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Bluehost Review (2023): Still The Most Beginner-Friendly Web Host

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Bluehost is perfect for hosting WordPress sites because it's Bluerock Platform is a WordPress focused control panel that offers an integrated experience with WordPress websites.

Nayan Dhumal

March 4, 2023

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User Rating: 5 (1 vote)

Bluehost is a big name in WordPress hosting and they are the official ‘WordPress’ recommended hosting provider. In this Bluehost review, I test its features, support options, performance, and pricing, helping you decide if this is the best web host for you.

If you type Web Hosting into a search engine like Google, one of the first names that will come up is Bluehost, hands down. The reason for this is that Bluehost has a lot of market shares, as it is part of a large corporation called EIG (Endurance International Group), which owns many other hosting providers (such as HostGator).

Obviously, they have a lot of money to spend on marketing. In addition, they are also supported by WordPress. But does this mean it’s really good? Is it as good as many reviews say? Well in this 2023 Bluehost review, I will try to answer that question and settle the debate once and for all!

Bluehost isn’t perfect – but Bluehost is one of the best web hosts for WordPress beginners that offer automatic WordPress installation and a website builder, plus solid features and a free domain name.

As with any other hosting provider, Bluehost also has its own set of pros and cons. Let’s take a look at what these are exactly.

Bluehost Advantages

The following are Bluehost’s key features! Let’s take a look at their top hosting plans, speed and performance features, their new website builder, and much more!

Hosting made for WordPress

Bluehost is perfect for hosting WordPress sites because its Bluerock Platform is a WordPress-focused control panel that offers an integrated experience with WordPress websites.

Installing WordPress is very easy, you can go through the automatic 1-click WordPress installation process, or you can get WordPress installed on an account set up when you sign up.

Bluerock delivers WordPress pages 2-3 times faster than the previous technical stack and comes with a built-in NGINX Page Caching feature. Every WordPress website will benefit from the latest security and performance features such as:

Installing WordPress couldn’t be easier!

When you sign up with Bluehost you are asked if you would like to get WordPress installed (you can also install WordPress at a later stage.

Bluehost uses an improved cPanel control panel, in it, you can access the file manager and configure email addresses, FTP/SFTP accounts, databases, and much more.

Within the Bluehost control panel, you can configure and optimize the performance and security settings of your websites. You can also access your marketing tools (access your free $100 credit for Google Ads and Bing Ads), and create a user and website backups.

In your WordPress dashboard, you can customize WordPress auto-update settings, comments, content reviews, and of course caching settings.

Caching is a technology that increases the speed of your website. You can choose between different levels of caching and you can empty the cache with the push of a button.

You can also create staging copies of your WordPress sites. This is great for when you want to clone your website live and use it to test design or development changes before going live.

Speed and performance 

Speed is very important when it comes to hosting as it affects everything from user experience to your SEO ranking.

If your web hosting service provider can’t provide you with fast load times and you’re not optimizing your website for speed and performance, you risk losing a lot of site traffic.

A Google study found that a one-second delay in mobile page load times can affect conversion rates by up to 20%.

The good news is that Bluehost is doing well in speed performance tests. I have done tests on Bluehost’s speed (using a Bluehost-hosted test site) and I could tell that the average loading time of the site is really good.

It gets a  92% mobile score on Google PageSpeed Insights.

And on  GTmetric its performance score is 97%.

Cloudflare CDN Integration

Everyone wants to have fast page load times, especially if you are in the online retail business. Cloudflare is a CDN (content delivery/distribution network), that harnesses the power of a geographically dispersed network of data centers and proxy servers to maximize the security and performance of your site and improve your overall hosting experience. 

Basically, CloudFlare’s network plays the role of a wide VPN network, allowing your site to function over a secure and encrypted Internet connection. 

The good news is that Bluehost promotes Cloudflare integration. This vast network of servers around the world will easily cache versions of your site so that when a visitor comes to your site, the browser they use to access your site content receives it from a CDN network that is closer to your site. they. Therefore, your site ends up having much faster load times, since it takes much less time for the data to reach its destination.

Cloudflare is integrated for free on all Bluehost accounts, regardless of plan. All you need to do is create a Cloudflare account and enable the integration in the dashboard. 

That’s the basic Cloudflare plan. You can also use the Premium plan, which has an additional charge. 

Both plans are mobile-optimized, offer 24/7 customer support, and are SSL compatible. 

They also include: 

The Premium plan additionally offers:

Strong Uptime

Aside from page load times, it’s also important that your website is “up” and available to your visitors. I monitor uptime for a test site hosted on Bluehost to see how often they experience outages.

The screenshot above only shows the last 30 days, you can see the historical uptime data and server response time on this uptime monitor page.

Drag and Drop WordPress Website Builder

As I mentioned before, Bluehost integrates very well with WordPress. Regardless of your Bluehost plan, you can use the WordPress page builder to create responsive and attractive websites.

And I’m not just saying this. Smart AI makes it very easy to create a site from scratch, a site that will look great on any device. You can choose from ready-made templates for a quick start and you can edit the design in real-time without coding.

When you log in, you have the option to create and edit your site directly from WordPress, OR from the Bluehost website builder for WordPress, which is a really simple builder that’s capable of a lot of things. 

You can use more than 100 free stock photos and upload custom images, videos or music without any limitations. Bluehost’s generator also allows you to choose from their variety of fonts or upload your own if you think they are more suitable.

If you want to go a little further into customization, you can enter your own custom CSS by managing the CSS from the builder panel.

Bluehost’s WordPress website builders start at $2.95/month and you can create a professional-looking website using features like:

24/7 Customer Support

Like most web hosting providers, Bluehost also offers customer support that is available 24/7. Their customer support can be reached via live chat, email, phone, and support tickets. 

Whichever channel you choose to request support, you will meet with experts in the respective fields in which you need help.

Bluehost also offers a vast knowledge base that you can use when you need help with a particular problem. You can put the keyword of your problem in the search bar and you will get results with the closest match.

To give you an example, we typed the keyword “site migration” into the search bar and this is what came up:

There is also a Bluehost Resource center that contains a wealth of resources such as video tutorials, articles, and step-by-step guides. 

Who can you contact from Bluehost’s steam?

To make things easier for customers, Bluehost has divided its support team into three main categories:

Blue Sky

The blue sky is Bluehost, a WordPress support service. If you plan to host a WordPress site and want some serious optimization and development of that site, then Blue Sky is a great option. 

Blue Sky is a service that puts industry-leading WP experts at your disposal. They can help you with anything related to WP, like deciding the best theme for your site, setting up contact forms or making edits, setting up security, SEO optimization, marketing, etc.

Basically, as it says on Bluehost, Blue Sky’s website will help your site “reach its full potential.” 

However, you will not be able to get support from the Blue Sky team for HTML, CSS, and other types of coding.

This is a separate Bluehost service that is separate from their hosting plans, and if you want to use it, you’ll need to pay an additional monthly fee. There are three plans and the cheapest is $29.99 per month, but if you pay for 6 months and 12 months, the rates are a bit cheaper.

Security and backup

Bluehost offers very strong security protection for your site. They offer IP address blacklists, password-protected directories, filters for email accounts and user accounts, and access to the management of private keys and digital certificates. 

Bluehost also offers SSH (secure shell access), which means administrators and web developers can securely access configuration files. You can choose from three anti-spam tools: Apache SpamAssassin, Spam Hammer, and Spam Experts. They also offer hotlink protection. 

If you’re willing to pay to further enhance your site’s security, you can also choose from a variety of high-quality paid plugins, such as SiteLock, which is designed to prevent hacker attacks, and CodeGuard, which offers more copy options of security. 

SiteLock scans your site for viruses and malware daily. It also performs network monitoring on company servers 24/7. 

Plus, you can take advantage of the two-factor authentication system they offer so that even if you experience a hacker attack and they find out your password, they still won’t be able to gain automatic access to your Bluehost.

One great thing about Bluehost is that it also comes with Cloudflare integration, which is a type of CDN (free to use), meant to protect against identity theft and DDoS attacks, among others. It also serves to improve the performance and speed of your site, especially for load times. 

Basically, CloudFlare will improve your site’s security features and your site’s performance, so you should definitely consider using it.

I’ll talk more about Cloudflare CDN in the next chapter on Speed and Performance, so you can learn more about how it affects your site’s performance there.

Bluehost Backup Options

Bluehost offers free backups to its customers that are updated daily, weekly, and monthly.

The problem is that they don’t really guarantee the success of any of these backups. What does this mean? It means that you can keep incomplete backups; For example, if your files in the FTP directories are accidentally deleted, you may not be able to recover all of your files. It also means you won’t be able to access older versions of your site if you need them, as Bluehost rewrites them automatically.

Instead, Bluehost recommends that you create your own backup option and manage it internally. You can easily do this by getting a backup plugin, like Jetpack Backup, which will do real-time and daily backups for a fee.

Bluehost Disadvantages

No web hosting company is perfect, there are always downsides, and Bluehost is no exception. Here are the biggest negatives.

SLA with no uptime

They do not offer a guarantee of availability. When selecting a hosting provider, you want as close to 100% uptime as possible. They  don’t give you a guarantee, but their Network/Server Uptime Agreement states that “most issues are resolved in about 15 minutes.”

They have an average uptime of 99.94%. This 05% outage means that for a full year your site will be down for 4.4 hours. General Bluehost uptime is reliable, but again, there is no guarantee that your site will be up most of the time.

Aggressive Upsell Tactics

Their sales practices are designed to make you buy them. In other words, annoying pop-ups and alerts will appear trying to convince you to buy more.

For example, they have upsells to select from before you check out and finish signing up with them. Additionally, there are installation plugins that you will need to purchase that are typically bundled with other hosting providers as built-in features.

Free site migration is not included

If you’re looking to switch web hosts, keep in mind they do offer site migrations, however for a fee.

They will transfer up to 5 sites and 20 email accounts for the price of $149.99. Comparing this to other web hosting providers, this is a scam as most don’t charge anything to migrate your site.

But if you’re looking to migrate a WordPress site to Bluehost, then this is FREE! Bluehost offers us free website migrations for WordPress websites within the first 30 days after signing up.

Bluehost Pricing Plans 

Bluehost has many pricing plans, depending on the type of server and hosting service you want to use, so it can get confusing at times. But don’t worry, I’ll try to clear everything up here and show you what each pricing plan offers.

The prices indicated refer to annual payments (12 months), with auto-renewals at regular rates. There is also the option of 36 payments made every 36 months.

The prices indicated refer to payments made every 36 months. For dedicated and VPS hosting plans, there is no option for annual payments. 

Plans and prices are taken directly from resellerclub.com. Bluehost does not provide its own reseller plans (like SiteGround and HostGator, for example). Instead, they link to the Reseller Club website. With Bluehost, RH35 promo code (exclusive to Bluehost customers), you can get 35% off the prices listed above. The prices indicated above to apply for monthly payments (the same prices are valid for the 6-month payment schedule). If you choose to pay on a 1-year, 2-year, or 3-year basis, prices are lower.

Shared hosting plans

Shared hosting allows you to share servers with other websites. It means that multiple websites, from different owners, can use the resources of a single physical server. 

Shared hosting is why Bluehost offers some of the cheapest hosting plans out there. Who should use this option? People who don’t expect too much traffic to their site.

This is because if one of the other websites using the same server as yours experiences a spike in traffic, your site will feel it too. Your site’s performance will suffer and you will experience slower page load times. 

However, Bluehost promotes “resource protection” on all of its shared hosting plans, which is intended to protect the performance of your site on the shared server, regardless of traffic surges from the other hosted websites.

Bluehost offers four shared plans. The Basic one currently starts at $2.95/per month, and the most expensive is Pro at $13.95 per month. 

Bluehost’s shared hosting plans are some of the cheapest on the market. 

The Basic plan is just $2.95/mo (currently discounted) and comes with essentials like:

If you want to run more than one site, then the PLUS plan is the way to go. It offers an unlimited number of websites as well as unlimited ebook storage. In addition to the same basic features like WordPress integration, 24/7 customer support, free SSL certificate, free domain for a year, etc., it also offers Office 365 free for 30 days. 

If you want to focus on on-site security and have more privacy features, choose the Choice Plus plan. In addition to the basics of the Plus plan, it also includes free domain privacy and free automated backups for 1 year. 

The latest option in shared hosting is the Pro plan, which adds more power and optimization to your sites. In addition to the Choice Plus plan upgrades, it also includes free dedicated IP, automated backups, and a premium, positive SSL certificate. 

All shared plans include: 

Bluehost Comparison of Basic vs Plus vs Choice Plus vs Pro Plans

What plan should you get? That’s what this section aims to help you discover…

So what are the differences between the Basic, Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro hosting packages? Here is a comparison of the Basic vs. Plus plan, the Plus vs. Choice Plus plan, and the Choice Plus vs. Pro Plan.

Bluehost Basic vs Plus Plan

Their Basic Plan is their cheapest plan so it comes with fewer resources and features. The main difference between the Basic and Plus plans is that with the Basic plan you are only allowed to host one website, but with the Plus plan, you can host unlimited websites. If you intend to run multiple websites, you should go for the Plus plan.

Another main difference between these two plans is the amount of web space you can store on the server. The Basic plan only comes with 50 GB of web space, while the Plus plan comes with unlimited storage space. 50GB is plenty of space and should be enough in most cases, but if you store a lot of pictures and videos it can add up quickly.

Finally, the number of email accounts and amount of email storage in the basic plan is quite limited. Maybe it’s not so much the number of emails as most users never use more than 5 emails, but having only 100MB of email space is pretty low and you can run out of space quickly.

You should consider choosing the Plus plan if:

Bluehost Plus vs Choice Plus Plan

There are very few differences between the Plus and Choice Plus hosting packages. In fact, there are only things that distinguish these plans. That’s with the Choice Plus plan you get free domain privacy (also known as whois privacy) for your domain and the Choice Plus plan also comes with SiteBackup Pro which is their website backup and restore service.

If you’re flipping between these two plans, then you’re much better off choosing the Choice Plus plan.

You should consider choosing the Choice Plus plan if:

Bluehost Choice Plus vs Pro Plan

There are a couple of differences between Choice Plus and Professional Hosting Plan that are worth knowing about. The first and most important one if you intend to run an eCommerce or more resource-intensive WordPress website is that the Pro plan sites will be hosted on high-performance servers.

High-performance servers on the Pro plan have 80% fewer accounts per server allowing more resources to be used per account (more CPU usage, disk usage, bandwidth). It offers more speed, and more power, with fewer users.

The Pro plan also gives you a dedicated IP Address and a private (not shared) SSL certificate.

You should consider choosing the Pro plan if:

Which shared hosting plan is best for you?

Their new Bluerock platform is a WordPress-focused control panel that offers an integrated experience with WordPress websites. Bluerock delivers WordPress pages 2-3 times faster than the previous technical stack. Every site hosted on Bluehost.com will benefit from the latest security and performance features, such as:

Now you know what plans they have to offer and you are in a better position to choose the best shared hosting package for your needs. Remember that you can always upgrade to a higher plan if you need more resources and features.

Based on my experience, here is my recommendation for you:

Dedicated hosting plans

Dedicated hosting plans give you the option to use the resources of an entire server, making your site more powerful and optimized, and giving you more control over the services you’re paying for.

The Standard programs plan starts at $79.99 per month (currently discounted), paid on a 36-month basis. The dedicated hosting plan is not available for annual payments. 

The Standard plan offers the following features:

The other two plans, Enhanced and Premium, have the same elements but offer more storage and more power for better performance and more traffic. 

All dedicated plans include: 

VPS hosting plans

The VPS plans are somewhat cheaper than the dedicated ones, starting with the Standard plan of $18.99 per month, with the current discount (payment over 36 months, as in all VPS plans). 

The Standard plan programs include the following features: 

The other two plans, Enhanced and Ultimate, also have the same elements but offer more power and storage. and performance capabilities for more demanding sites. So you have 60 and 120 GB of SSD storage respectively, as well as 4 and 8 GB of RAM, and 2 and 3 TB of bandwidth. 

All VPS plans include:

WooCommerce Hosting Plans

There are two Bluehost WooCommerce Plans – Standard and Premium. The Standard plan is $12.95 per month at the current discount and can be paid for on a 36-month basis only. 

The main features of the Standard plan are: 

Premium Programs The plan includes a premium version of the Jetpack plugin, country and local tax management, product customization, subscriptions, online booking, and appointment scheduling, Google My Business verification, and unmetered bandwidth so you can have all the traffic you want without slow load times. 

The Premium plan also has domain privacy and domain protection for a more secure eCommerce site – you can rest assured that you won’t have to deal with any identity theft, spam, malware, or unwanted or unauthorized changes to your website. 

All WooCommerce plans include: 

30-day money-back guarantee on all hosting plans 

Bluehost’s promotional or discount prices are valid for the first term only, after which the plans renew at their regular rates, meaning they get more expensive. 

Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all its hosting plans and hosting services. If you’re not happy with any of them and want to cancel your plans within that 30-day purchase period, you’ll receive a full refund. 

However, please note that the refund does not refer to most of the add-ons that you could have purchased within the 30-day period. 

After 30 days of your purchase, you will not be able to return your money if you cancel Bluehost’s services.

BlueHost Pros and Cons

FAQs on BlueHost Review

What is Bluehost?

Bluehost is a web hosting company that offers a range of hosting services; from shared hosting, WordPress hosting, WooCommerce hosting, VPS, and dedicated server hosting, to domain registration and small business marketing services. Bluehost was founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton.

He realized that the web hosting services offered at the time were inadequate, so he set out to fix it by creating his own web hosting service. The company headquarters can be found in Provo, Utah, USA. Their official website is www.bluehost.com.

Is Bluehost Easy to use? Is it suitable for beginners?

Bluehost is definitely good for beginners in a number of ways. Firstly, their standard shared hosting plan is incredibly cheap, and secondly, it’s really easy to use, if you’re a beginner. The board is simple and doesn’t bombard you with too many options at once. The interface is very intuitive, plus the support team is available 24/7. You can always refer to their knowledge base and check out numerous how-to videos and articles that really help make it easy to get started in using this hosting provider’s platforms.

Is Bluehost a reliable hosting provider?

Bluehost is definitely one of the most reliable hosting providers out there. Bluehost has a 99.98% uptime guarantee, which is close to perfect. That’s a total downtime of about 1:45 minutes per year.

Is Bluehost Good for Blogging?

Bluehost is good for blogging because it is really easy to use, has basic and cheap shared hosting plans, and has a simple and versatile website builder. The excellent WordPress integration makes it an even more attractive platform for blogging, knowing that WP offers one of the best blogging web tools out there. Bluehost is the web hosting that I recommend to start a blog.

Does Bluehost Regulation Affect Do You Have A Website Builder?

Yes, in 2021 Bluehost released a WordPress Website Builder, which uses a visual drag-and-drop interface to create a custom WordPress-based website. One of its strengths is its ease of use for beginners. The Bluehost Website Builder is not a separate product that you need to sign up for. If you subscribe to a regular WordPress web hosting plan, then the builder is included.

How do I know if Bluehost is down?

If you want to check the status of the websites hosted on them, you can go to bluehost.com/hosting/serverstatus and type in your domain or account name, then they will send you an update on whether the sites are working properly or not. You can also use this free tool to check if your website (or any other website for that matter) is down or not.

Bluehost Power Handle high traffic?

They are capable of handling a lot of traffic, however, their shared hosting plans are not suitable for high-traffic websites. It is better to go with their VPS or dedicated server plans. Every Bluehost user gets access to Cloudflare, a content delivery network that helps sites with high traffic keep their servers up and their website running fast.

What are Bluehost nameservers?

Name servers are specialized servers that handle requests from computers for the exact location of a domain name’s services. In simple terms, think of it like a phone book. Before you call someone, you’d take the time to look up their number in a phone book if you weren’t sure. That is the logic used with nameservers.

Its default nameservers are:

ns1.bluehost.com (IP Address 74.220.195.31)

ns2.bluehost.com (IP Address 69.89.16.4)

Is Bluehost Good For E-commerce Websites?

They offer Woocommerce hosting. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that turns your site into a full-fledged online store eCommerce site. These are just some of the features offered by the WooCommerce plugin: Sell products and accept payments. Manage orders and shipping. Integrate with social media and allow customer reviews. Extend the look and feel of your online store using free and premium extensions.

What are the best Bluehost Alternatives?

This is undoubtedly one of the best-known and most popular web hosting companies in the world. However, if you are looking for providers and looking for good Bluehost alternatives then here are my recommendations. Cheaper Bluehost alternatives are Cheap Plans from Hostinger and HostGator (However, it is also owned by EIG).

Conclusion – Bluehost Review 2023

Do I recommend Bluehost?

Bluehost is a good web host to try if you are just starting out with your site. This is because it is really easy to use, it has an intuitive interface, a nice, simple but very functional website builder, good customer support and it is quite cheap.

In fact, it is one of the cheapest hosts out there. And also, one of its greatest strengths is that it has great integration with WordPress.

Finally, Bluehost has been recommended by WordPress as a preferred web host. All of this means that with Bluehost, you get pretty good value for your money.

I wouldn’t think twice about subscribing to one of their basic plans if I’m dying to open that dream website and want a good provider but have limited financial resources. I say – go ahead!

Bluehost Review (2023): Still The Most Beginner-Friendly Web Host

Get up to 75% discount