One of the oldest web hosts started in 1996, Bluehost has become the largest brand name when it comes to WordPress hosting. They are an official ‘WordPress’ recommended hosting provider. With Bluehost, you never have to worry about your website being slow even when there is a lot of traffic. Their 24/7 expert support is always there to help when you need it by phone, email, or live chat. They are rated #1 in web hosting for small businesses. On top of that, they are offering WPBeginner users an exclusive 63% off discount, a Free Domain, Free SSL, and a free Site Builder with templates.
Bluehost Review from Our Experts In The Field
Bluehost is one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress recommended hosting provider. Bluehost offers a wide variety of hosting plans for beginners and for medium to large businesses with 24/7 customer support. See the complete Bluehost review by our experts to find out if Bluehost is the right choice for you.
In this comprehensive Bluehost review, we’ll put their promises to test with a rigorous and through analysis using industry standard benchmarking tools.
Following are the areas we’ll look into:
- Speed: How fast will your website load with Bluehost? We will test their speed and server response time to assess that.
- Performance: How does Bluehost perform under traffic spikes? We’ll test that by performing the stress test and see how well it performs under traffic.
- Reliability: Will your website be available 24/7/365 without any downtime?
- Customer Support: Can you count on Bluehost’s customer support when you immediately need help with your website?
- Features: Do they offer all the features that you’ll need to build your website?
- Pricing: Do they have the best pricing in the industry? Are there any Bluehost deals that can save you money?
This is our complete Bluehost review and we’ll be doing an in-depth analysis of Bluehost pros and cons. If you don’t want to read the full review, here is the quick scorecard of Bluehost with our verdict right below it.
| Bluehost Review Summary | |
|---|---|
| Performance grade | A+ |
| Average load time | 1.48 ms |
| Average response time | 1.26 ms |
| Free domain | Yes |
| Free SSL | Yes |
| 1-click WordPress | Yes |
| Support | Phone / Live Chat / Knowledge base |
About Bluehost
First, let’s take a look at the company itself.
Bluehost started in 1996 and steadily grew to become one of the largest web hosting companies in the world. It now powers more than 2 million websites from all over the world.
Bluehost has a long-standing relationship with the WordPress community. They are an official WordPress recommended hosting company since 2006.
They pride themselves in their 24/7 customer support, great hosting infrastructure, and support for the free open source software like WordPress.
Pros and Cons of Bluehost
All web hosting companies have their pros and cons. Some you can live with, and some you cannot ignore.
Here are the pros and cons of Bluehost that we learned.
Pros
First, let’s take a look at the advantages that make Bluehost the top choice.
- Pricing: Their hosting plans are well within the reach of most users, particularly those who are just starting out.
- Reliability: They power a large number of websites with minimum downtime.
- No hidden charges: There are no hidden fees when signing up for your account.
- Free domain: You get a free domain name for 1 year when you signup.
Cons
Bluehost is not without some disadvantages that you should be aware of before signing up.
- Higher domain renewal price Their free domain renewal price is higher than average.
- Upselling Addons: They have an aggressive upsell process during signup. But you can easily uncheck all the addons if you don’t need them.
Bluehost Performance Tests
The most important performance metric that you should look for is the speed. It not only affects user experience on your site, but it also affects your WordPress SEO rankings.
Studies show that a 1-second drop in website speed can decrease your conversion rate by 7%. A 3-second delay can cost you 50% of your traffic.
Breakdown of Bluehost’s Shared Hosting Plans
Bluehost offers a shared hosting package suitable for starter websites. Their shared plan is available at four different levels.
Let’s take a look at what’s included in each plan.
- Basic: The basic plan only allows you to host one website. It hosts one domain and 25 subdomains, 50GB SSD storage, 5 email accounts of 100 MB storage for each account. For the first term you’ll pay $2.75 per month. When you renew the account, you’ll have to pay $7.99 per month.
- Plus: The Plus plan includes unlimited websites with unlimited web space and bandwidth. You’ll also get unlimited email accounts. The price for the first term starts from $5.45 per month. When you renew the account, you’ll have to pay $10.99 per month.
- Choice Plus: The Prime plan includes all features of plus plan. You will also get domain privacy and SiteBackup Pro as extras worth over $80/year. Prime also has the same first term price of Plus, $5.45 per month. When renewing, you’ll have to pay $14.99 per month.
- Pro The Pro plan starts from $13.95 per month for the first term after that you’ll pay $23.99 per month. It includes all features of above plans + dedicated IP address.
If you are just starting your website, then you can select any of these plans. You can easily upgrade your hosting plan as your website grows.
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