Powering over 2 million websites worldwide, Bluehost is a recognized brand name in bargain web hosting. Bluehost is one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress recommended hosting provider.
If there is one name you know in the world of web hosting, Bluehost is probably on the top along with Inmotion and Green Geeks. It got its start back in 1996, which makes it ancient by web standards, but I like them none the less.
Getting started on your first business website can be daunting. Sure, you could just communicate with your customers via Facebook or another social media platform, but if you're serious about doing business online, you'll want to take the plunge and sign up for a top-notch web hosting service.
Bluehost does a great job of balancing price and features for businesses that need a bit of hand-holding, while also offering plenty of options to experienced administrators.
It’s no surprise why so many people ask us about Bluehost.
Anytime a hosting company is explicitly recommended by WordPress.org, you can probably assume that it’s worth checking out.
Especially when you consider that WordPress powers more than, ohhh half of the websites on the internet.
While Bluehost’s WordPress endorsement speaks volumes to the popularity of the service, there are those among us who want to know whether or not this popularity is actually deserved.
Bluehost was founded in 2003 and has since grown to become one of the world’s largest providers of reliable and cheap web hosting.
Bluehost offers a range of products and services to help you get started with your website or online shop: from shared and WordPress hosting to website builder tools. They have a special focus on meeting the digital marketing and training needs of small businesses.
Their value-priced hosting packages come with unmetered bandwidth, free global CDN and SSL certificates, and free daily, weekly and monthly backups on a powerful and proven platform that is built to scale and optimized for speed and security. Their cheapest hosting plan is $2.75/mo.
ENDORSED BY WORDPRESS
If you’re planning to create a website or blog, you’ll want to check out Bluehost because it’s one of only three hosting companies endorsed by WordPress.
Their cheapest shared hosting plan for a single domain costs only a few dollars a month. For a little bit more money, you can add unlimited domains and subdomains.
But Bluehost isn’t solely for beginners. They are staunch supporters of the Open Source community and they provide advanced developer tools like SSH Access, FTP, and a fully-customized Linux kernel.
Their corporate vision is to create “a better safer web for everyone.” Bluehost supports this vision by investing in open source projects, promoting web civility, and making their service easy for people of all ages to use.
Ease Of Use
Bluehost has a modern, sleek company website, and that clean design extends to the platforms and interfaces customers use behind the scenes.
Setting up a domain is simple, as is virtually any objective you tackle with Bluehost — whether you're installing WordPress with a single click or configuring your email hosting.
Bluehost is often ranked #1 hosting company by many websites. They offer a wide range of hosting plans with tons of features that help you easily build your website.
All their hosting plans include expert 24/7 customer support from knowledgeable staff. Most importantly, they offer affordable starter plans that fit any budget requirement.
If you are just starting out, then you cannot go wrong signing up for a Bluehost shared hosting plan. Its easy on your pocket, and comes with all the right tools. As your site grows you can easily upgrade your hosting plan accordingly.
Quick Summary
#1 Speed
Below-average server performance. Not suitable for heavy, resource-hungry sites.
BlueHost's servers are fairly slow, even for an affordable shared host. A light page of a WordPress site, of just 338 KBs, needing only 15 HTTP requests, took 1.13 seconds to load.
BlueHost's shared hosting servers aren't equipped with newer, faster technologies like LiteSpeed or Nginx. As a result, they're only suitable for very lightweight websites that aren't at all resource-hungry.
#2 Uptime
Minor outages are frequent. Downtimes can often last for long periods of time (a few hours at a stretch).
Downtime can be really bad for your website. Not only can it frustrate its visitors and hurt its conversion rate, but it can also have a negative impact on the performance of your site on search engines like Google.
As BlueHost doesn't use SSD for storage, and still rely on traditional spinning hard drives, storage failures aren't that rare on their platform. And that can often result in extended periods of downtime.
With most shared hosts, downtime is a major concern. Most cheap hosts, especially those part of a bigger holding company like EIG (which also owns HostGator, iPage, JustHost and a lot of other brands) fail to keep their servers up as much as they promise their customers. This isn't any different with EIG-owned BlueHost.
Some others impose such heavy restrictions on resource usage that as soon as users' sites receiving any significant traffic, they start getting 'throttled' and in some cases, even taken down, often for prolonged periods of time.
BlueHost has been accused of throttling server resources many times in the past.
#3 Support
Support is sluggish, and not the most efficient at handling advanced issues. No free site migration.
BlueHost are one of the few web hosts that offer 24x7 phone, live-chat and email support. I've found their support department to be inadequate when it comes to handling site-specific issues or anything other than answering generic tech queries.
The support response times aren't that impressive, either, and they varied quite a bit, from around 20 minutes to four hours (in case of support tickets). The first response has been an auto-generated response in quite a few cases, too.
#4 Price
Initial prices are low, but renewals are a lot more expensive. No monthly payment option either.
BlueHost's shared hosting plans are very competitively priced, but that applies only for the first-term, as they all renew at their regular prices, which tend to be around 2x costlier.
The plans mainly vary based on the number of add-on domains (i.e. the number of unique websites) that you can host on them.
Watch this video to get more understanding of Bluehost.
VERDICT
Overall, BlueHost is another one of those over-hyped hosts that are hugely popular thanks to expensive marketing, but fail to live up to the hype when it comes to actually delivering a solid service.
If you'd rather go with a much better alternative that's still well known in the hosting industry, I'd definitely recommend SiteGround. They not only offer much more for a similar price, but they also perform considerably better in crucial aspects like site speed and uptime.
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