.99 per month.
To avail, of the introductory offer you have to buy a Bluehost shared hosting plan for three-year terms. The rates of the plan will increase for a duration lesser than three years and the minimum duration you can pay for is 12 months.
Let’s see some additional features of Bluehost’s shared hosting plans…
- Free domain? Yes
- Ease of Signup: Easy two-page signup process.
- Payment Methods: Paypal and major credit cards
- Hidden Fees and Clauses: The low introductory starting rate for three years minimum (with renewal plans that jump). And that whole, we’ll delete your account if you go over 1,000 database tables or 3GB total database, thing.
- Upsells: Some Upsells… But it’s common and you can uncheck it during the transaction.
- Account Activation: Instant. If the information is inaccurate or there’s suspicion of fraud, activation might get delayed.
- Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: Simple and easy-to-use control panel.
- Installation of Apps and CMS (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Mojo Marketplace makes app installation quick and easy!
Must Have Plugins After WordPress Installation on Bluehost
Like other hosting providers, Bluehost also offers some in-build plugins that get automatically installed once we install WordPress directly from the Bluehost account panel. However, there are a few other plugins that are required to take your blog to the next level.
1. Really Simple SSL
Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over HTTPS. To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum. The entire site will move to SSL.
The plugin is available in both free and pro versions. You must always go with the pro version of Really Simple SSL to make your website more secure.
2. WPS Hide Login
WPS hide login is required for all WordPress websites. By default, your website admin panel address will be www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin after WordPress installation.
So to make your website more secure you need to change the default admin panel address to some address of your choice like www.yoursitename.com/wp-name-XYZ.
Thus it will be difficult for hackers to find your website admin panel address. The plugin is free of cost and must be installed.
Do We Recommend Bluehost
Yes, definitely we do!
Bluehost is a cheap, reliable, and secure web hosting provider and is hence suggested by many bloggers. They have really come up well and this makes them recommended hosting for starters and intermediate bloggers.
Best uptime and fast page loading speed also make them a class apart from hosting providers. The flexibility of the plans lets you choose the best hosting plan as per your requirement. If you have a high-traffic website then you can shift to Bluehost VPS hosting or dedicated hosting.
Overall, Bluehost is our TOP 1 host and you shouldn’t go wrong with it.
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