Speed & Performance
Pricing
Features
Customer Support
Inside This Article...
Bluehost Review Overview
Bluehost was founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Provo, Utah. BlueHost powers over 2 million websites worldwide and is partnered with WordPress, who recommend them for WordPress hosting.
We’ll talk more about Bluehost’s WordPress features later in our Bluehost review.
BlueHost’s Basic plan caught my eye as it is only $2.95 per month. With that you get a free domain for 1 year, free SSL certificate, 1-click WordPress install, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
I honestly felt there was nothing to lose, so I signed up to BlueHost to provide my readers with a review that covers the following:
- Pros and Cons
- Performance and Speed
- Features
- Pricing
- Customer Support
Does BlueHost Sound Right For You?
Speed & Performance
BlueHost doesn’t offer an uptime guarantee, which can be off-putting for some. Because of this, I was quite wary and wondered whether BlueHost would be a reliable web host.
BlueHost does offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is a bit more reassuring when there’s no uptime guarantee.
When I signed up to BlueHost, I started monitoring my WordPress website with Uptime Robot. This allowed me to compile some data to assess my website’s actual uptime and response time.
These are my website’s uptime results:
- 100% (last 24 hours)
- 100% (last 7 days)
- 100% (last 30 days)
You literally can’t get better results than that! I am genuinely impressed with BlueHost’s server status and feel a lot better about them not offering an uptime guarantee. Following the uptime guarantee results, I wanted to have a look at my website’s response time.
My response time totalled an average of 340.20ms which is less than 1 second. That means when someone visits my website, it takes just over 0.3 seconds for the server to respond to a visitor’s request. These figures are vital, and ensure that your website visitors have a great experience.
In my opinion, it’s important to assess a website on all fronts. It’s not good enough to take just one lot of results. I input my website’s details into Bitcatcha which assesses the speed of your website and server response time.
Bitcatcha also details overall information about a variety of web hosts, including BlueHost. Bitcatcha sets up their own hosting accounts (much like I do) and records the results of each of them.
As you can see, BlueHost scored an A in terms of server response time. The results on this front seemed positive, but now it was time for my own results. Drum roll please!
Great! My BlueHost website’s server response times were fantastic. In the U.S. (W) the response time was 57ms, U.S. (E) was 33ms, and even over in the U.K., their London server came back with 103ms.
The longest server response time was in Bangalore, and even that was only just over 0.2 seconds which frankly is incredible.
Pricing
BlueHost has 4 pricing plans. The prices shown below are based on a 36-month term, and get more expensive if you decide to shorten your term to 24 months or 12 months.
The Basic plan is only $2.95 per month, which is $1 cheaper than SiteGround. The Plus and Choice Plus plans are currently the same price, which is an absolute steal.
The Choice Plus plan includes Domain Privacy + Protection (which keeps your details from being publicly published when you purchase a domain), and Site Backup (great for if something goes wrong).
- Basic: Suitable for personal websites, blogs, or portfolios.
- Choice: Ideal for personal websites or small businesses, with the added bonus of unlimited storage and bandwidth.
- Choice Plus: A great choice for small to medium-sized businesses, or people wanting to sell online with their website.
- Pro: A solid choice for larger businesses and enterprises, offering a dedicated IP for free, and all the benefits of the Choice Plus plan.
Features
With so many web hosts competing against each other, one of the factors that tend to differ the most between them seems to be price and features.
When I review web hosts, I like to take everything into account. It’s no good saying a web host is cheap if they don’t offer awesome features to go along with it.
BlueHost shines bright in terms of features. Here’s an overview of just some of their features to wet your palate:
- Free domain: All shared hosting plans include a free domain. On top of this, they offer a domain manager which allows you to keep track of your domains, update them, and transfer them.
- SSL certificates: Another bonus with BlueHost is that all plans include a free SSL certificate. If you are serious about hosting your website online, you should consider an SSL which will keep your website secure and reassure your website visitors that their data is protected.
- Marketing credits: BlueHost offers $100 marketing credits for Microsoft Advertising and $100 for Google Ads.
- CloudFlare CDN: CloudFlare CDN can be added onto BlueHost’s shared hosting. CDNs are essential for speeding up your website and creating a better user experience for your website visitors.
Customer Support
BlueHost’s support is 24/7, and in my experience, it’s been pretty damn good! But, don’t just take my word for it. BlueHost host millions of websites, so I’m sure some of their customers will have an opinion on their customer support.
I took it upon myself to head over to their Twitter page to see what people had to say about BlueHost’s customer support.
The general consensus is quite good and people seem to be loving BlueHost’s support. However, it’s near on impossible for a large hosting company to be perfect in every way, so there have been a few negative comments.
BlueHost’s support portal offers a knowledgebase which is very easy to use and search for answers to issues. There are categories you can choose from, too, if you’re struggling to find what you’re after.
BlueHost’s customer service is available 24/7 with a toll-free number, and live chat service. As we know, they are also contactable via their social media channels, which they are very active on and respond frequently.
Bluehost Review Summary
Now that you’ve read my BlueHost review, I’m hoping you can join me in appreciating how awesome they are. Not only are they a cheap web host, but their shared plans also come packed full of useful features, generous offerings, and their performance is truly spectacular.
I’m going to remind you of why I recommend BlueHost so highly:
- Although BlueHost doesn’t offer an uptime guarantee, they have always been reliable for me and I’ve had 100% uptime over the last 30 days
- Their pricing is incredibly affordable, starting from just $2.95 per month which includes a free SSL and free domain name
- All of BlueHost’s shared hosting plans include $200 marketing credits to spend on advertising your website
- BlueHost’s servers use SSDs which means they will perform faster and include 50GB storage on BlueHost’s Basic plan
There’s no doubt about it – BlueHost is a reliable web host, offering scalable hosting. If you’re an individual looking to host a personal website, small business, or even wanting to sell online, BlueHost is a perfect web host.
Whilst BlueHost doesn’t offer any uptime guarantees, they do have a 30-day money-back guarantee which means you can host your website risk-free for the first month.
Even if you’re still not sure about BlueHost (though I’m sure you will be by now), you can enjoy your hosting experience without any financial loss.
Are You Ready to Try BlueHost?
BlueHost FAQs
Yes! WordPress.org recommends just 3 web hosts, one of those being BlueHost. BlueHost power over 2 million websites and are supercharged for WordPress. WordPress have minimum requirements for recommended hosts, of which BlueHost meets all of the requirements.
Unfortunately BlueHost don’t offer an uptime guarantee, though many hosts do. BlueHost have apologized for not offering refunds or pro-rata refunds for any downtime, and say it’s due to the complexity of a shared web hosting environment.
If you have or are considering building a WordPress website, I highly recommend BlueHost (as do WordPress). They are an ideal web host for personal websites or blogs, small websites, medium traffic websites, and even small eCommerce stores.
You may notice that several web hosts now offer marketing credits for Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising when you sign up. These are actually of some use, not only as a way to explore these advertising platforms, but also to try and generate more traffic and interest to your website.
User Reviews
User Reviews
BlueHost Pros:
- Free domain name and SSL certificate with shared hosting plans
- Recommended by and partnered with WordPress
- $200 worth of marketing credits to spend on advertising your website
- CloudFlare CDN and SSD drives on all shared hosting accounts to speed up your website
BlueHost Cons:
- No free website migration
- No free website backups and restores