Bluehost Review 2019: Is it Worth as WordPress Hosting (Pros & Cons)

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Finding the right web host for your website can be a daunting task. With so many web hosting providers, it is easy to get confused. That’s why you read hosting reviews and look for recommendations. And that’s certainly a better way to choose a good Webhosting. Today, I will take you through the Bluehost Hosting. It is one of the recommended hosting providers by WordPress.org, that means a lot. So, through this Bluehost Review, we’ll find out: Is Bluehost Hosting worth your money for WordPress blog or website?

Bluehost Review
Bluehost Review

Bluehost powers over 2 million websites. It is also popular among WordPress users. Moreover, if you are new to WordPress hosting, Bluehost can be your best fit. After all, they offer excellent cost-effective plans suitable for the newcomers. They also offer decent customer support and tons of features. And there is 30-days money-back guarantee. So let’s discuss and review the Bluehost hosting in detail.

Fastest WordPress Hosting Anywhere!

Bluehost Review: It is Really Worth for your WordPress Blog/Site

Bluehost Review: Is It Worth as WordPress Hosting
Bluehost Review: Is It Worth as WordPress Hosting

In this Bluehost review, we will go through critical aspects including features, performance, security, pricing, reliability, customer support, and their pros n’ cons. Let’s get started.

About the Company: BlueHost

Bluehost was started back in 2003 by Matt Heaton. Later, it was acquired by Endurance International Group. The company has headquarters in Utah, USA. They host more than 2 million domains.

As I mentioned above, Bluehost hosting is one of WordPress officially recommended web hostings. Let’s find out what does that mean to you.

Bluehost Hosting is Recommended by WordPress: So What?

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WordPress recommendation is certainly given Bluehost an edge over other hosting providers.

But, for the end-user, does it really matter?

Of course, it does. In fact, this is one of the reasons to review the Bluehost hosting in detail.

The recommendation instills trust in the hosting provider. It means that Bluehost hosting is equipped with the infrastructure and the know-how to manage WordPress. The recommendation also filters the option out for you. The two other web hosting providers that are recommended by WordPress include SiteGround and DreamHost.

So, if you are new to the whole WordPress or web hosting, these recommendations help guide you to make an informed decision. Also, if you are using other hosting and are not satisfied, you can migrate to Bluehost Hosting.

Bluehost Hosting Types

Just like any other web hosting provider, Bluehost does offer different hosting types. These hosting types enable end-users to choose the right hosting option for them. The three hosting types include the following:

  • Shared Hosting plans start from $2.95/month.
  • VPS Hosting plans start from 19.99/month.
  • Dedicated Hosting plans start from $79.99/month.

Apart from the three main hosting types, they also offer WordPress hosting, WP Pro and WordPress eCommerce hosting.

Bluehost Shared hosting is an ideal choice for bloggers and small businesses who don’t want to spend much on hosting.

The dedicated hosting, on the other hand, is the most expensive. It is the right choice for pro bloggers, large firms, eCommerce sites and website with a large amount of traffic.

However, if none of the shared and dedicated hostings fit your needs, then Bluehost VPS hosting is for you. It provides dedicated-like hosting services without carrying the hefty price tag.

You can check the price of a specific plan under Plans & Pricing heading below.

Bluehost Features

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Bluehost comes with a lot of features. To truly review Bluehost hosting, we need to go through its features one by one. Let’s get started.

Easy-to-use Bluehost Dashboard

Bluehost’s interface is quite user-friendly. They provide a customized yet great cPanel through which you can access all the important features. Most of the features are a simple point and use. To further improve the ease-of-use, they also offer a website builder which you can use to speed up the website development process. It comes with a drag-and-drop feature.

Free Website Scripts

Bluehost offers free website scripts for easy site setup and maintenance. These scripts including popular Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla – out of these: WordPress is very popular among bloggers for making blogs and websites.

In addition to that, they offer different Message Forum scripts/software (PHPBB and many others), Form-mail Scripts, Social Networking Scripts, Mailing Lists, Image Galleries (Coppermine and more), Survey & Poll Software, Project Management Scripts, Help Center/Support Ticket Scripts, etc.

Easy WordPress Installation

WordPress is the most popular CMS used to start blogs, websites, Question-Answers sites, and whatnot. Bluehost hosting makes sure that WordPress installation is easy and straightforward so that beginners and people from the non-tech background can easily install WordPress to start their blog or website.

Bluehost Control Panel makes WordPress installation like a piece of cake. To start a WordPress blog or website, all you need is to enter your site name & description, select a domain and few clicks, Voila! Yeah, that’s all.

Free SSL Certificate

SSL has become important for security and technical SEO. Bluehost get you covered by offering free SSL certificate. All the Bluehost hosting plans come with free SSL certificate provided by Let’s encrypt, which is easy to enable. The free SSL certificate will help you protect users’ data and improve customers trust.

Technologies offered by Bluehost Hosting

SSD Storage: They offer SSD storage which means better site speed and loading time.

Apache: They use Customized Apache Web Servers that means you will be offered all the Apache legacy features like easy .htaccess access for several tweaks etc.

E-mail Support: Bluehost offers POP3/POP3 & IMAP/Secure IMAP email setup for your domain emails. So that you never miss an important mail even on the fly.

Simple Scripts Installation: Starting a new blog or website is easy with Bluehost as their Simple step by step Script Installation is bliss for beginners.

Visit Bluehost official website to check all the features.

Performance and Speed

Let’s review Bluehost performance and speed. When it comes to speed, Bluehost hosting performance above average. Speed is an important factor considering that traffic starts to drop off when the website loading time is more than 2 second. It is worth mentioning that, it takes anywhere between 1.5 seconds to 2 seconds to load a bare-bones WordPress website hosted on Bluehost Shared Hosting. Frankly speaking, that’s slightly slow, considering the standards put by other web hosting providers. However, it can be more than enough for the majority of users out there and considering their low price-point speed is fair.

Who are these majority of users?

You’re one of them if you are just starting off with blogging, WordPress or any other project which doesn’t require many hosting resources initially. You’re good to go with a budget hosting like Bluehost. Of course, if I have got extra bucks you can go for expensive hosting.

If you want more speed, then we recommend checking out other hosting service providers like SiteGround which comes with a comparatively higher price tag.

However, you can still speed-up your site hosted on Bluehost hosting by optimizing your website resources and their delivery. Followings are the definite-guides to speed up your WordPress website.

Uptime

We have been using Bluehost hosting for different projects and by our experience, they have certainly improved their reliability as compared to a few years back. Bluehost hosting has 99.99% uptime all around the year. That’s amazing, and it means that your site downtime will be minimal to none. It matches the industry standard.

Low Pricing

Bluehost is considerably cheaper compared to the competition. Their plans start from just $2.95/month. That’s a fantastic deal for those who are deploying their website for the first time. At that price, you are getting a lot of benefits, including unmetered bandwidth, SSD storage, free SSL certificate. During sales, you can also find the prices to go down even further. So, keep an eye out on the deals out there!

Security

Bluehost lets you own a web host at a cheap price, but that doesn’t mean that they compromise on other features. While reviewing Bluehost, one of the important features we found up to the mark is Security, it is top-notch. Security is really important in the online world and Bluehost understand that well. For starters, you can enable two-factor authentication on your Bluehost hosting account.

Also, they also offer paid add-on services of SiteLock – a way to protect your website from malware and hacking attacks. Their CodeGuard solution provides daily backups. The backups help you to recover your site if it gets hacked or something went wrong.

Lastly, it uses Postini to protect your website from spam on your email.

eCommerce Support

If you are looking for necessary eCommerce support, then you won’t be disappointed with Bluehost. You can also integrate new apps and use other services as per your requirement. To make it easy for you, they have provided a domain manager from which you can manage all domains.

Customer Support

Bluehost offers customer support through different mediums, including ticketing system, live chat, and phone. For basic problems, you can check their knowledge base.

The best way to reach their customer support is live chat. You get connected with their live support in minutes. The experience of connecting with their live chat has been fairly good. Sometimes it becomes a little tough for us to explain the issue to support. However, the problem got resolved once the support staff understood it well.

If you have an issue that requires more attention, we recommend using the ticket system. You can also get your issue resolved through the phone. Overall, Bluehost hosting offers above-average customer support.

Pro and Cons of Bluehost Hosting

Bluehost Pros

There are many pros of Bluehost Hosting. Let’s list them below.

  1. Great Uptime: Bluehost offers excellent uptime for their plans. You will get 99.99% uptime.
  2. Cost-effective plans: You can get started with their introductory plans. If you need something powerful yet cost-effective. If you require a more robust and high-resources hosting solution, you can also check out their dedicated or VPS plans.
  3. Average loading time: The loading time for Bluehost  Hosting service is good. However, I believe it could have been better.
  4. No Hidden Charges: You get what you pay for. All of their plans do not have any hidden fees associated with them.
  5. Free Domain: Each of their plans come with a free domain for the 1 year.
  6. Security: They offer great security for their hosting service.
  7. Refunds: 30-Days Money Back Guarantee.

Bluehost Cons

Bluehost hosting is not free from any cons. Not everything is rosy here, let’s see some deal-breakers.

  1. Higher renewal fees: They have high renewal fees. This means that once you get the first-year plan for cheap, you need to pay a lot more for its renewal.
  2. No Free Site migration: Unlike other web-hosting providers, they do not provide free migration service.
  3. Average customer support: Bluehost provides customer support through email, phone, ticket system. You also get access to a well-documented knowledge base. But, they do lack fluidity and expertise when it comes to handling complex hosting issues.

Plans and Pricing

There are plenty of Bluehost hosting plans. Each plan is aimed at a different user. All their plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. That’s why we are going to look at them below.

Shared Hosting

Bluehost Shared Hosting Plans
Bluehost Shared Hosting Plans
  • Basic – starts from $2.95/month; 1 website, 50 GB SSD Storage
  • Plus – starts from $5.95/month; ultimate website, unlimited SSD storage
  • Choice Plus – starts from $5.95/month; everything that plus plan offers and domain privacy and site backup
  • Pro – starts from $13.95/month; everything that Choice Plus offers and dedicated IP and one extra spam expert.

Learn more about their shared hosting prices here.

Bluehost WordPress Hosting

Under Bluehost WordPress Hosting they offer three different hostings – WordPress Hosting, WP Pro, and eCommerce.

WordPress Hosting
Bluehost WordPress Hosting Plans
Bluehost WordPress Hosting Plans

Under this category, Bluehost offers three plans just like their Shared hosting plans: the Basic Plan, Plus Plan and Choice Plus Plan. Prices and basic features are also the same as that of shared hosting plans except for one thing that is: they manage WordPress updates in Bluehost WordPress hosting.

WP Pro

This one is Bluehost’s fully Managed WordPress hosting. They offer three plans under WP Pro category:

  • Build Plan: starts from $19.95/month; 100 Free Premium Themes, Daily Scheduled Backups, etc.
  • Grow Plan: starts from $29.95/month; Jetpack Premium with Ads integration, Bluehost SEO Tools, etc.
  • Scale Plan: starts from $49.95/month; Advanced features for WordPress eCommerce Website.
eCommerce

This is a separate category of WordPress eCommerce Stores powered by WooCommerce. There are following plans for WordPress eCommerce Stores:

  • Starter Plan: starts from $6.95/month; 1 online store, 50 GB SSD Storage
  • Plus Plan: starts from $6.95/month; ultimate online stores, unlimited SSD storage
  • Pro Plan: starts from $12.95/month; everything that Plus Plan offers and Bluehost SEO Tools.

VPS Hosting

  • Standard: $19.99/month; 2 cores, 30 GB SSD storage, 2 GB RAM, 1 TB Bandwidth, 1 IP
  • Enchanted: $29.99/month; 2 cores, 60 GB SSD storage, 4 GB RAM, 2 TB Bandwidth, 2 IP
  • Ultimate: $59.99/month; 4 cores, 120 GB SSD Storage, 8 GB RAM, 3 TB Bandwidth, 2 IP

Dedicated Hosting

  • Standard: $79.99/month; 4 cores @2.3 GHz, 500 GB Mirrored Storage, 4 GB RAM, 5 TB Bandwidth, 3 IP Addresses
  • Enhanced: $99.99/month; 4 cores @2.5 GHz, 1 TB Mirrored Storage, 8 GB RAM, 10 TB Bandwidth, 4 IP Addresses
  • Premium: 4 cores @3.3 GHz, 1 TB Mirrored Storage, 16 GB RAM, 15 GB Bandwidth, 5 IP Addresses

Which is the Best Bluehost Shared Hosting Plan?

Bluehost offers four shared hosting packages. Each offers a set of features aimed towards specific users. If you are looking for a basic website with low traffic, then the basic plan is for you. It offers SSD storage and a free SSL certificate. You can also park 5 domains and make 25 subdomains.

The plus package, on the other hand, is ideal for those who are looking for hosting two or more websites with considerably low traffic. The choice plus, on the other hand, offers everything that the “plus” package offers, including Domain Privacy and Site Backup.

If you are creating a website that requires “High Performance”, then you can choose the Pro plan. The high performance is managed by hosting your website in a lower density server. It also comes with a dedicated IP.

Is Bluehost WordPress Hosting Worth-it?

WordPress is the number one content management system out there. It is easy to use and is an ideal choice for beginners. To use it effectively, you need a hosting that lets you explore its full potential.

Bluehost WordPress Hosting is a great starting point. It offers an adequate amount of features, including excellent performance, live support, and features.

As I have already mentioned above that Bluehost offers three types of hosting plans for WordPress:

  1. WordPress Hosting: This one is no better than BlueHost Shared hosting. The only additional benefit you get with WordPress Hosting is: that Bluehost will manage WordPress updates.
  2. WP Pro: The WP Pro is like full-fledged Managed hosting. That means BlueHost will take care of hosting hustles so that you can focus on your website or blog.
  3. eCommerce: The eCommerce hosting is suitable for eCom site running on WordPress.

So, it is worth your money?

WordPress Hosting plans are offered at the same price of Bluehost shared hosting. So this could be your pick if you want WordPress updates to be maintained by BlueHost.

WP Pro is their fully managed WordPress hosting which means you get auto-updates, all hosting things are managed by Bluehost and less server-side engagement of your own. The plans are priced right – starting from $19.95/month. You can check more about their other tiers on their pricing page here.

eCommerce Hosting is meant to host eCommerce running on WordPress + WooCommence. If you want to start an online store, you can give eCommerce Hosting a shot. Bluehost eCommerce Hosting starts from $6.95/month. You can check their eCommerce hosting plans here.

Pros of Bluehost WordPress Hosting (WP Pro)

  • Fully managed
  • Great infrastructure
  • Domain Privacy
  • 100 Free Premium Themes
  • Daily Backups
  • Malware Detection & Removal
  • Good security with daily scans
  • Marketing Center to monitor your marketing performance

Cons of Bluehost WordPress Hosting (WP Pro)

  • Higher Price
  • No Free CDN

Wrapping it Up

Bluehost has a lot to offer. It has tons of plans to choose from. Moreover, it is easy-to-use, cost-effective, and can be used for almost everything out there. This makes Bluehost hosting a top pick for anyone building their first website. Apart from that, they offer security, uptime, and a free domain.

Customer support, on the other hand, can be improved. There is no free site migration and higher renewal fees are a few disadvantages in the entry-level low-budget plans.

I hope this Bluehost hosting review gives you clear insights and answered all your queries.

Now, what do you think about Bluehost hosting? Are you going to choose it as your first hosting provider? Please comment below and let us know.

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Shashank Singh
Shashank is a web addict and amateur blogger. His current interests include blogging, SEO, and WordPress. See his social profiles to know him even better.
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