Bluehost is one of the oldest and largest brand names when it comes to web hosting. Theyre an officially recommended hosting provider by wordpress. Org.
We believe bluehost is the best cheap hosting service thanks to their affordability, reputation, usability, and the ability to grow with your business.
With bluehost shared hosting plan, you get a free domain, free ssl, and more. Once you outgrow the traffic allowance on shared hosting, you can easily upgrade to their vps and dedicated server options.
You can also save on bluehost plans by paying annually.
Added to that, with bluehost, you can also create custom email accounts for your business or brand. This is available for all bluehost hosting plans.
On that note, youll be interested to know that bluehost offers different hosting options including shared, dedicated, vps, wordpress, and reseller hosting.
Bluehost complies with all the modern standards for hardware and software. They consistently strive for excellence by regularly improving their server hardware infrastructure as well as overall hosting experience. In an effort to make it extremely easy for beginners to start a website, theyve revamped their user dashboard. They use industry-leading technologies like kvm and openstack to make sure your website is as fast as it can get.
Whenever you need web hosting assistance, you can get in touch with bluehosts 24/7 support team via live chat, or phone.
Bluehost is a regular contributor to open source projects like wordpress. They offer one-click installers for wordpress as well as other popular website builders and blogging platforms. If youre just getting started, then you really cant go wrong with bluehost.
Bluehost Review: Is It Worth the Hype?
Not all web hosting companies are created equal. To set themselves apart from the competition, every hosting provider, including Bluehost, offers some unique features. It can be tricky to figure out whether those features are right for your needs.
.Free Domain Name and SSL Certificate
Bluehost waives off the domain name registration fees when you sign up for a web hosting service. This obviously comes in pretty handy, when you are just starting a small business with a tight budget. Along with a free domain, youll also get a free ssl certificate, which enables encrypted communication between a web browser and a web server, meaning your website will be more trustworthy and secure.
1-click WordPress install
Bluehost provides automatic wordpress installation when you set up your hosting account. You can enter your details, select a free wordpress theme, and start a blog right away. It doesnt require any technical knowledge or coding to install wordpress with bluehost.
Complimentary backups
bluehost offers regular backups on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You need to sign up for this service for bluehost to keep backups. However, its recommended that you also create manual daily backups from cpanel and download them on your computer.
Advanced security
bluehost offers customized internal tools to keep your wordpress website secure. These tools provide security against ddos attacks, hacking attempts, and so on. If youre hosting your website with bluehost, you also get a big discount on the sitelock security features to enhance your website security.
Reliable high-speed servers
bluehost is one of the officially recommended web hosting providers by wordpress. Org. Theyre hosting 2 million websites from all around the globe and are a reputed brand in the web hosting space. The uptime result speaks for itself. They guarantee 99.99% uptime, which is pretty phenomenal.
Free WordPress Site Migration
After purchasing Bluehost web hosting, you can request a free WordPress website migration. A team of experts will make sure that you don’t lose any data on your website during the migration.
Your website needs to qualify to a few requirements to get the free migration service:
- The website should be built on WordPress.org (WordPress.com websites will not be eligible)
- Website using the latest WordPress version (or above 4.7)
- Website running on the latest PHP version (or above 7.0)
- You must have a complete website backup and backup has been made using Bluehost Site Migrator plugin
- The migration file size should be less than 2GB
- Your database size should be less than 40MB
- The website should be malware free
- WordPress multisite is not eligible
cPanel Access
Bluehost provides cpanel (control panel) access to all its users. The cpanel includes all tools and features that youll need to make a website and manage your website hosting. You can also install wordpress, update the php version, and more in the cpanel.
Professional Email
Bluehost offers email hosting to set up a professional email address for your business. This will give an identity to your business and you can communicate with your customers in a professional way. Even if youre a small business or startup, a professional email can help you grow in the right direction.
Bluehost Pros:
After trying Bluehost’s web hosting service, here’s what we liked about them.
Low introductory pricing: the pricing for the bluehost web hosting packages starts at as low as $2.75 / month, which is a hefty discount compared to the regular price of $8.99 / month. Bluehosts pricing gives you really good value for money considering their uptime guarantee and consistent support you will receive.
No Hidden Fees: You won’t find any hidden fees like setup fees while creating or renewing your account with Bluehost. While you can find a few hosting addons such as Codeguard Basic or Bluehost SEO Tools start, you just need to unselect them when you sign up to avoid any additional cost.
Easy to Use:Â Bluehost provides a simple and user-friendly dashboard to manage your websites. It also offers a cPanel that includes several options, including 1-click WordPress installation. The setup takes less than a few minutes and your website will be ready to go live on the internet.
Customer Support: You’ll get premium-quality 24/7 customer service from a team of experts. Bluehost offers live chat support and phone support to all its users.
Scalability: If you’re a growing business and you want to upgrade your hosting plan, Bluehost is highly scalable and lets you move from a basic plan to a high-tier plan (like Choice Plus plan and Pro plan) in just a few clicks.
Bluehost Cons:
Now let’s take a look at a few limitations of Bluehost.
High renewal rates: just like every other web hosting provider, the renewal price of bluehost is also a bit higher than its introductory price. However, our users can still get up to 70% off for the first year.
Basic website builder: bluehost offers a basic wordpress website builder with a drag and drop interface. It starts at $2.95 per month and can be used on unlimited websites. This may be enough for beginners and bloggers but youll be better offer installing wordpress on your new website and opting for a builder like seedprod or elementor.
Bluehost Uptime Guarantee & Speed Test Reports
If you want a high-speed website, choosing fast web hosting is compulsory.
We used Bluehost to conduct a few different speed tests on our website that gives a clear picture of how the hosting performs. Here are some of the following testing tools that we used:
- Pingdom
- Load Impact
- Bitcatcha
According to our pingdoms website speed test, we found that our test site loads in less than two seconds for a server in new york city. That means the site is faster than 94% of all tested sites.
Just like the speed test, its imperative to analyze whether your hosting service of choice can survive a traffic surge.
For our traffic surge test, we used a popular testing tool load impact, and sent some virtual users (vu) to our site. They gradually built up to 100 visitors at a time to see how the server would handle the traffic surge.
In the chart below, you can find blue (vus active) and green lines (vu load time) which represent the number of virtual visitors sent to the testing site and the time it took to load the web page for the respective number of users on the site.
Bluehost Server Response Time
Without a doubt, images often account for most of the downloadable bytes, meaning publishing too many images on a page can negatively impact your page loading time.
Not to mention, a content-heavy site would take more time to load than a lightweight website. Aside from speed tests, well also have to conduct a server response time test by ignoring the content of our site.
For this test, we used another testing tool known as bitcatcha.
Bitcatcha works quite differently from pingdom.
With bitcatcha, you can analyze server response time from around the globe by ignoring the content of the site.
It averages the loading speed of your website from eight different global locations: new york, los angeles, london, brazil, india, singapore, japan, and australia. The speed for each location is measured three separate times, and then the results are averaged.
With this test, you get a broader overview of how your server responds globally to the page requests.
You can see that our Bluehost test site was rated C by Bitcatcha.
While the web hosting server responded in just a fraction of a second in the United States, the response time was comparably high in all other locations. However, the site still responded in less than a second.
That means if your target audience is in the United States, Bluehost could be a great choice for you. On the flip side, if your target audience isn’t in the United States, you might consider using a local hosting server for faster page rendering.
Bluehost Customer Service
Founded in 2003, bluehost is one of the 20 largest web hosting companies, powering over 2 million websites worldwide. Bluehost is also #1 recommended web hosting company by wordpress. Org.
The bluehost website has a vast knowledge base consisting of articles, guides and how-tos that can answer to all your questions regarding your web hosting account.
Bluehost friendly 24/7 support team is available via phone and live chat to resolve your hosting related issues quickly. They also have an in-house team of wordpress experts who can resolve any wordpress related inquiries.
The big downside of bluehost support is that recently theyve made the decision to discontinue ticket support in an effort to focus more on providing personal and direct support through phone and chat. This can be frustrating to users with more advanced issues that may take a bit longer to resolve.
Ease of Use
Built on cpanel, bluehost has a custom interface that lets you easily manage your website and server without hassle.
They also offer 1-click install option for popular website builder tools like wordpress, joomla, drupal, magento, weebly, prestashop and many more.
You can access the softaculous app installer inside your cpanel dashboard to quickly install various apps and tools on your site.
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