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
per month.
Powering over 2 million websites worldwide,
Bluehost is a recognized brand name in bargain web hosting. By doing a large
volume of business they’re able to offer steep price discounts.
In addition to offering a full range of web
hosting services, Bluehost provides
marketing training, SEO services, social media marketing, content creation,
graphic design services, email, domain names, and local business listings to
grow traffic.
Pros
and Cons of Bluehost
All best web hosting services have their pros
and cons. Some you can live with, and some you cannot ignore.
Here are the pros and cons of Bluehost that
we learned.
Pros
First, let’s take a look at the advantages
that make Bluehost the top choice.
• Pricing: Their hosting plans are well
within the reach of most users, particularly those
who are just starting out.
• Reliability: They power a large number
of websites with minimum downtime.
• No hidden charges: There are no hidden
fees when signing up for your account.
• Free domain: You get a free domain name
for the first year when you signup.
• Free CDN + SSL: For each website, you
get a free SSL certificate and free Cloudflare
CDN to block malware and improve security.
• Money Back Guarantee: They offer a 30
day money back guarantee on all plans.
Cons
As we mentioned earlier, there are always
downsides with every hosting company. The following are some disadvantages of
choosing Bluehost as your host.
• Higher domain renewal price: Their free
domain renewal price is higher than average.
• Upselling Addons: They have an
aggressive upsell process during signup. But you
can easily uncheck SiteLock and all other addons if you don’t need them.
Bluehost
Hosting Plans and Features
Bluehost offers a variety of hosting plans
for all budgets and sizes. This includes shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server,
cloud hosting, WooCommerce hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and more.
Let’s take a look at Bluehost hosting plans
and their features.
• Shared hosting: Shared hosting is the
perfect way to start a new website with low
traffic volume. In a shared hosting environment, your website shares server resources with other websites.
• Cloud hosting: A more reliable upgrade
to the shared hosting plan. It allows you to
utilize multiple cloud servers, allowing your website to automatically switch
to a different server in case of a
hardware failure or high traffic.
• WordPress hosting: Their WordPress
plans are 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 (Virtual Private Server) hosting:
An upgrade to shared WordPress hosting,
VPS hosting allows you to virtual dedicated resources in a shared environment.
• Dedicated hosting server: A dedicated
hosting server for your website, means you
will have all the resources of the dedicated server to yourself. The downside is that you will have to manage the server
on your own.
All Bluehost hosting plans allow you to
install WordPress with 1-click.
All plans come with an easy-to-use hosting
control panel where you can manage your hosting, create databases, etc.
Bluehost has a custom control panel that improves
ease of use for beginners. It also uses a customized version of the cPanel
hosting dashboard for more advanced options.
Bluehost Pricing and Options
Bluehost offers quite a few pricing plans for
individual website goals and needs. Let’s break it down into each level.
Bluehost
Pricing
The great thing about Bluehost is that it has
a wide variety of options at an affordable price. It offers three main business
niches, with different pricing plans according to said niches. These include
shared hosting, online stores, and managed WordPress.
Shared
Hosting Plan
The shared hosting plan offers the most
flexibility and is most popular with Bluehost users. The thing about Bluehost
pricing is that it’s much cheaper on a 36-month plan, instead of a 12-month plan,
so let’s compare these two. This plan has four pricing options, including:
• Basic:
$4.95/month on a 12-month term; $2.95/month on a 36-month term
• Plus:
$7.45/month on a 12-month term; $5.45/month on a 36-month term
• Choice
Plus: $7.45/month on a 12-month term; $5.45/month on a 36-month term
• Pro:
$18.95/month on a 12-month term; $13.95/month on a 36-month term
As you can see, the pricing for 36-month
terms is much cheaper than 12-month terms. Bluehost also offers a 24-month
term, but that’s only a tad cheaper than the 12-month option.
With that said, all pricing plans include a
free domain for one year, free CDN, free SSL certificate, custom themes, and
24/7 support.
The Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro plans have
unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage, and free Office 365 for 30 days.
Online
Store Plan
The Bluehost online store plan feels a lot
less complicated than its shared hosting plans. These specific plans are best
for ecommerce stores, where you can build, promote, and start selling through
your store that’s packed with WooCommerce tools.
This plan has two pricing options for
12-month and 36-month terms, including:
• Standard:
$15.95/month on a 12-month term; $12.95/month on a 36-month term
• Premium:
$32.95/month on a 12-month term; $24.95/month on a 36-month term
Both plans come with unlimited products,
WooCommerce installed, 24/7 customer support, payment processing, discount
codes, and CodeGuard Backup Basic.
Managed
WordPress Plan
This powerful plan focuses on users who are
building their website through WordPress. It allows you to purchase a plan that
offers scalability, security, speed, and support for your professional
WordPress website.
This plan has three pricing options, all on
36-month terms, including:
• Build:
$9.95/month
• Grow:
$14.95/month
• Scale:
$27.95/month
All plans include top features like one
WordPress website, 200+ global edge servers, free SSL, built-in high
availability, staging environment, and best for up to 50,000 visitors per
month.
You can also expect daily scheduled backups,
malware detection and removal, and domain privacy and protection.
Bluehost
Customer Support and Service
We all need help every now and then. It is
really important that you choose a web hosting company that offers help and
support when you need it.
Bluehost maintains a huge library of
articles, step by step guides, and video tutorials as part of their extensive
knowledge base. This is a huge help for beginners and most common issues can be
quickly resolved by a simple search.
However, sometimes you may need to talk to an
individual to get more help.
Bluehost offers a 24/7 support system where
you can talk to their support team representatives using live chat or phone
support. This is really helpful when you need quick help from technical support
staff and you know they are just one-click away.
How
Is Bluehost’s Performance and Uptime?
While there are a few complaints from users
about several server outages and a server team that is slow to respond, a great
number of Bluehost users claim that the company has solid server performance.
According to these users, Bluehost scores a
99.99% uptime on average and occasionally outdoes itself to deliver a 100%
uptime. The company itself also allows you to cancel your hosting agreements
because of downtime without having to pay any cancellation fees.
Our tests indicate that last year Bluehost
had an average uptime of 99.97%, which is excellent.
Site
Loading Speed
Bluehost also provides good page load times.
Last year, they had an excellent 422 ms page load speed with a static website
using their Basic shared hosting plan. This year, we installed WordPress and
the page load speed has increased to a still respectable 650 ms. This does,
however, indicate that if you have a computationally demanding site, you may
want to upgrade to a more advanced Pro plan that offers high-performance
servers.
Cloudflare
CDN
Fast page load times are important for
everyone, especially for e-commerce owners. Slow pages are a major contributor
to high bounce rates, low conversion rates, and loss of profits. That is where
Cloudflare comes in.
Bluehost packages come with Cloudflare
integration. Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN), or a network of
servers that store cached versions of your website.
When someone navigates to your website, their
browser receives content from the CDN point closest to them, reducing the
amount of time it takes for the data to travel (shorter distance = shorter
travel time).
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