Table Of Content
- What Is Bluehost?
- The Pros and Cons
- Bluehost Pricing
- Other Benefits
- Who is Bluehost for?
- Conclusion
What is Bluehost?
Bluehost is a web hosting company that allows your manage your online projects. It was founded by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth.
When trying to build a website to connect with your customers, you need a stable web hosting platform to help you out, it also needs to be easy to use, and affordable. Bluehost balances price and features, offering services that work for users that use it for their hobbies and business professionals. Bluehost stands out with a new website developer that integrates into WordPress to bring amazing flexibility to the popular content management system. Bluehost has a staff of over 750 people working around the clock to bring satisfaction to their customers. They feature 1-Click installations in all their plans, being a recommended web host by WordPress.org.
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The Pros and Cons
Pros
One year of a free domain: The free domain name you get for a whole year has to be one of Bluehost’s most appealing features. It completely eliminates the extra work of going through a third-party domain seller or investing more money at the beginning stage of your website.
24/7 customer support: Only very few companies can boast of 24/7 customer support. Bluehost’s customer support is made available for you as you start your site, and anytime you need extra support when trying to troubleshoot site errors that are bound to happen.
Quick site setup: With Bluehost's intuitive and guided step-by-step setup, you can easily get your site up and running as soon as possible. And if you happen to encounter any problems, you can always tap into their chat support feature in real-time and chat with a customer support staff and get your problems solved.
Beginner-friendly: Bluehost is ideal for first timers. Anyone venturing into creating and maintaining a website for the first time can easily navigate the platform. This is because there isn’t a need for advanced web management knowledge or coding when you set up your site through it.
Free SSL certificate: Otherwise known as Secure Sockets Layer certificate, always makes sure to authenticate the identity of your website and encrypts important site information. In other words, you must have this feature for any site you publish. Bluehost provides SSL certification for free, fortunately.
Free web scripts: Tons of free website scripts are available, including social networking scripts, mailing lists, blog support, message forums, Tikiwiki, Drupal and Joomla.
Solid uptime: Feedback from customers also state that uptime with Bluehost have always been good. Unlike other providers that don’t offer an SLA (Service Level Agreement) that guarantees a minimum uptime.
Unmetered bandwidth: One other thing you should know is that Bluehost won’t limit the traffic that your website can get and that is very good because you need all the traffic that you can get on your website.
Cons
Only US-servers: Unlike other providers, you only have the option to host your site in the US. Other readers coming from regions could face having a slow site.
Entry-level plan limitations: The entry-level plan comes with a lot of limitation in the sites, database and email accounts you can create.
Poor backup options: The entry-level plans do not have a good backup solution.
Charges for site migrations: If you want help migrating your site, Bluehost charges a lot just to migrate your site to or from another platform and it gets really annoying.
Not the best fit for pre-existing high traffic sites: Bluehost is not the best option if you want to scale an already existing high traffic site and need hosting to meet those specific needs, an entry-level . But you can always upgrade to their more expensive managed WordPress tiers.
Bluehost Pricing
When going with a month to month plan, its best to know that your monthly hosting fee will be a tad more expensive. However, Bluehost still stands as the most value-filled and affordable plan you can choose, especially as a beginner.
Lets break down each shared hosting tier
Shared Hosting
A shared hosting Bluehost plan is one of the easiest ways to get started when building your website.
Basic: You can start with the Basic plan for $2.95, which is good to create one site with 50 GBs of space and includes free CDN and a free SSL certificate.
The CDN or SSL certificate enables them with one click to get a faster, more secure site.
Plus: Also if you are running a few websites, then you’ll want to try the Plus tier which is at $5.45 per month. This Plus tier includes everything in the basic plan tier, including the ability to host and manage an unlimited number of sites. You also get access Microsoft 365 for 30 days, which is not bad. It’s the most convenient tier if you want to reliably start more than one site from scratch without too much overhead cost.
Choice Plus: This is Bluehost's most recommended tier, and the one that gets you the most value for your money under the shared hosting plan. It is at $5.45 per month with added security features.
Here, you get everything in the first and second tier, plus free domain privacy and free automated backup for a whole year. Since internet security is a growing concern in the online world and the price for this tier is similar to the Plus option, this is the preferred option to go with.
Pro: Finally, the Pro tier. if you’re looking for a bit more than the previous shared hosting plans, then you should consider the Pro tier, which is sitting at $13.95 a month.
With this plan, you’ll get additional CPU resources and a free dedicated IP.
VPS Hosting
VPS, which means virtual private server hosting, is when hosting is within a shared server but acts as a dedicated virtual space for your site. VPS hosting gives you better security and potentially better performance than shared hosting. It has become very popular, as it is less expensive than dedicated hosting.
Bluehost’s VPS Hosting options include guaranteed resources. They come out tops against competitors , as they charge you only $18.99 for the standard VPN feature. This also includes 2 GB of RAM and an additional 1 TB of bandwidth.
Looking through each Bluehost offering, it’s clear they’ve positioned themselves as a beginner-friendly web host, but they also offer affordable dedicated and VPS hosting. That’s a win-win situation.
Dedicated Hosting
The perks of using this hosting are privacy, security, and all-round more control. If you want the best to host your website for scale and reliability, then a Bluehost dedicated hosting is the answer to your need.
Especially if your site growing rapidly and you have more traffic coming in every now and then. Bluehost dedicated hosting plan is what you should be looking into.
The dedicated hosting plan starts you off at an incredible 500 GB of storage space, 4 GB of RAM, and 5 TB of bandwidth for just only $79.99 a month. This places Bluehost as a premium contender in the market, even for their more expensive hosting tiers.
Managed WordPress Hosting
This hosting is an all-in-one managed platform that scales your website to any demand given to it. The pricing plans for managed WordPress hosting through Bluehost include incredibly fast speeds, multi-tiered security features and marketing tools.
The managed WordPress option is the most dynamic hosting tier Bluehost offers. You have the Build, Grow, or Scale options available to choose from . Each one offers a different hosting package to fit exactly what you’re looking to achieve. You’ll want to base your decision on the amount of traffic they’re each appropriate for when trying to make the best choice.
Also each plan comes equipped with a lot of helpful features built to help your website grow. This means storage space starting at 20 GBs, access to over 200 global servers, scheduled backups, staging environments, free SSL certification and so on.
Here’s a quick overview of their traffic capacity:
- Build — $19.95 a month, best for 50,000 monthly visitors
- Grow — $29.95 a month, best for 150,000 monthly visitors
- Scale — $49.95 a month, best for 500,000 monthly visitors
Taking time to breakdown their differences will enable you make the right choice of managed WordPress hosting that befits what you want.
Other Benefits
There are also some other benefits of using Bluehost that you should get to know and I will be mentioning some of them below.
Online Store
Choosing from the Standard or the Premium store hosting tiers to start your online store with WordPress and WooCommerce is not difficult at all.
You should go with the Standard deal at $15.95 a month for a store with a big payment processing system that comes equipped with a lot of analytics and the ability to create basic store backups.
Say your store is a bit more complex than a simple storefront with your product listings, you’re better off with the Premium tier as a very reliable ecommerce option if you’re going to capture subscriptions or online booking and appointment scheduling.
In 2021 Bluehost introduced a new Woocommerce service. Woocommerce is built on WordPress and it’s probably the most popular alternative to Shopify without a vendor lock-in. With the new service you not only get to install Woocommerce with one click, but Bluehost also makes it much easier to add payment processing — which is a 1-click install, multiple shipping options, built-in calendar bookings, and daily backups.
The plans for this start at $12.95/mo and up depending on your commitment and add-on services.
There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. Bluehost pays for the bandwidth you are using.
The $200 in free marketing credits is also a big help if you are a store owner. You can use these to promote your business through Google, Facebook, Bing, and Twitter.
Stating all that, Bluehost is not particularly known for eCommerce, and to be fair some sites make it easier and faster to set up a shop. But Bluehost is an economical choice, and you will get access to a ton of great features to help you sell online.
Professional Marketing Services
Bluehost offers to assist your business with design and marketing strategies to give you more time to focus on revenue-generating activities and running your business.
These are four primary services offered by Bluehost :
- Website migration assistance, including one-on-one consultations to review your website before and after any migration
- Full-service website support with design, marketing, and content help
- SEO services to optimize your website and target keywords
- PPC services to assist with pay-per-click campaigns and best practices to get more customers
You’ll need to contact them to discuss pricing and support options because the cost for these services is not listed on the Bluehost website.
Hosting
It is not a new thing that shared hosting is Bluehost’s most popular hosting deal because it lets you kickstart as far as getting your site up and running goes.
One reason Bluehost’s shared hosting stacks up high when you’re comparing it to other hosting providers is the fact that they have their free SSL certification and their free domain name deal. But as far as hosting your site on a server where you’ll share space with other sites like yours, it does a good job for sure.
Although shared hosting might be the best affordable hosting option for fresh starters, it won’t be what you want to stick with as your site experiences growth. That’s why there’s dedicated hosting and VPS hosting. The dedicated hosting is a more huge and reliable hosting option for powerful site performance, and VPS hosting offers increased power, control and flexibility.
Refund Policy
Bluehost covers its plans with a 30-day money back guarantee. That means if you cancel within the first 30 days, you will get a total refund.
If you choose to cancel after that, you won’t get a prorated refund for the period of your hosting term which you have not used. Domain fees are not refundable.
Live WordPress Support
Bluehost offers Blue Sky, a service that teaches users how to build, grow, and maintain any WordPress website through individual training and guidance.
The Live WordPress Support starts right at $29 per month for on-demand ticket support and backup assistance and starts at $149 per month for SEO tools, help with content optimization and mobile optimization, and access to Constant Contact.
Easy to Use
Bluehost is the most popular web hosting service on the market for its outstanding features and products and it’s also because it’s so amazingly easy to use. Ease of use is a really important feature to have because web hosting can already be confusing to some people, so there’s no need for the onboarding process to be difficult.
Bluehost has an easy onboarding process that takes a few minutes to complete, to get your website up and running but let your heart not be troubled. With a good intuitive interface, you will be asked to fill out a form that includes your website goals, what you want to add to your website, and what you want your name and the tagline of your website to be.
After these questions are answered, you get to choose a theme of your choice from the Bluehost Marketplace, and then it automatically installs WordPress for your ultimate convenience.
Who is Bluehost for?
- Owners of both large and small businesses. Bluehost is fine if you are on a budget and just want general-purpose shared hosting. Just watch out for the upselling.
- Customers who are looking for a reliable web host with a strong reputation. Bluehost is one of the oldest names in the business and has established trust.
- WordPress customers who can pay extra to get access to more features and a dedicated support team of WP experts.
Conclusion
Bluehost has a lot of exciting features and extras included at every price point, and the difference in plans provides a lot of flexibility for every budget. Whatever your needs, Bluehost delivers regarding its packages.
Majority of customers are quite happy with Bluehost’s services, despite some negative feedbacks.
To summarize, Bluehost is literally one of the top few that I would recommend to anyone and everyone. If you’re looking for a web host with a strong reputation, then look no further than Bluehost. With cheap and scalable plans you can customize your website, and in just a couple of moments, you’ll be up and running.
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DISCLAIMER
This post contains affiliate links, which means that I may get a commission if you make any purchase using any of these links.
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