Bluehost is an excellent choice for novices looking to create their first website for their businesses or blogs. Their onboarding process and automatic WordPress installation make things appear to be highly user-friendly. They may not offer the best price or service, but their product simply works.
If you’re confused whether or not to utilize Bluehost as your web hosting company, don’t worry – you’ve come to the correct place.
We’ve created a Bluehost account, performed some performance tests on their shared hosting plan, and are now ready to give you with the most comprehensive Bluehost review you’ll find on the internet.
But before we do that, let’s get you a little more familiarized with the web hosting provider.
A Little Bit About Bluehost
Founded by a very young Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth all the way back in 2003, Bluehost has been around a LONG time.
They’re practically dinosaurs in the industry, but that ain’t a bad thing – having been around for so long means that they’ve learned a thing or two about web hosting, and are able to provide their users with a kick-ass user experience.
Bluehost, a well-known and widely used web hosting service, has only one datacenter, which is based in the United States. That datacenter hosts all of their clients’ websites, which total 2 million and are expanding by the thousands every day!
Damn, it’s hot!
They clearly created an impression in the industry, for after just 7 years, they drew the notice of web hosting behemoth Endurance International Group, who proceeded to acquire them and include them into the EIG group of enterprises.
Bluehost was able to significantly extend its formerly tiny team to a family of 750 employees with the help of EIG, allowing them to provide much needed round-the-clock support for their clients!
Not impressive enough for you?
Then check this out – Bluehost is also one of the 3 web hosting providers that are actually recommended by WordPress!
If you’re wondering why that’s impressive, it’s because 30% of sites in the entire world wide web is actually powered by WordPress. In other words, they’re the rock stars of the internet and getting an endorsement from them is similar to getting your workout gear endorsed by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
Now that you’re acquainted with Bluehost, let’s find out why, in our humble opinion, Bluehost is a pretty strong web hosting provider!
7 Excellent Reasons to Choose Bluehost!
- Bluehost is a surprisingly simple service to use.
If you’ve ever constructed a website and used a web hosting service provider with a bad interface, you know how frustrating it is to get into the dashboard and… not know what to do.
Bluehost’s onboarding process astounded us. We logged in to the dashboard after finishing the registration procedure, and before we knew it, we had clicked next a couple times and poof magic – WordPress was already installed and ready to go.
But, because a picture is worth a thousand words, here are some to show you what really happened once you logged in.
Bluehost will begin by asking you a series of questions about what kind of site you’ll be creating. Select an option from the drop-down menu, and hit continue. Easy-peasy.
They’ll then ask what kind of site you’ll be creating, whether it’s a blog, e-Commerce site, or a niche website selling poop scented wrapping paper.
Them pesky buggers will want to know more about your site, but worry not, because they have your best interests at heart. Name your site, think of a tagline, and rate your website building level on their noob detector scale.
All you have to do next is pick a theme you like, and then…
…boom, WordPress is automatically installed just like that! No need to worry about getting it installed in the wrong folder, or drastically messing something up.
Bluehost will take care of the backend, while you just need to worry about customizing your site and making it look pretty.
If you’re new to site building, I’m pretty sure you have no problems at all creating your site with Bluehost. Even those of us that are a little more seasoned will appreciate how convenient their dashboard is to use.
Look out how beautiful that custom cPanel interface looks. None of that confusing looking dated mess that comes with stock cPanel.
- They travel at an astonishingly fast rate around the world!
According to thinkwithgoogle, fast site load times are critical for the success of online businesses, and server response time plays a HUGE role in getting websites to load quickly.
However, with only one datacenter in the United States, we didn’t anticipate Bluehost would fare well in our custom server speed test.
We went to town with our test site hosted on their basic plan and began evaluating their response speeds – oh, were we mistaken.
| US (W) | US (E) | London | Singapore | Sao Paulo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 ms | 78 ms | 183 ms | 193 ms | 164 ms |
| Bangalore | Sydney | Japan | Canada | Germany |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 330 ms | 168 ms | 125 ms | 92 ms | 174 ms |
Except for Bangalore, the American hosting provider performed admirably, with speeds that are significantly quicker than Google’s recommended 200ms in all nations.
They’re clearly fastest in the United States because the datacenter is there, but they’re no slouch in nations like Singapore, Sydney, and Japan!
Bluehost is one of the fastest A-rated hosting providers we’ve ever reviewed, with an average global score of 153ms. You can be confident that Bluehost will be able to deliver no matter where your target audience is located in the world!
Except if your audience is from India. Instead, you might want to read our article on the best web hosting for India.
- They have high-performance servers.
Those of you who intend to create large-scale e-Commerce websites or Reddit-like forums will be relieved to learn that Bluehost has High-Performance Servers that are adequate for your requirements.
What is the significance of this?
The function of the server is literally in the name with shared web hosting – you share the space with other users, which helps minimize the cost.
However, some users may mistakenly (or purposely) consume far more resources than allocated, causing everyone else sharing the server with that user to experience site slowdowns, and in some cases, their sites will not load at all.
Bluehost allocates fewer users per server with High-Performance Servers, and each user has a file count of 300,000 – this means more processing resources per user, consistent site load speeds, and less downtime caused by rogue users!
BUT!
As with all excellent things, there is always a catch.
Their High-Performance servers are only available with their Pro plan, which is significantly more expensive than the other shared web hosting options.
If you want good performance, you’ll have to pay for it.
To be honest, we have complete faith in their servers. Our test site is only hosted with their Basic plan, however it has had 100% uptime since April 2018!
If their shared hosting servers can produce such uptimes, we can easily expect the same from their High-Performance servers.
- Outstanding Security Features
When we talk security, we don’t only mean elements that keep your website safe from nefarious hackers.
We’re talking about security in the sense of peace of mind and keeping spam out of your fresh new email inbox.
Let’s start with peace of mind.
You don’t want to spend days, weeks, or months customizing and adjusting your business website to make it seem beautiful and suitable for ranking on the first page of Google, only to load it up and realize that someone messed up the pooch and your entire website is gone.
Bluehost offers CodeGuard basic to their customers for $2.99 per month.
CodeGuard Basic
The name sounds cool, but it’s actually just a fancy name they came up with for their daily backup service. It’s not bad at all – monitoring your website/database frequently, notifying you if there are any changes, and automatically performing backups.
The basic version provides 1GB storage space, daily backup and monitoring, and 3 restorations a month.
If you need more, CodeGuard comes in Professional, Premium, and Enterprise versions too, but be prepared to pay higher prices for those.
SpamExperts
We assure you, Bluehost won’t be sending someone that can tell you the nuances between different types of pork used in SPAM products.
Instead, SpamExperts is their term for an advanced email filter. It scans incoming emails for spam, viruses, phishing, and other email-related attacks by spammers, and filters them with a rockin’ 99.98% accuracy, all before it reaches your inbox.
Basically, it helps your mailbox stay squeaky clean and junk-free.
SiteLock
In terms of actually protecting your website, Bluehost comes with a basic firewall that offers a minimal level of protection against external threats.
However, If you want enhanced protection, you can get it in the form of SiteLock.
SiteLock comes in three tiers: Essential, Prevent, and Prevent Plus.
With Essential, you’ll get to enjoy automatic Malware removal, which does exactly nothing against DDOS attacks or anything major.
With Prevent, the security level is upped a little with Automatic Malware Removal, DDoS Protection, 6-hour response time and….Image Optimization. Quite frankly, I don’t know what image optimization has to do with security, but it’s a feature I won’t be complaining about.
Prevent Plus does everything Prevent can, but with the added benefit of having daily scan frequency.
SiteLock is good and all, but the thing is, they all come as an add-on, meaning we’re gonna need to fork out more money to enjoy it. Come on Bluehost, you can afford to give your customers a little extra security for free!
5. They’ve Got A Buffet Of Benefits
Gone are the days where you have to carefully plan out the number of sites you’re planning to launch, and the kind of resources needed to run all of it effectively.
Bluehost’s shared hosting plans come with all sorts of benefits, and best of all, almost everything is unlimited! We’re talking:
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Unlimited parked domains
- Unlimited subdomains
- Unmetered bandwidth
You are basically free to create as many sites as you want with them! And you won’t have to worry about the number of visitors to your site!
Be wary though – having too many visitors at the same time might take up too much resources, and Bluehost is notorious for deactivating/deleting rogue sites.
- Support is extremely responsive!
Waiting for support to respond to you is one of the most aggravating aspects of life, especially if your site requires immediate attention.
We were pleased to find that support responded quickly via Live Chat while we were setting up our test site. We were used to waiting at least 15 minutes for live chat support staff to respond, but Bluehost consistently responded in less than 5 minutes.
We didn’t try phone or email support, but with live chat responding so quickly, we don’t think those options are necessary, though they are nice to have in case of an emergency.
You will also not have to worry about support in different time zones.
7. Freebies That Matter
Some companies will entice you to sign up with their service with shallow free gifts. We’re talking about those that market regular services as “free”, such as “free” 24/7 support, or “free” WordPress installation.
Not Bluehost.
With the all-American web hosting service provider, you’ll actually get freebies that’ll make a difference in your bank account.
With every shared hosting plan purchased, Bluehost will throw in a domain name, free for the first year. To put things in perspective for you, domain names can cost anywhere from $8 to $872 million – yes you read that right. Here’s proof.
Aside from that, you’ll also get the enjoy free SSL – now this might not be much, but every little bit definitely helps to make a difference to the small business owner!
Verdict: Bluehost Is Good, And The Best And Recommended Choice!
They’re actually pretty decent, providing their users with fast enough speeds worldwide to ensure their users’ sites are loaded fast enough to generate a healthy amount of sales.
With superb usability and great UX, Bluehost is fantastic for beginners. Their WordPress recommendation should speak volumes about their service.
One thing we need to mention is that Bluehost is still using cPanel, which is great news for those of us that are accustomed to using it. Since cPanel increased their prices, most web hosting providers have decided to dump them, but so far there seems to be no indication of Bluehost dropping cPanel.
However, the lack of an uptime guarantee got us pretty peeved, as most major providers have the balls to provide some sort of compensation if their users’ sites are down for a certain amount of time.
The very fact that the companies are willing to put their money where their mouth is, inspires confidence. Bluehost does exactly the opposite without an uptime guarantee… what if the websites hosted with them go down for an entire week?
Anyone can promise to “strive to maintain network and server uptime” but it means completely jack if they can’t sack up and foot the bill when shit hits the fan.
However, credit where credit is due – we’ve never had a problem with Bluehost’s actual uptime before. As a matter of fact, the uptime has been 100% on our test site since April 2018!
Our humble opinion is that Bluehost is a pretty strong hosting provider. They may not be the fastest and they may not be the best, but if you’re just looking to host a simple website, they’ve got all the tools you’ll need to do so effectively.
