Bluehost Review (Sep 2023) | It Is Cheap, But Is It Good?

Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosts in the hosting industry. So, I hope more or less everyone knows the name of Bluehost.

But do you know the detailed features offering services of Bluehost? If you search Google or YouTube for the best web host, you’ll often find Bluehost at the top of the list.

Is it actually this good? Or is there something else? If you want to buy hosting services for your website, you must have heard the name of this, and often, you would find that people are calling this the best.

So, who wants to do something other than hosting their website with the best hosting service?

If you wish for these answers, you have come to the right place. I personally use Bluehost.

Now, are you considering using Bluehost for your web hosting needs? If you are, I will share my experience using Bluehost in this Bluehost review article. So, let’s start.

About Bluehost

When I first set my mind to buy hosting from Bluehost, I did research on them. First, I learned that Bluehost was founded in 1996 and is one of the oldest web hosts.

So, it made clear that this company has excellent experience in serving customers with web hosting. After that, I found out that it.

The most prominent brand for WordPress hosting and officially recommended by WordPress. This makes it clear why people call this the best web hosting service provider.

After seeing some customer reviews, I have found that Bluehost is known for website speed, even during high traffic. After personally using it, I also agree with the statement.

In some research and studies, it made its position on top of the list for number one web hosting for small businesses. However, I have doubts about that.

The best thing that made me buy hosting services from Bluehost is that they offer an exclusive 70% discount, a free Domain, free SSL, and a site Builder with templates. If you want the offer, get started with Bluehost.

Bluehost is a part of Endurance International Group (EiG). And this company owns various hosting providers, including Web.com, iPage, and Network Solutions.

So, we can tell that the management of Bluehost is in good hands. This company is well known for complying with modern hardware and software standards.

Also, I have noticed that Bluehost also regularly improves their server hardware and overall hosting experience.

How can you determine which hosting service will give you the best support in the near future? You can tell this by seeing the adoption of modern technology by hosting service providers.

I will provide Bluehost 10 out of 10 in this part because they have industry-leading technologies like KVM and OpenStack for faster websites.

Bluehost Offerings

After knowing about the company, why not dive into the features and options Bluehost is offering?

In this part, I will talk about the characteristics of Bluehost I personally like and have found the most useful.

Performance and Speed

The first thing Bluehost catches my eye is its performance page. It will offer you a Performance page where you can set cache settings adjustment for faster website loading.

As we all know, performance is crucial for web hosting. And now, how can you determine whether your hosting service provider gives you the best performance?

You can measure the performance of your web host by loading time and uptime. So, what is the ideal loading time for a good website?

According to Google’s recommendation, loading time is Ideally under 3 seconds for better user experience and SEO.

After using Bluehost for one of my websites, I measured the loading time of Bluehost with Gtmetrix, which came out to 1.57 seconds.

However, the company claims that their average loading time is 2.20 seconds, which is pretty good and fast. Page load speed is crucial.

According to Google research, slow page load leads to a higher bounce rate (32% increase).

When it comes to performance, the second thing you need to notice is the uptime. I got 100% uptime for all websites I run on Bluehost hosting.

But the Bluehost’s average uptime is 99.98% over a year, which is an excellent uptime record. I fell in love with Bluehost hosting because of its consistent performance.

From other users’ reviews, I learned that people face occasional dips in uptime, but their hosting is generally reliable. Personally, I didn’t encounter any uptime issues.

The fact I liked about Bluehost while using their service for more than three years is that they have been trying to improve their loading time over the years.

Bluehost’s Website Builder

Building a website is hard. So, I see that most of the hosting service providers offer website builders to help their customers.

But the website builder I got from Bluehost is beyond comparison to other web builders. It is the best website builder in the market.

It offers a range of powerful website-building tools to suit various needs. When I first saw this website builder, I was speechless. How can a hosting service provide this much powerful website builder?

For comparison, if I rate the other web builder offered by different web hosting providers 40 out of 100, I will give Bluehost website builder 110 out of 100. So you can imagine how good it is.

I was surprised when I saw that it gives me the capability to seamlessly build a professional website without any hassle.

The website builder has many features and options. So, let me tell you which features and options I personally liked about Bluehost.

Content Management System

CMS is the system that makes website management easy for users. Bluehost also offers a variety of content management options to cater to different preferences.

As a user, I have the opportunity to choose from popular software like Joomla or WordPress.

I personally like WordPress, and WordPress recommends Bluehost. These options are beneficial to simplify the creation and management of your website’s content.

Website Management Tools

Managing a website is not an easy task. After creating a website using Bluehost’s website builder, I saw they offer many tools to manage my website.

After using these tools, I have found out that they are highly effective in managing websites.

These tools include features for website construction, spam filtering, email account management, site statistics collection, and domain management tasks.

These are essential tools that will make your website managing your journey smooth. Bluehost also offers FTP or File Manager for more advanced users.

If you want a mobile-friendly website, you can do it with Bluehost’s goMobi Mobile Web Builder for mobile-friendly websites.

Weebly Feature

We all know how helpful drag-and-drop features are for website building. Bluehost calls their drag-and-drop features as Weebly.

This feature is for those seeking easy ways to build websites. Weebly enables you to quickly create visually appealing web pages complete with elements such as slideshows, contact forms, and social media links.

Bluehost even offers a free version of Weebly with basic functionality, allowing the creation of up to six pages and the addition of custom HTML.

For more advanced features and flexibility, users can opt for the $16 per month Professional tier, which includes custom themes and password-protected pages.

First, I used the free version, and it impressed me. If you don’t want to spend 16 bucks, you can easily make your website with the free version.

But I will recommend you buy the premium if you wish to have a beautiful-looking website.

Professional Email

The best way of formal communication in this digital world is email. Bluehost offers email hosting to set up professional email addresses for businesses.

It will make you look more professional to your customers. This email is essential if you want to communicate with customers in a professional manner.

Interestingly, I found out that I can get a professional email address for free from Bluehost.

So, I researched a little bit more and found out the process of getting a professional email is easy.

You need to go to cPanel, click on the Email Accounts icon, and use the Create button to create your professional email. But it has a drawback.

The drawback is that Bluehost email hosting shares server resources with your website, so it’s not suitable for large marketing campaigns.

But overall, you can use this email for official work with your clients. I personally like this feature of Bluehost and hope that beginners will find this feature pretty helpful.

Storage and Bandwidth

Bluehost offers unmetered storage, meaning you won’t be charged extra for bandwidth or disk space usage.

This feature forced me to buy hosting for my portfolio website from Bluehost.

However, Bluehost’s storage limits vary by plan, with the Basic program providing 10GB of SSD storage, which is enough for a new website and can support it for at least one Year.

Bandwidth is unmetered, allowing unlimited data transfer, but you share server resources with other sites, which can sometimes slow your website. But I didn’t find this to be an issue.

Free Domain

Who doesn’t like free gifts with their hosting? Interestingly, Bluehost also gives a domain name with their new hosting service.

But it’s usually applicable for one Year. However, getting a domain name for free for one year is a pretty excellent and pocket-saving gift.

Marketing Tools

Most of the new websites are built for marketing purposes. So keep this in mind: Bluehost provides marketing tools for online businesses.

I have a marketing website, and I have tried their marketing tool. I won’t say that their marketing tool gives me magical results, but these tools are practical and make my job pretty easy.

Their marketing tools include SEO Toolkit, Google Ads integration, and Google My Business listing.

The SEO Toolkit offers a paid option starting at $5.95/month for SEO planning and progress tracking. It helps me a lot to improve the overall SEO of my website.

User Friendliness

The most prominent feature for any web hosting service provider is user-friendliness.

Because of the websites we are seeing now, and the new ones going live on the web are run mainly by new, inexperienced people.

So, to help them run their website easily, there is no better option than to provide them with a user-friendly environment.

Regarding user-friendliness, this is one of the features that sets Bluehost apart. They make it really easy for anyone to manage a website.

Even if this is the first time you’ve ever had a website. First of all, Bluehost uses cPanel, a web hosting control panel that offers many options for integrations.

And using their cPanel with this much functionality is pretty straightforward. Users can easily use the features and options without confusion.

For example, you can add email autoresponders, various apps to track marketing metrics, such as the number of clicks on your website, and apps for automatic billing very quickly.

You can easily install a CMS system on your website. Not only this, Bluehost is offering a one-click installation system for WordPress.

Bluehost makes it simple and easy to add any additional apps and plugins, which gives your site more features and can help to improve the experience of visitors to your website.

I think their features won’t overwhelm people who can easily use them.

Customer Support

After using it for an extended period of time, One of my favourite things about Bluehost is its customer support.

This year, I have fallen into many problems, and their customer support team was always on my side when I needed them.

Bluehost’s support stands out as the best hosting company I’ve used. It’s rare to find a company that hires helpful and knowledgeable staff and allows them to go above and beyond to assist you.

If you’ve ever been stuck with website issues, you know how important this kind of support is.

Bluehost’s support team is available 24/7 via phone, email, or chat for your convenience. I think this will become the most helpful feature for a beginner.

I will rate them 10 out of 10 in terms of customer support. Because of their customer support, you will see reviews where you can see that Bluehost users have the most minor problems running their website.

Migration Feature

After knowing their extraordinary features and options, are you thinking of shifting your website to Bluehost’s hosting?

Or are you not satisfied with the current hosting service you are using and want to move your website?

The good news is you can do this in a very easy way, and you don’t have to pay for this because free site transfer is available for all Bluehost plans.

But there are some qualifications you need to fulfill for a free transfer. The first thing is that your site must have to be a WordPress site.

After you buy their hosting plans, you need to request migration within the first 30 days of signing up.

After that, just reach out to Bluehost’s customer support to start the transfer process. That’s it. Now, you can clearly see how easy it is to migrate to Bluehost hosting from another web hosting.

Usually, the transfer process typically takes 1-3 business days. Now, there is a question: What if your site isn’t a WordPress site?

The answer is you need to pay for non-WordPress sites. Non-WordPress sites or multiple sites cost $149.99.

This fee covers up to five website migrations and 20 email account migrations. However, all sites are not eligible for transfer. So, you need to contact Bluehost support first if you want to transfer your website.

Security Feature

The biggest concern for website owners is the security and safety of their websites. I have seen many website owners who choose their hosting service only based on the security features.

When I bought hosting from Bluehost, I was concerned about their safety and security.

But they don’t give any chance to complain about their security. We know SSL certificates are the most common security feature; every hosting service provider offers this to their clients.

Interestingly from Bluehost, you can also access other security measures, such as free CDN, to help mitigate DDoS attacks.

I think these are enough to protect a site. But there are more things that Bluehost has to offer when it comes to security.

You’ll get even more security features if you go for a higher-tier plan. These include the spam experts add-on to help protect against spam and phishing attacks.

Not only this, you will get an exclusive feature of domain privacy protection, which will keep your personal information hidden from the public view.

We know how vital backup data is in case something terrible happens to your website. Bluehost offers you server backups to ensure that you can recover your data in case of an emergency.

Bluehost also offers advanced security tools like SiteLock, which helps prevent malware attacks, and CodeGuard, which provides daily backups to allow you to roll back to a previous version of your site in case it gets hacked.

You’ll also have access to Postini from Google, which offers spam protection for your email in order to keep suspicious messages from reaching your inbox.

All of these security features combine to make Bluehost an excellent choice for safeguarding your website and ensuring the security of your online presence.

Bluehost Hosting Packages and Pricing Plans

Now, let’s come to the critical part, which is Bluehost’s hosting packages. Bluehost has several web hosting options to fulfill any customer’s demands.

Here, I will give you a basic idea of the hosting packages’ price and their offerings. If you want a detailed pricing plan, you can visit their official website.

1. Shared Hosting Plans

This hosting is ideal for websites with low to moderate traffic. Their shared hosting has relatively affordable pricing compared to the other packages of Bluehost.

They have four plans for their shared hosting, and these are:

PLUS plan $2.95/Mo

• Free Domain, 1st Year
• 1 Website
• 10 GB SSD Storage
• Free CDN

CHOICE PLUS plan $5.45/Mo

• Free Domain, 1st Year
• Added privacy and security features
• 3 Websites
• 40 GB SSD Storage
• Free CDN
• Security included

ONLINE STORE plan $9.95/Mo

• Free Domain, 1st Year
• 3 Websites
• 40 GB SSD Storage
• Free CDN
• Security included

PRO plan $13.95/Mo

• Free Domain, 1st Year
• 5 Websites
• 100 GB, SSD Storage
• Daily Website Backup
• Domain Privacy
• Security included

2. VPS Hosting Plans

This is suitable for websites needing more power, handling high traffic, or having specific compliance requirements.

Their VPS hosting shares server resources with fewer sites compared to shared hosting.

The excellent fact about Bluehost‘s VPS hosting is that it guarantees a specific amount of server resources for VPS hosting. There are Three tiers of Linux-based VPS hosting:

Standard plan $29.99/Mo

• 120GB SSD storage
• 2GB RAM
• 2 core CPU
• Unmetered bandwidth
• cPanel License Fee Included

Enhanced plan $39.99/Mo

• 4 GB RAM
• 2 core CPU
• 165 GB SSD
• Unmetered bandwidth
• cPanel License Fee Included

Ultimate plan $69.99/Mo

• 8 GB RAM
• 4 core CPU
• 240 GB SSD
• Unmetered bandwidth
• cPanel License Fee Included

3. Dedicated Hosting

This hosting plan is Ideal for handling huge traffic numbers and requiring complete server resources.

Also, they offer Linux-based dedicated server configurations. There are three options.

STANDARD plan $89.98/Mo

• 4 core / 8 thread
• Intel Xeon-D CPU
• 8 GB RAM
• 1 TB HDD Storage
• Unmetered bandwidth
• Linux
• cPanel included with Root Access

ENHANCED plan $119.88/Mo

• 8 core / 16 thread
• Intel Xeon-D CPU
• 16 GB RAM
• 2 TB HDD Storage
• Unmetered bandwidth
• Linux
• cPanel included with Root Access

PREMIUM plan $139.99/Mo

• 8 core / 16 thread
• Intel Xeon-D CPU
• 30 GB RAM
• 2 TB HDD Storage
• Unmetered bandwidth
• Linux
• cPanel included with Root Access

4. WordPress Hosting Plans

This WordPress hosting plan is specially designed to host WordPress websites. These plans offer various features for WordPress.

As I mentioned earlier, Bluehost ranked number 1 in hosting WordPress sites and is officially recommended by WordPress. It has four plans, and these are:

Basic plan $2.95/Mo

• Free Domain, 1st Year
• 1 website
• Storage 10 GB SSD
• Custom WP Themes
• Free CDN
• Security included

CHOICE PLUS plan $5.45/Mo

• Free Domain, 1st Year
• 3 websites
• Storage 40 GB SSD
• Free CDN
• Custom WP Themes
• Security included

ONLINE STORE plan $9.95/Mo

• Free Domain, 1st Year
• 3 Websites
• 40 GB SSD Storage
• Free CDN
• Custom WP Themes
• Security included

PRO plan $13.95/Mo

• Free Domain, 1st Year
• Hosting 5 websites
• Storage 100 GB SSD
• Free CDN
• Custom WP Themes
• Security included

Why Should You Use Bluehost Web Hosting?

There are plenty of reasons to choose hosting from Bluehost. First things first, they are the number one web hosting provider, according to several research.

If you want the best web hosting, this is the option for you. The second one is that Bluehost is the industry’s most reliable web hosting service provider.

They don’t have that many negative reviews. So you can tell that they are experienced in keeping customers happy.

From website building to managing, Bluehost offers you a complete package. And the price is low compared to the features they offer. Bluehost is a reliable and trustworthy web host.

They provide the best uptime and load speed. So you can believe everything about the performance of Bluehost.

If you are a beginner and start a blog or e-commerce website, Bluehost is the right option because it is the only hosting service that will guide you in managing your website.

Is Bluehost the Right Choice for You?

I have been using Bluehost for my multiple websites for several years. Using this for a long time is the best web hosting service I have ever used.

Their features and options help me manage several websites at once without hassle. Firstly, if you are planning to buy hosting, I’d recommend that most people start with either the Basic or Choice Plus plan.

Even though Bluehost plans seem a bit on the higher side, the pricing is justified. When it comes to your website, and you are really serious about it, you should not go with the cheapest possible option.

Bluehost’s reliability and customer support are top-class, and I loved it. Whatever Bluehost plan you start with, you can easily upgrade or downgrade whenever it might make sense for you to do so.

With Bluehost, you can enjoy the industry’s best load speed and uptime. With the help of the exceptional features of Bluehost, you can easily overtake your competitor.

If you are serious about your website and want the best experience, I recommend you go for Bluehost.

Pros and Cons of Bluehost

Everything in the world has some downside, and Bluehost is the same as them. Here, in this part, I will briefly tell you the pros and cons of Bluehost.

Pros of Bluehost:

• Reliable uptime (Exceeds 99.98%).
• Fast page load speed.
• Comprehensive website security.
• Responsive customer support.
• Smooth site transfer options for WordPress.

Cons of Bluehost:

• Higher renewal rates.
• Limitations on the cheapest plan.
• Advanced backup and security features require higher-tier plans.

Last Thoughts

Bluehost is an excellent choice for beginners, with affordable plans and an easy-to-use interface.

Before deciding on Bluehost or another provider, take into account factors such as support, speed, security, and pricing.

Bluehost offers good value for money, particularly if you’re a beginner looking for a dependable web host and award-winning customer service.

Finally, I hope this article has helped you learn more about Bluehost.

FAQ About Bluehost Hosting

Get answers to all your burning questions about Bluehost hosting. Find out everything you need to know about one of the leading web hosting providers.