Bluehost Hosting Review: Is It Good for the Money?

 Bluehost Hosting Review: Is It Good for the Money?

Bluehost is one of the most popular and affordable web hosts out there. In this Bluehost hosting review, we take a look at what's under the hood, how good the platform really is, and if it's the right fit for your next website project.

What is Bluehost and what type of hosting does it offer? 🤔 

 Over the years, Bluehost has grown into one of the most popular hosting companies, especially for WordPress sites. 

 

 A quick glance at their homepage and all the different products Bluehost has to offer tells you a lot about why it has won over so many users. First of all, Bluehost has a lot of different hosting products in its portfolio, not just simple website hosting. 

 

 Second, their prices are really, really affordable. Plus, you also get a handful of free bonuses. This makes the overall cost of launching a site much lower than what you would pay with the competition. 

 

 But let's start at the beginning. Here are the different types of hosting that Bluehost offers, including one that will likely be the choice of most users. 

1. Web hosting for beginners

In Bluehost's web hosting portfolio, this is the most affordable option. These plans are typically chosen by customers who are unfamiliar with the concept of owning a website and the necessity for web hosting.

Bluehost's entry-level hosting services are divided into two categories:

Web hosting on a shared server

WordPress hosting at its most basic

While the latter may appear to be superior if you wish to use WordPress as your website engine, they are actually the identical product. According to what I've observed, this is just a different marketing frame, but the internal pieces are the same.

Bluehost

2. WordPress hosting that is managed

The above-mentioned basic WordPress hosting plans are exactly that: basic. Bluehost, on the other hand, offers a Managed WordPress service that is more advanced.

The managed option, as opposed to the basic one, takes care of all technical aspects of hosting setup and WordPress maintenance for you.

To put it another way, if you choose managed WordPress hosting, you won't have to worry about anything connected to keeping your site up and running. Instead, you may concentrate solely on establishing and promoting your website.

Managed plans also provide you greater power behind the scenes, which is vital for sites that have a strong market position and receive a lot of traffic.

Bluehost also has a special WooCommerce-enabled WordPress hosting package for eCommerce stores. Some WooCommerce-specific elements are pre-installed on such plans (WooCommerce itself, an optimised theme, payment processing tools, security, extras).

If you're looking for a host because you're going to open a WooCommerce store, this is most likely the best option.

3. Use a professional hosting service

Bluehost's professional-level hosting is the top grade of their service. There are two primary goods here:

Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting

Servers that are exclusively yours

The former is a fascinating concept that revolves around virtualization hosting. The term VPS refers to a virtual private server. What you're truly obtaining is access to a web hosting configuration that runs on a larger, physical server as a virtual machine. It's a good arrangement to use when creating web apps or other web-based goods that aren't necessarily webpages.

Dedicated servers are useful when you really need a whole physical machine at your disposal. This is usually the most expensive sort of web hosting.

Bluehost hosting review: benefits and costs

As you can see from the table above, Bluehost offers a variety of hosting plans and levels, each with its own set of features.

For the sake of this Bluehost hosting review, we'll look at the Basic Web Hosting plan, which is the most basic option.

It's the most cost-effective option in the lineup, and as a result, it's the most popular among clients.

Here’s a snapshot of the pricing page at the time of writing:

Bluehost, as you can see, has a very economical plan that starts at just $2.95 per month. However, the first thing you should know about this price is that it is only available if you sign a three-year commitment. It's also paid in advance, so you'll have to pay $106.20 on the first day.

There are possibilities to start with shorter contracts, but the prices rise as the length of the contract increases. Here's the whole storey:

Basic $2.95/mo, Plus and Choice Plus $5.45/mo, Pro $13.95/mo for 36 months

Basic $3.95/mo, Plus and Choice Plus $6.95/mo, Pro $15.95/mo for 24 months

Basic $4.95/mo, Plus and Choice Plus $7.45/mo, Pro $18.95/mo for 12 months

Bluehost does not accept payments on a month-to-month basis.

But, for these costs, what do you get?

Bluehost focuses on two things in particular:

the most basic set of features and server capabilities that most users will want, all of which are simple to use and access.

On paper, all of the entry-level plans appear to be relatively similar, but there are a few minor variances.

To begin with, none is "more powerful" than the other. In terms of computer power and "website scale," they can all manage the same amount of traffic. The biggest distinctions are in the size of the website and the number of websites you can manage.

You can only have one website on the Basic plan. You're also limited to 50 GB of disc space.

All of the other options allow you to run an unlimited number of websites and consume an unlimited amount of disc space.

This is fantastic since it implies that if you want to develop two or more websites, Bluehost will only charge you $5.45 each month.

Here's what else you'll receive.

The Basic plan:

24/7 customer support via phone and chat (more on the quality of that later in this Bluehost hosting review),

access to custom themes from within the Bluehost panel,

a free domain name for the first year(!) plus access to a domain manager,

email hosting – albeit it’s kind of hidden in the panel,

a $100 Google Ads credit and Google My Business integration,

free CDN integration – a “content delivery network” hook-up means that your website’s data is served from multiple servers across the web instead of just one machine; this improves your site speed a lot,

free SSL certificates.

The Choice plan throws in a free Office 365 subscription for one month. The Choice Plus gives you additional access to free domain privacy (so that no one can check your personal data associated with the domain name) and free automatic backups. Lastly, the Pro plan offers an additional dedicated IP address (important when building web apps/tools, not so much for standard websites).

Overall, there really is nothing here that’s missing. Bluehost has put some real thought behind what the essential web hosting features are and then put them all together in this offering.

The free domain is a huge deal in particular! You’d usually have to pay around $15 for a new domain name registration. While it’s not a lot, it still adds up to your overall website launch bill. The fact that Bluehost throws that in for free is great.

⚠️ Note. Mind the renewal prices. Bluehost, like most hosting companies, will charge you a different amount when first signing up for their service vs renewing after a while. Those renewal prices are higher. Take a look at that pricing screenshot above one more time. See the crossed off price below the main price? That’s the renewal price – it’s what you’re going to pay after your initial contract is up.

Bluehost hosting review: ease of use 👐

Bluehost does a lot to make the signup and website launch process as smooth as possible. They realize that whoever’s choosing the entry-level plan probably doesn’t have a lot of experience with web hosting. Bluehost tries to make it possible for that user to configure everything on their own without outside help. All within the Bluehost hosting interface.

Once you get through the purchase process on Bluehost’s website and finalize everything, you’ll be invited to your new user profile page.

Right away, Bluehost will ask you how you want to go about building your website and if you want to have WordPress installed on your setup. They will even ask you whether you want to work on your site in the classic model (by picking a theme and modifying it) or use Bluehost’s new builder interface.

Bluehost builder

I went with the first option since it’s more common for WordPress users to do so.

Next, right in the main dashboard, you get a couple of suggestions as to what you should do to make your site better:

Bluehost hosting dashboard

You can log into your WordPress site directly from the dashboard as well – just click the Log in to WordPress button in the top right corner.

If you take a look at the sidebar to the left, you’ll find links to other useful sections:

Home. It’s where you are right now.

My Sites. Since you can have more than one site on most Bluehost hosting plans, this is where you can see them all.

Marketplace. Bluehost makes it easy to integrate your site with other third-party tools, add-ons, and also upgrade your hosting tier if needed. This section is where you can purchase and install those integrations with a couple of clicks.

Bluehost hosting add-ons

WordPress themes and plugins. This is a subsection under Marketplace, but I feel I should highlight it here. Bluehost gives you access to custom WordPress themes right from the dashboard. It also hooks up to your site directly, so that you can purchase and install those themes all from the Bluehost interface. This can be a huge timesaver.

Bluehost hosting themes

Email & Office. Bluehost gives you an option to integrate your site with hosted email via Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. This is where you can enable everything.

Domains. This is where you can manage your website domain(s) and purchase new ones.

Marketing Tools. This section is all about making it easier to integrate your site with popular marketing channels such as Google Ads, Google My Business, and others.

Advanced. Go here if you want to access cPanel (if this doesn’t sound like English, then Advanced is probably not a section for you).

Let’s look into what’s possible when managing your site, since that’s what most of us will want to do.

When you go to My Sites and select your site from the list, you’ll see the following panel:

Bluehost hosting WordPress panel

This is a nice view of your site’s status all in one place. From here, you can access the themes you have installed, your plugins, and even oversee your marketing promotions, backups, user accounts, security, and more.

What’s great here is that everything is presented nicely, and you’re spared all the server lingo. You don’t have to be a pro to know what’s going on.

And I remind you that we are dealing here with basic, entry-level hosting setup that did cost a mere $2.95/mo. So…impressive.

Bluehost performance and load times 📈

Okay, so we know that Bluehost is cheap. But is it fast? There has to be a trade-off somewhere, right? Is it performance?

Let’s find out:

We did a very simple test. We set up a site using Bluehost’s tools, published some dummy content on it, added images, picked a theme and configured it, and basically made the site look real.

Then, we also added a couple of plugins for good measure, like WPForms, Yoast SEO, Jetpack, and a couple more.

Below are the results of the tests – done from several locations:

Pros and cons of Bluehost hosting 👍👎

Before we give you our final rating in this Bluehost hosting review, let’s look at a quick list of pros and cons.

Pros 👍

The entry price is more than affordable ($2.95/mo).

They give you a free domain for the first year.

The setup is really easy to do, especially if you want to use WordPress.

The user interface is great, making it easy to do simple modifications and/or maintenance tasks.

The load times are really impressive, managing to go below the one-second mark.

The support is quick to respond.

Cons 👎

The renewal prices are much higher than the entry-level ones. That’s why you’re better off going for the max-term contract right out the gate.

While you can set up hosted email on the platform, it’s a bit hidden. You have to go to the cPanel view and set everything up there by hand.

The reviews on the web are mixed. Some users seem to be having issues with their setups. However, many of those reviews are from a while back.

Bluehost hosting review conclusion: Why use it over another host 💪

At the end of the day, Bluehost looks like a great solution for the budget-minded person who wants to launch a new site as quickly as possible and also fairly cheaply.

Bluehost has all the basic hosting features you might expect, and the performance isn’t lacking in any way either.

Granted, the tests we did haven’t been carried out over a long period of time, so you’re mileage may vary, but the early indicators are certainly more than positive!

⚡ Pro tip: If you’re looking for a host to take care of all your new website ideas in one place, consider the $5.45/mo plan at Bluehost. It’s the first hosting tier that Bluehost offers that allows unlimited websites.