Are you looking to purchase Bluehost? Don’t do so without reading this review thoroughly!
With so many hosting options out there, it’s imperative that you choose the right one. Literally, your web traffic depends on it!
I’ve spent the last five years working with Bluehost (and most other hosting providers) at my digital agency (which I just sold for a multi-million dollar exit).
I had the opprotunity to look at Bluehost as a business owner and as a web developer.
How did we test Bluehost for this review? We set up a staging site at tybtestsite.com and tested Bluehost for:
- Hosting Types & Features
- Performance & Speed
- Ease of Use
- Pricing & Value
- Security
- Help & Support
- WordPress Features
- All extras
If you’re ready to nerd out, let’s dive in!
Bluehost Review From Our Experts
Bluehost is a web hosting service provider owned by Endurance International Group (EIG).
Bluehost hosts millions of websites and offers a wide range of shared, dedicated, VPS, and WordPress hosting options.
Bluehost also has an extensive list of features, making it one of the most popular web hosting services.
The TYB team and I run rigorous tests on the best web hosting services available each year.
Therefore, this Bluehost review is in-depth and up-to-date.
Bluehost web hosting is affordable, performs well, and is excellent for solo entrepreneurs, small businesses, up to enterprise organizations.
Bluehost Pros and Cons
Bluehost is one of the most well-marketed hosting companies on the planet.
You’ve probably heard one of their commercials or an influencer shout-out from time to time (or every day).
But do they live up to the hype? We think they do!
However, no hosting company goes without flaws, and Bluehost does have a few.
Check out the top pros and cons of Bluehost.
Bluehost Pros
- Affordable plans
- WordPress sites are endorsed by WordPress
- 24/7 helpful phone and chat support
- Excellent reliability (minimum downtime)
- Users get a free domain name
- Free SSL certificate
- Free Cloudflare CDN (blocks malware and improves overall website security)
- There is a 30-day money-back guarantee
Bluehost Cons
- There is a higher domain renewal price (compared to the average)
- Bluehost sells add-on services aggressively
- There is no cloud hosting options
- No Windows servers
- No uptime guarantee
- No month-to-month plans
Hosting Pricing & Plans
If you’re unsure whether Bluehost is your hosting provider of choice, look at the differences between each type of hosting!
Bluehost offers shared hosting as an option for those just getting started or wanting a quick and straightforward solution.
You can either set up a website with their included website builder or install WordPress and other platforms quickly with their one-click installer.
After launching our staging site on Bluehost’s shared hosting plan, we did a deep dive into speed & performance, uptime, features, and extras.
Choice Plus
Added Privacy & Security-
40 GB Storage
-
Free CDN
-
Unlimited Websites
Online Store
Great to Start Selling Online-
100 GB Storage
-
Free CDN
-
Unlimited Websites
Regarding loading speed, Bluehost’s shared hosting plans are generally reliable.
They offer incredibly fast response times, and websites load thanks quickly to the high-performance servers they use.
In addition, the servers are backed up by a powerful caching system that helps further improve speeds.
As with most web hosts, your exact performance will depend
on your website’s content and size.
So, how did our staging site perform?
- Grade: B
- Performance: 80%
- Largest Content Paint: 922ms
- Total Blocking Time: 262ms
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0
Uptime is one of the most important factors when selecting a web host, and Bluehost delivers here as well.
They do not guarantee an uptime percentage, so we had to put it to the test with our staging site.
We tested the site’s uptime for 30 days and found our results to be quite impressive.
During that time, we saw an average of 99.98% uptime, which is great for a shared host and pretty much the industry standard.
Web Hosting Plans
- Basic: $2.95 per month (for 12 months)
- Plus: $5.45 per month (for 12 months)
- Choice Plus: $5.45 per month (for 12 months)
- Pro: $13.95 per month (for 12 months)
Plan Features
- Resource protection (website’s performance is protected and unaffected by other websites on the same server)
- Domain manager
- SSL certificates
- Google Ads credit match up to $150
- List businesses on Google
- Custom themes
- Unlimited websites (select plans)
- 24/7 customer support
SSL Included & Activated?
Bluehost provides free SSL certificates for each of the shared hosting options.
Additionally, the shared hosting options come with free CDN for added security.
Bluehost’s shared hosting plans are intuitive and easy to use.
The cPanel dashboard is streamlined and provides quick access to all of the features needed to build and manage your website.
They also include a range of helpful tools like Softaculous, which lets you install over 400 apps with one click.
Here’s a screenshot of the cPanel dashboard so you’ll know what you’re getting into with their shared hosting.
Shared hosting with Bluehost is a sensible option and comes with a lot of benefits for beginners.
Bluehost pricing is much less expensive compared to other web hosting providers.
Also, the free SSL certificate with shared hosting is an excellent feature.
This hosting package is an excellent option if you are looking for an affordable price and industry-leading support from one of the top hosting providers.
The speed left us wanting a bit, but it is shared hosting, so…
Shared hosting through Bluehost is best suited for small business websites or first time bloggers.
Bluehost VPS Hosting Review
Bluehost offers Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting as an upgrade from their shared hosting plans. VPS hosting provides better performance than shared hosting and more control than dedicated servers.
Here we will review Bluehost’s VPS plans to help you decide if it is right for your website needs!
Standard
Get Started Today!-
2 Cores
-
30 B SSD Storage
-
2 GB RAM
-
1 TB Bandwidth
Enhanced
More Storage!-
2 Cores
-
60 GB SSD Storage
-
4 B RAM
-
2 TB Bandwidth
Ultimate
Power & Resources!-
4 Cores
-
120 GB SSD Storage
-
8 GB RAM
-
3 TB Bandwidth
Bluehost VPS Hosting Speed Review
Bluehost offers three VPS plans with varying speeds depending on the type of plan and size: Entry, Standard, and Elite.
The standard plan is a good choice for smaller websites that don’t require much speed or resources. It provides up to 2 GB RAM, 30GB storage space, and 2 cores of CPU power.
The enhanced is better for larger websites or those that experience high traffic. It has up to 4GB RAM, 60GB storage, and 2 cores of CPU power.
The ultimate plan provides the best performance with up to 8GB RAM, 120GB storage, and 4 cores of CPU power.
The more speed you want, the more you’ll have to pay.
After testing Bluehost on our staging site (using the standard plan) we got the following metrics.
- Grade: A
- Performance: 98%
- Largest Content Paint: 1.0s
- Total Blocking Time: 18ms
- Cumulative Layout Shift: .02
Bluehost VPS Hosting Uptime Review
Again, Bluehost does not have an “uptime guarantee” for VPS hosting, but their server reliability is excellent.
We tested the VPS uptime for three months on our staging site tybtestsite.com and found that it was consistently at 99.99%.
Bluehost VPS Hosting Features
Web Hosting Plans
- Standard: $19.99 a month (for 36 months)
- Enhanced: $29.99 a month (for 36 months)
- Ultimate: $59.99 a month (for 36 months)
Plan Features
- 24/7 Bluehost support (via telephone or live chat)
- Multi-server management (you can add more VPS, dedicated, or shared hosting tools to your account)
- Access control
- Root access (you can modify your virtual private server)
- Free domain privacy
- Can host unlimited websites
- Simple dashboard
- Unlimited bandwidth
SSL Included & Activated?
Despite how extensive the Bluehost offerings are for VPS hosting plans, no SSL is included.
Still, users can have up to five websites on their cPanel account and two cores for the basic plan.
How Easy is Bluehost VPS Hosting to Use?
If you are comfortable with server administration, then Bluehost VPS hosting is easy to use.
VPS hosting is typically not for beginners, but Bluehost makes it (nearly) as easy as it gets.
The dashboard provides a range of options to configure your server and install popular applications like WordPress and Joomla.
Bluehost also offers helpful guides for setting up your server and troubleshooting common issues.
Here’s a look into their cPanel so you’ll know what’s what.
Bluehost VPS Hosting Our Final Take
Our Take
The Bluehost interface is excellent for VPS plans.
The hosting provider gives users complete access to their server, allowing for unlimited customization.
Also, if users have any problems, phone support and live chat support are available 24/7.
VPS hosting allows users to add more dedicated hosting or shared hosting tools to their plan anytime.
Therefore, users never have to worry about their Bluehost website not functioning as they want it to.
Bluehost Dedicated Hosting Review
Bluehost is one of the industry’s most popular and reliable dedicated hosting providers, offering a full range of solutions for webmasters and businesses.
This section of the review looks at their dedicated hosting product to see how it stacks up against other options.
Spoiler alert. It stacks up well. We’ve reviewed hundreds of hosting options, and Bluehost is in our top 10.
Let’s see how tybtestsite.com did here!
Standard
A Whole Server Just for You-
CPU 2.3 GHz
-
CPU 4 Cores
-
RAM - 4GB
-
Bandwidth - 5 TB
Enhanced
More Power!-
CPU - 2.5 GHz
-
CPU - 4 Cores
-
RAM - 8 GB
-
Bandwidth - 10 TB
Premium
Highest Level Baby!-
CPU - 3.3 GHz
-
CPU - 4 Cores
-
RAM - 16 GB
-
Bandwidth - 15 TB
Bluehost Dedicated Server Speed Review
Bluehost has some of the best speeds in the industry. They use a high-powered processor that provides excellent performance, and they include 4 GB of RAM on all of their plans. This ensures fast page loading times and consistent uptime, which is critical for businesses that rely on their site to stay running.
But how did our test site do?
We tested it out on thier dedicated server and got an impressive response time of just 0.5 seconds.
GTmetrix Scores:
- Grade: A
- Performance: 95%
- Largest Contentful Paint: 816ms
- Total Blocking Time: 43ms
- Cumulative Layout Shift: .16
Bluehost Dedicated Uptime Review
Bluehost Dedicated Hosting offers reliable uptime and is designed to keep your website running without interruption. They use a combination of redundant power sources, powerful server processors, high-speed network connections, and adaptive load-balancing technology to deliver an optimal hosting experience.
Since you’ve got your own server, the only way you’ll experience downtime is an outage, or malicious attack.
In our test sites case, we saw uptime scores of 99.98%
Bluehost Dedicated Hosting Features
Web Hosting Plans
- Standard: $79.99 per month (for 36 months)
- Enhanced: $99.99 per month (for 36 months)
- Premium: $119.99 per month (for 36 months)
Plan Features
- 24/7 dedicated hosting assistance (over the phone or live chat support)
- Personalized dedicated server
- Multi-server management
- Unmanaged dedicated servers
- Intuitive cPanel
- Root access
- RAID storage
- Storage updates
- Fast provisioning
SSL Included & Activated?
Bluehost plans for a dedicated server come with an SSL certificate for free for the first year.
This certificate protects personal information and gives you more security with your dedicated hosting service.
How Easy is Bluehost Dedicated Hosting to Use
Bluehost Dedicated Hosting is relatively easy to use. The control panel provides access to a suite of hosting management tools, which allow you to easily set up and run websites on your dedicated server.
It also offers you the ability to customize settings, such as CPU and RAM allocations, disk space limits, and much more.
Additionally, their support team is available 24/7 to assist.
Bluehost Dedicated Hosting: Our Final Take
edicated hosting through Bluehost is an excellent option.
Regarding pricing, Bluehost presents an affordable hosting package.
Also, every plan comes with a free domain name for the first year.
Dedicated server accounts have root access, allowing unrestricted access for custom alterations and plugin installations on every site.
Bluehost WordPress Hosting Review
In this review, we’ll be focusing specifically on Bluehost WordPress Hosting. Speed: Bluehost offers fast speeds for loading your WordPress site. Their WordPress hosting has some serious perks, including:
- Automatic WordPress Installation
- Free Domain for Your First Year
- Automatic WordPress Updates
Does it live up to the hype? Let’s check out how our test site performed on their WordPress hosting.
Choice Plus
Added Privacy & Security-
40 GB SSD Storage
-
Free CDN
-
Unlimited Websites
Bluehost WordPress Hosting Speed Review
We setup our WordPress site tybtestsite.com on Bluehost’s WordPress hosting and ran a series of tests to measure the loading speed.
We were pleasantly surprised with the results. Our pages loaded in an average of 1.4 seconds, which is pretty good for shared hosting plans.
While “WordPress” hosting is great, it’s still shared hosting. If you want faster speeds, look into Bluehost’s VPS or Dedicated plans above.
Here were our test results from GTmetrix:
- Grade: B
- Performance: 77%
- Largest Contentful Paint: 812ms
- Total Blocking Time: 317ms
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0.05
Bluehost WordPress Hosting Uptime Review
Bluehost is known for reliable uptime on their WordPress hosting plans. We ran a month-long test to measure the average uptime of our test site.
On average, our tybtestsite.com was up 99.99% of the time during our testing period, which is terrific! Those numbers are consistent with what Bluehost claims on their website.
Bluehost WordPress Hosting Features
Web Hosting Plans
- Basic: $2.95 per month (for 12 months)
- Plus: $5.45 per month (for 12 months)
- Choice Plus: $9.95 per month (for 12 months)
- Pro: $13.95 per month (for 12 months)
Plan Features
Custom themes
- 24/7 customer support from knowledgeable WordPress users
- The free domain name (for one year)
- Free CDN
- Automatic installation for WordPress websites
- Automatic updates (unmanaged and managed WordPress plan)
- Verified on Google My Business
- Secure login credentials
- Easy-to-install plugins
- Unmetered bandwidth
- $200 in Bing Credits
SSL Included & Activated?
Bluehost’s WordPress hosting support includes an SSL certificate for the first year.
How Easy is Bluehost WordPress Hosting to Use
Since Bluehost automatically sets up the latest version of WordPress and offers a ton of features, it’s super easy to use their WordPress hosting.
The Control Panel is intuitive and user-friendly, making most tasks simple for even the least tech-savvy users. And if you ever run into any issues or have questions, Bluehost has excellent customer support available 24/7.
Bluehost WordPress Hosting Our Final Take
Considering WordPress executives recommend using a Bluehost account to host a WordPress site, it is safe to say Bluehost is a reliable option.
Also, Bluehost’s support team specializes in WordPress inquiries, assuring customers have all the support they need to run a successful WordPress site.
Bluehost pricing is reasonable, so you do not have to worry about breaking the bank to host a WordPress platform.
Even the basic plan has all the tools you need to build a new website or transfer an existing site.
Here are a few screenshots of the getting started process!
Bluehost Customer Support Review
This part of the review is always my favorite. Essentially, we log into our Bluehost account and ask ridiculous questions to see how helpful the support is.
Our average wait time was 3 minutes. On the support side, Bluehost did an excellent job. The reps were knowledgeable and friendly, and they even had answers to our most ridiculous questions.
They do also have a product called WP Live (for $55/month) that let’s you have direct access to WordPress help.
Bluehost Security Review
Bluehost has decent security. Nothing that blew us away.
Here’s what they offer in most plans:
- Free SSL
- Daily Website Backups
- Domain Privacy
- Malware Scanning
Obviously, the more you pay, the more secure your site is doing to be.
Their shared hosting is going to be less secure than their VPS and dedicated plans.
If you’re lookin for more security, we suggest moving onto your own dedicated server. You’ll pay more monthly, but the added security is worth it.
Bluehost Website Builder Review
Bluehost also offers a website builder for those who don’t want to use WordPress. We tested out the Bluehost Website Builder and found that it was surprisingly easy to use and had great features.
The drag-and-drop interface is intuitive, making it simple to create stunning pages without any coding knowledge. Plus, it comes with many free templates to get you started.
- Bluehost’s website builder is GREAT if you’re a beginner just looking to get a website up.
- Bluehost’s website builder is POOR if you’re a small to medium-sized business looking to ramp up marketing efforts and your SEO game.
Bluehost Free SSL
Bluehost offers a free SSL certificate with all their hosting plans. This is great for SEO and for giving visitors peace of mind that your site is secure.
We tested the Bluehost SSL Certificate on our test site, and everything seemed to work correctly. We were able to get the coveted “padlock” in our browser.
Is Hosting Good for Business?
Bluehost is a great option for small to medium-sized businesses looking for reliable hosting and good customer service.
Their VPS, Dedicated, and WordPress Hosting plans offer the speed, uptime, security, and features necessary for business owners to succeed online.
Bluehost Final Verdict
Overall, we give Bluehost 4.6/5 stars! They have competitive pricing, a large variety of hosting options, and are pretty easy to use.
The primary areas they were lacking were performance (not as fast as other hosting companies we’ve tested) and security.
Bluehost Alternatives
If you’re not excited about Bluehost, here are some other competitors you should check out!
Hostinger
Hostinger is Bluehost’s main competitor.
For starters, Hostinger plans are generally cheaper than Bluehost’s.
Still, Bluehost has more features and better website security options than Hostinger. Hostinger has web builder tools and scalable plans that grow as your website grows.
The features that Hostinger lacks include a cPanel, telephone support, refunds, and numerous email accounts.
A2 Hosting
A2 hosting is a highly-rated website host with excellent features like a 99.9% uptime guarantee, 24/7 customer support, and page speeds.
A2 Hosting is well-known for its fast speeds and Turbo Boost feature.
The Turbo Boost feature offers speeds 20 times faster than other hosts.
Although A2 Hosting does not offer a free domain, the company does provide free security features.
Lastly, A2 Hosting is considerably more expensive than Bluehost, especially if you want the Turbo Boost feature.
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Bluehost Review FAQ
The type of hosting better than Bluehost depends on the type of hosting a user needs. For instance, since Bluehost doesn’t provide cloud hosting services, companies like WP Engine or HostGator are better.
Yes, Bluehost is a great choice for small businesses. Bluehost provides affordable hosting options, excellent customer support, and an array of tools to help make setting up a website easier. Bluehost also offers a variety of web hosting options so businesses can choose the plan that best suits their needs.
Bluehost is rated highly by customers and industry experts alike. Bluehost offers reliable hosting services, an array of helpful tools, and a knowledgeable customer support team that can answer questions anytime. Bluehost also offers affordable plans and is endorsed by WordPress for its WordPress hosting options.
GoDaddy is not always cheaper than Bluehost. Bluehost offers affordable plans and discounts for customers who pay for a year of service in advance, but the pricing can vary depending on the hosting plan. It is important to compare the features and prices among different web hosting providers before deciding.
Yes, Bluehost can be trusted. Bluehost is a reliable and reputable web hosting provider with decades of experience in the hosting industry. Millions of people rely on Bluehost to host their websites. Bluehost also has a 30-day money-back guarantee, so users can confidently try it.
