Bluehost is a web hosting company founded by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Provo, Utah. Bluehost is one of the Endurance International Group brands, along with HostGator, iPage, and FatCow, among others.
They offer a full range of hosting plans including shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting as well as a WordPress-optimized VPS package. Further, they work for non-profits and educational institutions to make hosting even more affordable.
Hosting Types
Bluehost offers five main types of hosting plans:
Shared hosting
VPS hosting
Dedicated hosting
WordPress hosting
Woo commerce hosting
If you are looking for something inexpensive and basic, shared hosting is probably what you need. This is what most beginners and small businesses are shopping for.
Dedicated hosting is the most expensive option, appropriate for large commercial firms that need full control of their resources.
With dedicated hosting, you are essentially renting a physical server. VPS hosting is a middle-ground option where you share a physical server with others, but you have your virtual operating system, so the server functions as if it is physically yours.
WordPress hosting is of course what it sounds like—hosting optimized for WordPress customers. Let’s take a look at the plan tiers for each.
Shared Hosting
Bluehost offers three shared hosting plans, priced competitively at $5.99, $9.99, and $19.99 respectively. All of their shared hosting plans come with enhanced cPanel, backup, email, and CloudFlare CDN.
All of their shared servers run on a standard LAMP hosting structure running CentOS 6. Like a lot of hosting companies, Bluehost has a lot of unlimited listed in their plans. This isn’t actually unlimited, but is rather restricted in their terms of service for what they feel is reasonable.
Fortunately, this is the normal usage for 99% of their customers, making it essentially unlimited.
Starter: $5.99
Bluehost’s Starter plan is enough to get you out the door and online quickly and effectively. It includes:
1 website, 1 domain, 5 parked domains, and 25sub domains
100 email accounts
100GB website space
Unlimited bandwidth
20 databases
1,000 database tables
Site backups
$50 in ad credits
Plus: $9.99
The Plus plan is essentially the same, except with more unlimited options and a couple extra add-ons:
SpamExperts protection
Unlimited email accounts, website space, subdomains, and MySQL databases
Global CDN
$200 in ad credits
Pro: $19.99
Their Pro plan is obviously more of the same again, but each Pro server has 80% less accounts on it, so you are allocated far more resources. The Pro plan includes:
Free SSL certificate ($4.99 per month)
Free Dedicated IP address ($3.99 per month)
Free One free domain privacy ($0.99 per month)
An extra domain
Free domain registration for life ($14.99 per year)
3,000 database tables (vs 1,000 in the cheaper plans)
Free Site Backup Pro ($1.99 per month)
VPS Hosting
Standard: $19.99 your first month, up to $29.99 after that
Enhanced: $29.99 your first month, up to $59.99 after that
Ultimate: $59.99 your first month, up to $119.99 after that
These prices are in line with typical costs for VPS hosting industry-wide. The speed for the first two plans is 2 CPU cores, up to three and four cores for the top plan. You get 30GB SAN storage at the lowest tier, up to 120GB at the highest level. RAM ranges from 2 GB up to 8 GB.
You get 1 TB of bandwidth at the Standard level, up to 3 TB at the Ultimate level. Each tier includes one domain. The Standard tier includes one IP address; you get two with the rest. Every plan is backed by 24/7 support and a money-back guarantee.
Dedicated Hosting
Standard: $79.99 your first month, $119.99 per month after that.
Enhanced: $99.99 your first month, $159.99 per month after that.
Premium: $119.99 your first month, $209.99 per month after that.
With the Standard plan or Enhanced plan, you get a 4 x 2.5GHz CPU. The Premium plan offers you a 4 x 3.3GHz CPU. Storage is ranging from 500GB to 1 TB (mirrored), and RAM starts at 4 GB at the Standard level, ranging up to 16 GB at the Premium tier.
You get 5 TB of bandwidth at the Standard tier, 10 TB at the Enhanced tier, and 15 TB at Premium. One domain is included with every plan.
You get three IP addresses at Standard, four at Enhanced, and five at Premium. All plans are backed by 24/7 service and a money-back guarantee.
WordPress Hosting
Basic: Starts at $2.95 with a 36 months subscription
Plus: Starts at $5.45/mo with a 36 months subscription
Choice Plus: Starts at $5.45/mo with a 36 months subscription
These plans look the same as their shared hosting plans, and they cost the same.
However, at the end of 2018 Bluehost introduced a new category: WordPress Pro.
WordPress Pro
These plans are quite expensive compared to their simple WordPress hosting and what some competitors offer (many hosts sell WordPress hosting plans at the same prices as general-purpose shared hosting plans).
WordPress Pro at Bluehost is a big deal, however, and one of the company’s most popular services (with more than a million sites hosted by the company).
The Pro plans are running on high-performance VPS and offer improved site speed.
Features at the Build level include Basic Jetpack Site Analytics, Marketing Center, 100 Free Premium Themes, daily backups, and Malware detection and removal for added security.
The Grow plan is a step up with Jetpack Pro.
The Business review tools let your visitors leave positive Yelp, Google, Yahoo, or Bing reviews for your business directly from your site. The SEO tools give you real-time optimization tips on how to increase your search engine rankings. It’s integrated into the Marketing Center where you can see stats on how you are doing in major search engines.
The top-level Scale plan gives you Paypal integration and Elastic Search.
It’s worth noting that you get live support with Grow and Scale. It gives you hands-on assistance with design, functionality, or general questions from real WordPress experts 24/7.
All plans come with Positive Wildcard SSL, and 24/7 service and a money-back guarantee back them. These plans also include automatic plug-in updates and regular backups and a staging environment that allows you to build and test your WordPress website before publishing it.
A feature that probably not many use is the unlimited video compression. You can upload your videos without optimizing them for the web. Bluehost takes care of it. I have not used Bluehost for streaming, but support told me they have no restrictions on how many videos can you stream.
These are all excellent features, but still, you may be asking, “Why would I pay this much for WordPress hosting?” Bluehost plays a very active role in the WordPress community and has a core staff of developers.
That means that Bluehost can offer first-class customer support and troubleshoot even complex problems which are unique to WP.
WooCommerce Hosting
WordPress users who are looking to dabble in the world of online sales have the option of trying out the number one WordPress e-commerce plugin: WooCommerce.
WooCommerce, like WordPress itself, is entirely free of charge.
Bluehost offers three different WooCommerce hosting plans. You could host WooCommerce on a general-purpose shared hosting plan, but Bluehost’s specific plans mean that:
WooCommerce comes auto-installed as does its popular Storefront theme
You get a dedicated IP address, which protects you from others who might be sharing a server with you
You get an environment that facilitates safe and secure online payments
Pro Tip: As your online store grows, you might consider moving all of your e-commerce functionality off of your primary hosting environment into its hosting environment. This helps ensure that both your blog and your store perform well.
Comments