expert evaluation
Strong Points
- Competitive introductory price
- generous features
- Beginner-friendly with customer support services like website migrations and a dedicated team of WordPress experts
- 30-day refund policy
Cons
- Lagging competitors in support and reliability
- Rapid price increase after initial purchase period
- Documents are not easily found on the website
- Storage is limited and reduced from previous offerings, especially on the Basic plan
our verdict
Bluehost is a beginner-friendly web hosting platform that offers affordable introductory prices, plenty of features, and easy setup for first-time website owners, but it lacks support when compared to competitors like HostGator and InMotion Hosting. and reliability are limited. After the initial buying period, prices increase significantly but still remain competitive with other providers.
Today’s Best Price: Bluehost
Bluehost is a WordPress approved web hosting platform that offers a wide range of hosting services. You can’t beat the early start-up price, and Bluehost offers generous features and easy onboarding for first-time website owners. Competitors have the upper hand.
Bluehost: Pricing
One of Bluehost’s biggest advantages is the competitive introductory price for its service. How much you save on your first purchase depends on the type of plan you use and how many months you decide to purchase the plan during initial checkout.
However, the savings can range from 20% up to 76%. For example, if you subscribe to Bluehost’s shared hosting service for 12 months, the initial and renewal costs are:
Marshall Gunnell / Foundry
Or, if you want to go with the Dedicated Hosting service for maximum performance and optimization, this is what you’d expect compared to what you’d pay upfront on renewal.
Marshall Gunnell / Foundry
Bluehost’s adoption rate is hard to beat, but be prepared for a steep increase (over 50%) when it comes time to renew. , with HostGator having a slight advantage.
The plan you use should only depend on what you expect from your website. If you just want to build a site to showcase your portfolio, hosting on a shared server is good enough. Even if you plan to grow your site, a shared server is probably the best choice to start with. If so, it may be time to consider switching to a dedicated server to improve overall performance.
Bluehost offers a full refund if you cancel your subscription within 30 days.
One of Bluehost’s strengths is its beginner-friendly setup process. It also offers many generous features across all plans.
Bluehost: Setup
Another strength of Bluehost is its beginner-friendly setup process. Bluehost offers a variety of customer support services, from website migrations to full site builds. The company also has a dedicated team of WordPress experts ready to help you.
Bluehost has a lot of documentation if you want to set everything up yourself, but finding documentation on their site is another story. Bluehost offers an intuitive control panel that is easy for users to navigate, but documentation is very difficult to find in their knowledge base.there is teeth A 24/7 support team is available via online chat, but if you’re not interested in standing in line or just want to figure things out on your own, the structure of the site leaves a lot to be desired. you will soon notice.
Bluehost: Features
Bluehost offers a lot of generous features on all plans. Each plan includes metered bandwidth and unlimited domains, except for the Basic plan which gets you one domain.
The Basic plan also includes 10GB SSD storage, which Bluehost calls “website storage,” which is a significant decrease compared to the previous 50GB offering. They used to offer unlimited storage, but are now downgraded to 20GB, 40GB, and 100GB respectively. In addition to storage capacity, there are also limits on the number of files you can host, with a maximum of hundreds of thousands. So unless you’re on a file-sharing website, you’re unlikely to hit the limit. .
Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro plans also offer unlimited databases, while Basic plans allow up to 20. However, the maximum database size for each plan is 5GB.
There are many other services such as email accounts and storage, dedicated IPs, and allowed subdomains. Below is a summary of what each plan offers.
Marshall Gunnell / Foundry
Bluehost: Backup and Security
Bluehost offers decent backup and security features, but what you get depends on the plan you sign up for. Bluehost offers free malware scanning via SiteLock on all plans, and a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate offers.
Bluehost also offers Choice Plus and Pro subscribers free daily site backups with CodeGuard. A Choice Plus member must pay a renewal fee after her first year. If it’s not included in your plan, you can pay for it separately. We highly recommend backing up your site (or any of your data for that matter) daily.
Bluehost: Reliability
Server uptime is very important for your website as downtime directly impacts your bottom line. I see online claims that Bluehost has a server uptime of 99.98%, but Bluehost itself promises only 99.9%.
Also interestingly, Bluehost states in a blog post that a good web host should offer backup servers, but on their FAQ page they do not offer server redundancy on their shared hosting plans as it increases costs. says it hasn’t.
So what’s the real story? In general, Bluehost has good uptime and gives you a way to track yourself (but you have to set it up yourself). When I was hosting a game guide website on Bluehost, I had very few server issues, but one of his saying that the site went down sporadically for hours and days without any announcement from Bluehost. I encountered one problem.
There were 679,916 pageviews in the month before the server issue. Server problem month, 592,560. There are a lot of variables involved, but the sporadic server downtime certainly didn’t help, and with no announcement from Bluehost I was scrambled to figure out what was wrong. , plus poor communication from support during this time, ultimately led to us moving to another web hosting platform the following month.
Marshall Gunnell / Foundry
On the other hand, if a regularly scheduled maintenance is approaching, Bluehost will warn you in advance via email so you can prepare for it. These updates will be scheduled at times when the least number of customers will be affected. This is because updates usually do not occur during peak hours.
Bluehost: Customer Support
If you don’t like interacting with people, check out Bluehost’s online knowledge base to see if there’s documentation to help answer your questions. The knowledge base is plentiful, but as mentioned earlier, it’s very difficult to find the content you need.
If you want to talk to a real person, Bluehost boasts a 24/7 support system available via phone or live chat. This is on par with other hosting service providers such as InMotion Hosting and HostGator.
Unfortunately, the quality of Bluehost’s support was hit or miss for me. If the question is simple, it will probably be a good experience. However, during the aforementioned service disruption, support seemed to be out of the loop and unable to answer questions or periodically disconnected during support sessions. Additionally, there was a delay of several days before the official announcement was made.
Marshall Gunnell / Foundry
No contact from Bluehost or help from support during this time left us with an unfavorable experience.
Bluehost: Final Thoughts
Bluehost is a great hosting provider for first-time website owners. It offers easy onboarding and setup, so you can get your site up and running quickly without any technical knowledge.
The initial cost is also top class in the industry, so it is recommended for those who want to keep their budget down. However, renewal fees are on par with other services and slightly higher compared to HostGator. there is.
Finally, if uptime and customer support are important to your business, there are better and more reliable hosting providers out there. Even if you’re building your site as a passion project or online portfolio and downtime isn’t a big issue, you should strongly consider Bluehost.
Editor’s Note: Because online services are often iterative and gain new features and performance improvements over time, this review may change to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to the text or final review results are noted at the beginning of this article.
