Bluehost Review: Great Value Web Hosting for First Time Site Owners

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Plans range from $2.95/month to $13.95/month

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Bluehost is a WordPress powered web hosting platform that offers a wide range of hosting services. The initial start-up price is unbeatable, and Bluehost offers generous features and easy onboarding for first-time website owners. However, support and reliability are subpar, with competitors like HostGator and InMotion Hosting having the upper hand.

Bluehost: Pricing

One of the main advantages of Bluehost is its competitive introductory price for its services. The amount you’ll save on your first purchase depends on the type of plan you choose and how many months you decide to buy the plan for during your initial payment.

However, the amount you can expect to save ranges from 20% to 76%. For example, if you sign up for Bluehost’s shared hosting service for 12 months, this is what the initial fee looks like vs. the renewal fee.

Marshall Gunnell / Foundry

Or, if you wanted to go with dedicated hosting for maximum performance and optimization, this is what you would expect to pay up front compared to if you renewed.

Marshall Gunnell / Foundry

Bluehost’s introductory fees are hard to beat, but be prepared for a steep increase (50 percent or more) once it’s time to renew. However, even when the fee increases to their standard rate, the plans are on par with most competitors, and HostGator has a slight advantage.

The plan you choose should solely depend on what you expect from a website. If you just want to create a site to display your portfolio, just hosting it on a shared server will suffice. Even if you plan to grow your site, starting on a shared server is probably your best option. Once you start receiving significant traffic, it may be time to consider moving to a dedicated server to increase overall performance.

Bluehost offers a full refund if you cancel your subscription within 30 days.

Bluehost: Configuration

Another of Bluehost’s strengths is their beginner-focused setup process. Bluehost offers a variety of customer support services, from website migration to fully building your site for you. The company also has a dedicated team of WordPress experts ready to help you.

If you want to set everything up yourself, Bluehost has plenty of documentation, but finding that documentation on their site is a different story. While Bluehost offers an intuitive control panel that is easy for users to navigate, it makes it quite difficult to locate documentation in the knowledge base. Over there is a support team available 24/7 via online chat, but if you’re not interested in waiting in lines or just want to figure things out yourself, you’ll soon realize that the structure of the site leaves a lot to be desired.

Bluehost: Features

Bluehost offers many generous features on all of their plans. Each plan includes unmetered bandwidth and unlimited domains, in addition to the Basic plan where you get one domain.

The basic plan also includes 10GB SSD storage, which Bluehost calls “Website Storage,” which is a big drop from their previous 50GB offering. The Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro plans used to offer unlimited storage, but these have now been reduced to 20GB, 40GB, and 100GB, respectively. In addition to the storage capacities, there’s also a limit to the number of files you can host, although the maximum is a couple hundred thousand, which means you’ll most likely never hit the limit unless you’re a file sharing website. .

The Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro plans also offer unlimited databases, while the Basic plan allows 20. However, the maximum database size for each plan is 5 GB.

There are plenty of other offerings too, like email and storage accounts, dedicated IP addresses, allowed subdomains, and more. Here’s an overview of each plan’s offerings.

Marshall Gunnell / Foundry

Bluehost: backup and security

Bluehost offers decent backup and security features, though what’s available to you depends on the plan you sign up for. Bluehost offers free malware scanning through SiteLock on all of their plans, as well as a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, though you’ll have to pay for it after the first year if you’re signed up for the basic plan.

Bluehost also offers its Choice Plus and Pro subscribers free daily site backups with CodeGuard, and Choice Plus members have to pay a renewal fee after the first year. You can pay for it separately if it doesn’t come with your plan. It’s highly recommended that you make daily backups of your site (or any of your data, for that matter), so it’s well worth the $4 monthly price.

Bluehost: Reliability

Server uptime is extremely important for websites as any downtime directly affects revenue. Although you will see claims online that Bluehost has a 99.98 percent server uptime, Bluehost itself only promises 99.9 percent.

It’s also interesting that Bluehost mentions in a blog post that a good web host should provide backup servers, but then mentions on their FAQ page that they don’t offer server redundancy on shared hosting plans because it would increase the cost.

So what is the real story? Bluehost, in general, has good uptime and provides a way to track it yourself (although you have to set it up yourself). Server issues were few and far between when hosting a game guide website on Bluehost, although we did experience an issue where the site was down for many hours, sporadically over the course of several days, with no ads from Bluehost.

The month before the server crash, we had 679,916 page views. The month of server broadcasts, 592,560. Although there are many variables involved, sporadic server downtime certainly didn’t help, and we were left scrambling to figure out what was wrong due to Bluehost not serving any ads. This, coupled with poor communication from support during this time, eventually led us to migrate to a different web hosting platform the following month.

Marshall Gunnell / Foundry

On the other hand, when regularly scheduled maintenance is coming up, Bluehost alerts you via email well in advance so you can prepare, and these updates are scheduled during times when it will affect the fewest customers. This is good news for US customers, as updates generally won’t happen during peak hours.

Bluehost: customer support

If you’re not a fan of human interaction, you can browse Bluehost’s online knowledge base to see if there’s any documentation to help answer your questions. While the knowledge base is extensive, as mentioned above, it can be quite difficult to locate the content you need.

If you prefer to talk to a real person, Bluehost has a 24/7 support system available via phone or live chat. This is on par with other hosting service providers, such as InMotion Hosting and HostGator.

Unfortunately, the quality of support from Bluehost has been hit or miss for me. If the question is simple, you’ll probably have a good experience. However, during the service outage mentioned above, it seemed like Support was out of the loop and unable to answer questions, or periodically disconnected during a support session. Also, there was a delay of days until an official announcement was made.

Marshall Gunnell / Foundry

With no word from Bluehost and no help from support during this time, we’re left with a less than desirable experience.

Bluehost: Final Thoughts

Bluehost is a great hosting provider for first time website owners. It offers easy onboarding and setup, allowing you to get your site up and running quickly with no technical knowledge required.

The initial cost is also the best in the business, making it a desirable option for users on a budget. However, the renewal fee puts it on par with other services, and even a bit higher, compared to HostGator. If subscription cost is a concern, you’ll want to think long term when deciding who to go with.

Finally, if uptime and customer support are critical to your business, there are more reliable hosting providers that would be a better fit for you. If you’re building a site as a passion project or online portfolio and downtime isn’t a big concern, then you should consider Bluehost.

editor’s note: Because online services are often iterative and gain new features and performance improvements over time, this hotfix is ​​subject to change to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to the text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article.