What is Bluehost? Why do you need Bluehost? What is Bluehost used for? These three questions are commonly asked by people all around the world.
In this post, I’m going to be going over what Bluehost Web Hosting is and why you need them.
If you are not familiar with Bluehost and you hear the name you might be asking yourself just what is Bluehost?
Bluehost is one of the largest web hosting services around today. They are one of the top trusted hosting providers, and they currently power over two million websites worldwide.
You can visit Bluehost’s site and take a look at their hosting plans. Bluehost has supplied us with an exclusive discount that gets you up to 65% off your hosting, and it includes a free domain.
About BlueHost
The company was founded in 1996, by Matt Heaton, who had this idea to provide an efficient web hosting service. Bluehost happens to be a persistent web hosting solution since then.
Matt Heaton served as the CEO from 2003 to 2011. Dan Handy was the next CEO who operated from 2011 to 2015. The company was acquired by Endurance International Group. The current CEO is Mike Oslon, appointed by EIG.
BlueHost has been around since long. It has provided its service to a large number of people since decades. Today, BlueHost hosting empowers more than 2 million websites. Large and small businesses trust it for hosting their websites.
What is Bluehost Used For?
What is Bluehost used for? Bluehost is used for hosting sites online, and for purchasing domain names. To have a website you need two things, web hosting, and a domain name.
The remarkable thing about Bluehost is that they offer both!
Application hosting
Bluehost has only a very minimal range of application hosting plans, but it just about manages to cover the essentials: WordPress and simple e-commerce.
The WordPress hosting plan is little more than the same shared hosting plans, with the same pricing (from $3.95 a month initially, $7.99 on renewal), and more emphasis on some WordPress-specific features (Bluehost updates WordPress automatically, plus there's some decent WordPress documentation and support).
Bluehost's WordPress Pro plan is more capable, giving you unlimited storage, bandwidth and websites, spam filtering, CDN integration and more.
Powerful WordPress-related extras include a staging environment, a convenient way to create and work on a copy of your existing site. If you're making some major changes – replacing a theme, switching one plugin for another – the staging feature enables testing these out without risking causing problems on your production site.
Business-oriented features include Jetpack Site Analytics, Premium or Pro (depending on your plan), a marketing center, PayPal integration and more.
These are capable products, and prices are good from a standard $17.95 a month over three years ($29.99 on renewal) up to $47.95 ($59.99).
If you're only managing a single site and don't need the business features, check out IONOS WordPress Pro, too. It limits your storage and the number of websites, but it gets you dedicated resources (from 1 vCPU and 1GB RAM) and Varnish-based caching on the Pro plan, and prices start at $15 a month, no long-term contract required.
Bluehost's e-commerce product is essentially shared hosting with WordPress, WooCommerce and Storefront themes pre-installed, a dedicated IP address, and a few marketing credits (spend $25 on a Microsoft Advertising or Google Ads account, get $100 credit).
Again, prices are reasonable, starting from $6.95 a month (renewal at $13.99.) The plans might be useful if you're an e-commerce newbie, but experienced users could get much the same results by finding their preferred shared hosting package and using Softaculous (or any other auto-installer) to set up a web store for themselves.
Servers
Bluehost's VPS plans may not look cheap, at least initially, but that's because the company doesn't try to cut corners to hit a low headline price.
VPS products start at $17.99 over 36 months ($29.99) on renewal, for instance, more expensive than some. But the specs are decent, and include 2 CPU cores and 2GB RAM, twice the allocation you'll get with many starter VPS setups. Bluehost's custom control panel makes your service easy to manage, too.
If you're happy to accept a more basic system, Hostwinds' starter VPS plans are priced from an initial $4.49 a month. But that only gets you 1 CPU core, 1GB and 1TB bandwidth (Bluehost's entry-level plan gives you 5TB). Upgrade to a Hostwinds plan with 2 cores, 4GB RAM and 2TB bandwidth and Hostwinds charges $17.09, very similar to the Bluehost price.
Bluehost's dedicated hosting is limited to three base servers with restricted configuration options. The hardware specs are decent, though, and with prices starting at $73.99 a month over 3 years, they're cheaper than high-end VPS products from some providers.
Support
Bluehost support starts on the website with a convenient system alert page. Not only does this provide general warnings about major outages, but you can also use it to check information on any domain or server (this even lets you see server load.)
Bluehost's knowledgebase organizes its content into various well-chosen categories: FAQ, Domains, Email, WordPress, Control Panel, Account and more.
Click any category and the site displays a decent choice of starting articles. For example, click Email and you'll see articles including Create An Account, Setup An Email Client and Manage Your Accounts – just what you're most likely to want to know.
You can search for your preferred keywords, too, and the engine does a reasonable job of finding sensible results.
When we searched for 'import WordPress', for instance, the site listed 'How To Migrate An Existing WordPress.com Site' and 'How To Migrate A WordPress Site' as its first two articles, and there were other relevant articles just a little way down the list ('How To Transfer Blogger To Your WordPress').
There's some quality content here, too. Articles like 'How To Install WordPress' are short but get straight to the point, and (when possible) give you several options to solve your current issue. They typically link to related content, too, so once you've found one relevant article, it'll usually point you to many more.
If the website can't help you, support is available 24/7 via email, telephone and live chat.
We tried the live chat support, providing our email address and details and posting a summary of our question. This was a real issue, incidentally, rather than a test question: we weren't able to log in to our account, and needed to know why.
The chat window suggested we'd have a five-minute wait, a little longer than usual, but this turned out to be an overestimate. Within a couple of minutes an agent arrived, acknowledged our question, and sent an authentication code via email to confirm our identity.
Our credentials verified, the agent gave us an alternative login which got us access to most web hosting features.
He went on to explain that there were a few other reports of the issue, and engineers were looking into it but there wasn't an ETA for a fix. This wasn't a major concern as we could access everything we needed. We were still curious about the problem, but Bluehost later explained (and we confirmed) that it was a simple and relatively unusual issue which will be fixed by the time you read this.
Performance
To test Bluehost's performance, we set up a very simple static website and used Uptime.com to check its availability and response time for a week.
The company managed 100% uptime, which works for us. Keep in mind that we were testing the most basic shared hosting plan, too – if Bluehost is going to have problems, we'd expect them to show up here.
Response times ranged from 205ms to 669ms, with an average of 241ms, placing the company 10th out of 21 providers we were monitoring at the time.
Keep in mind that the differences in response times between good providers are generally very small. Our best host at the time, Hostwinds, managed response times from 126ms to 303ms with an average of 139ms, only 102ms faster.
If you're managing a high-traffic site and need the best possible speeds, that's good to know, but if performance isn't top priority, you might not even notice any difference.
What's more interesting than raw response times, especially for shared hosting, is how consistent the results are. Spiky graphs showing a lot of variation can indicate overloaded servers, as websites compete for resources.
Bluehost performed well, though, with only two significant peaks (that's a response time greater than twice the average) in seven days of measurement. Lesser hosts have multiple peaks per day.
To round off our tests we ran Bitcatcha's Server Speed Checker on our test site. This kind of one-off test can't tell us as much as Uptime.com's continuous monitoring, but it was still good to see Bluehost return excellent speeds, particularly from US locations. Bitcatcha was certainly impressed, awarding our server its highest A+ rating.
Bluehost products aren't as configurable as some of the competition. Its plans are well-specified, though, with 100% uptime and consistent response times during testing, and Bluehost's friendly live chat support quickly helps in resolving any technical issue.
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