Bluehost Review – Everything you need to know!
Undoubtedly, a website is essential for an online business, but getting started on building your first website can be an overwhelming task. From your domain name to the design and content of the website, though there are so many parameters to decide, many people overlook the importance of choosing the right web hosting service provider. Without a reliable and high performing web hosting, your website can’t generate desired results, no matter how creatively it is designed.
However, with countless numbers of web hosts available in the market, choosing the right one is not an easy task, but a little research is worth it. You must have heard about Bluehost – One of the oldest and most commonly used web hosts available in the market. But is it the only web hosting that can make your business grow exponentially? Is it good for your business or should you choose some other web host? If you are one of those who are struggling with such questions, then don’t worry! Here we are going to give an unbiased Bluehost review, which will further help you to make an informed decision. Without wasting much time, let’s get started.
What is Bluehost?
Founded by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in 2003, Bluehost is a Utah based company that is known for their innovative web hosting solutions, which empower people to harness the web completely. Bluehost is one of the largest and oldest web hosts, currently hosting more than 2 million domains worldwide. It is the cheapest and most reliable web hosting for beginners to small businesses.
Bluehost has been in partnership with WordPress for over 10 years. From web hosting, cloud and WordPress hosting to builder tools, they offer a wide range of solutions along with digital marketing training and graphic design services at reasonable prices; it will be helpful in setting-up, maintaining your first website or e-commerce store and enhancing its ranking in SERPs.
Apart from this, they offer WPBeginner, a Free Domain, Free SSL and Free Site Builder with templates, and an exclusive discount of 63%. With Bluehost, you need not worry about your website being slow even if there is a lot of traffic. Their full-time staff and engineering team, dedicated to WordPress support and WordPress core development, is available 24/7, which is reassuring.
How does Bluehost work?
When you start your business in the real world, you need a physical location to set up your office, store and sell your products. The same rules are also applicable in the digital world when setting up a website. A website is a combination of files and computer codes. These files and codes need to be placed online on the servers just like you store your music files, photos, and documents on your desktop hard drive.
Without an online space, your website files are of no use as no one can see them. A web hosting service provider such as Bluehost offers you a space on a server to store all the files of your website on a rental basis. They are responsible for delivering the files as soon as browser requests are received by someone searching for your domain name. Hence, when you pay for hosting service, you are renting some storage space on the Internet, just like you rent physical space for your business in the real world.
Generally, hundreds of servers work together that are stacked into towers. And, how do the people find which server the website files are stored on? Well, each website has a domain name tied to the IP address of its server, which allows people to track your website via the DNS (Domain Name Server). DNS acts like a phone book for computers which records the IP address of the server linked to a particular domain name. This information is crucial for your computer as it will be required to find the server, connect to receive the files and codes, and then show the data on your screen.
Bluehost Features:
- Outstanding support
- Incredible server uptime
- Very fast server speed
- Flexible and scalable
- Fully customizable websites
- Easy to use
- Built-in full suite of tools
- Offers shared, VPS and dedicated server hosting
- Free domain name and SSL certificate
- Affordable prices
Which Bluehost Plan is Best?
Bluehost offers its hosting services to a beginner, small businesses and Multi-National Companies. Their services are categorized in different parts, depending upon the user needs and price. It includes Shared hosting,
VPS hosting, Dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting and Cloud sites. However, which one you should choose is a difficult question to answer and anyone can get confused easily. So here, in this Bluehost review, we’re going to tell which plan you should choose when signing up with Bluehost.
- Shared hosting is for beginners and small businesses. If you’re on a tight budget and seeking something affordable and basic web hosting services, then Shared hosting can turn out to be the best option for your website. However, you will get only 1-website on your hosting account with limited features.
- VPS hosting is for medium-scale businesses. With this, you are going to share a physical server with others, but you will have your own dedicated operating system to run your website smoothly. So, if you have a website that has massive amounts of visitors and you want your site to load faster, even if the traffic is higher, then VPS hosting can turn out to be the right option.
- Dedicated hosting is for commercial firms and usually costs more than shared hosting and VPS hosting. With this type of plan, only your website will be hosted on a particular server. Hence, if you are someone who needs full control of your resources, then you can choose dedicated hosting and rent a physical server.
Bluehost Pricing
Coming to the most important part of the Bluehost review, here we are going to discuss the different prices of packages offered by Bluehost. From the business owner to the individual who wishes full functionality on a small budget, Bluehost offers a complete web hosting solution to its customers. They offer shared web hosting, VPS hosting and Dedicated hosting, depending upon the web hosting price package chosen by the customers. They offer a special discount to their new customers and those special offers are valid for a limited time period.
All packages includes Domain Manager - making it easy to track, update, transfer, purchase and administer all of your domains in one place. Resource Protection - identifies websites using excessive resources and temporarily re-assigns them to isolated systems. Scalability - begins with what you need and move to more powerful options as your website grows. SSL Certificates - helping to secure the connection between websites and your visitors.
Shared Web Hosting Packages:
This is ideal for when getting started online. It is built of a reliable platform and backed by 24x7 expert support. Bluehost's Shared Hosting is perfect for blogs, hobbies, and small business websites.
VPS Web Hosting Packages:
VPS (Virtual Private Server) is a website hosting environment that allows for resources such as RAM and CPU to be dedicated to your account. Meaning, your account will always be allocated the set amount of RAM, CPU, and Disk Space you've chosen regardless of what other users on the server are doing.
Dedicated Web Hosting Packages:
Dedicated Hosting is a website hosting environment that provides the highest level of resource allocation, privacy, and control. The dedicated servers are completely isolated from one another, so users get full access to configure their server anyway they want without affecting another user or being affected by actions of other users.
What are the Pros and Cons of Bluehost?
Pros:
- Bluehost offers a free domain with all web hosting plans
- Dedicated IPS, and free SSL certificate with some plans
- Multiple domain hosting
- Enhanced cPanel
- Hosting plans built for speed and performance
- WordPress-centric hosting
- Incredible uptime
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Recommended by WordPress.org
Cons:
- No windows hosting
- High renewal prices
- Lack of free migration service
- Available for only US Servers
- Poor backup options
- Constant upsells
Bluehost Customer Support
Bluehost has an in-house server management team that is available 24/7 to help you to sort out any hosting issues encountered. You can reach them via the live chat, email and phone call. However, there are mixed reviews about Bluehost customer
support. Many customers report positive feedback while some clients also say that they didn’t get the help they needed even after numerous phone calls.
Another issue that you may experience with Bluehost is excessive upselling as they try to sell you several add-ons and upgrades that may not be of any use for your website. This may feel overwhelming, especially if you’re on a tight budget.
Bluehost Competitors - How does it compare to HostGator and GoDaddy?
Like Bluehost, HostGator and GoDaddy - both are the most well-known web hosting companies around the world. Though they have both offered affordable and reliable web hosting services for years, it is difficult to differentiate between top service providers. Here, in this Bluehost review, we are going to tell you how Bluehost is different from HostGator and GoDaddy.
Bluehost vs HostGator
- Domain Name: HostGator doesn’t include a free domain name in their hosting plans. If you want to register your domain name with HostGator, you have to pay at least $12.99. On the other hand, Bluehost offers 1-free domain name when you sign up for hosting. This domain name is registered for one year and it will be renewed when you renew your web hosting plan.
- Website Migration: When it comes to migrating your website from another hosting service to HostGator, then HostGator will move your database, website files, etc. within 30 days of registration with them without any cost. On the other hand, Bluehost offer you two options to migrate your site – either you can manually transfer your files over to Bluehost or you can use Website Transfer service from your former hosting company. However, it will cost you $149.99 and you have to add the FTP option to your hosting package before migration.
- Moneyback Guarantee: HostGator offers you a 45-day money-back guarantee on their hosting plans. It also includes add-on products such as the domain name. On the other hand, Bluehost offers you a money-back guarantee of 30 days. Moreover, they don’t include domain names, etc.
- WordPress Installation: HostGator and Bluehost, both offer the MOJO Marketplace, which is directly accessible from the cPanel menu, making the WordPress installation simple and easy. However, Bluehost has worked hard to make the process easier; it has a one-step WordPress hosting setup. Hence, Bluehost is best if you’re planning to set up your website on WordPress.
- SSL Certificate: HostGator doesn’t include a free SSL certificate whereas Bluehost comes with a free SSL Certificate. However, HostGator comes with global CDN and can remove malware automatically using SiteLock security. Hence, you need not worry about your website being hacked or injected with a malicious virus.
Bluehost vs GoDaddy
- Price: Though the starting prices for both Bluehost and GoDaddy are almost the same, Bluehost is slightly cheaper than GoDaddy. Bluehost offers you a storage space of 50GB, email-hosting up to 5 accounts and an SSL certificate whereas GoDaddy includes double the storage and a website builder tool.
- Ease of Use: Bluehost has one-click WordPress installation process and cPanel access, making its navigation and installation process easier for users. However, unlike Bluehost, GoDaddy includes an intuitive, code-free, drag-and-drop website builder, allowing the users to design a professional-looking website without any coding from the GoDaddy platform.
- Speed and Uptime: GoDaddy’s uptime percentage is less than Bluehost, whereas the response time of GoDaddy is higher than Bluehost. So, we can conclude that a GoDaddy-hosted website may not be able to handle high traffic with the high server response time. So Bluehost is a little bit better than GoDaddy in terms of speed and uptime.
- Data Center: Though the data centers of both the web hosts are robust, Bluehost server runs on AMD power centers and uses CPU segregation technology, whereas GoDaddy runs on Intel Core i7 processors and you can choose between Windows OS and Linux OS when you register for their services.
- Customer Service: No matter whether you are a newbie or a web expert, at some point, you will need technical support from the web host team for the encountered real-time issues. Though there are mixed reviews about both Bluehost and GoDaddy customer support, Bluehost customer support team provides a timely response as compared to GoDaddy.
Final Thoughts
From the above Bluehost Review, we can conclude that Bluehost is an incredibly high-performing and reliable host that can make your experience of setting up a website awesome. With their affordably priced plans and feature-packed web hosting
services, Bluehost can fulfill your needs. Though Bluehost customer support gets mixed reviews, they are always ready to help their clients.
When it comes to which one is better – Bluehost or HostGator or GoDaddy, we can say that it all depends on who you are and what you’re looking for. If you are seeking a good deal and are okay with limited features, then GoDaddy is a reasonable option. If you are seeking a cheap hosting with unlimited features, then HostGator is a good decision. If you are seeking an affordable price with a secure and reliable web hosting services, then no one can beat Bluehost.
So, what are you waiting for? Know your needs and choose the best web hosting services now.