Welcome to my review of Bluehost
Bluehost is known for being one
of the most popular web hosting companies because of its affordability,
excellent value, great performance and being really novice friendly.
It is also one of the three
hosting services that is officially recommended by WordPress align with
Dreamhost and Siteground, but it's not going to be the perfect choice for
everyone.
After using Bluehost myself for
some years now, I have learnt what is good at, as well as the things it's not
so great for.
In this review I am not only explain
the different features of Bluehost and how will they perform in the real world but
I will also compare them to the competition and ultimately help you to decide
whether Bluehost would be the best choice for you or not.
Regarding user friendliness, this
is one of the features that sets Bluehost apart as they make it really easy for
anyone to manage a website, even if this is the first time you've ever had a
website.
Bluehost uses cPanel, which is a
web hosting control panel that offers a ton of options for integrations.
For example, you can add email
autoresponders, apps to track marketing metrics, such as the number of clicks
on your website and apps for automatic billing.
You can also install content
management systems other than WordPress such as Joomla and Drupal.
Basically, Bluehost makes it
simple and easy to add any additional apps and plugins which gives your site
more features and can help to improve the experience of visitors to your
website.
In the performance page you can
change the cache settings which basically allows you to delete the data stored
on your website so that it loads faster.
Settings page gives you an
overview of any updates that have happened or going to happend.
You can also manage contents such
as your blogs. For example, you can moderate comments you’ve received on your
blog pages, rather than have to log into each of your sites individually.
Performance
Then regarding performance, this
is an extremely important and for some the most important feature of a good web
hosting company.
Performance is basically measured
on two metrics. You have the loading time of your website and the up time.
Loading time is how fast your
website loads when a user opens it. A fast page loading time is ideally one
that is less than 3 seconds. This ultimately means a better user experience,
which means Google will give you more favor in the search results, and as
result means your website will get more visitors.
Bluehost has one of the fastest
loading times compared to other hosting companies, which is 2.89 seconds on
average.
Then the second factor is up time.
This measures the amount of time for which your website is up and running and
is generally shown as a percentage. Here again, Bluehost is one of the best as
well, with an uptime of 99.98% over the course of a year.
Although each hosting company
experiences some downtime, Bluehost is one of the best in this regard.
In addition to performance, there
are several other things Bluehost does which makes it a great value. For
example, no matter which hosting plan you choose, they all include at least one
free domain name for the first year, a free SSL certificate and 5 free email
accounts.
Bluehost also has one click
WordPress installation option which is simple and easy to use.
In addition to this, another
thing that makes Bluehost great for beginners is that it gives you a check list
of all the things that you may need to complete, like organize your site’s
navigation or customize your design.
Also, everyone is giving
unmetered bandwidth, which means that you won't be charged based on the amount
of bandwidth that you use.
However, you will be asked to
reduce your usage if you exceed the limits set in Bluehost terms and service.
This limit is 5000 database
tables and 10 gigabytes of total database usage.
Fortunately, it's not likely
you’ll ever have to worry about this as most website never exceed these limits.
Customer support
One of my favorite things about Bluehost
is their customer support. Out of all the hosting companies I've been with, Bluehost
has impressed me the most so far with, how great their support is, particularly
over the phone.
I've had some of the most
legendary support situations that literally prompted me to write letters to the
upper management because of how impressed I was.
It is particularly unique these
days to find a company that not only hires great people, who genuinely care
about helping you, but then that company also empowers those people to do
everything they can do to take care of you.
If you ever been in a situation
where you're stuck trying to figure out what's wrong with your website, you
know how valuable that type of support can be.
Their customers support team is
available 24/7 by phone, or you can email or chat with them if you prefer.
Pricing
Pricing is another area where Bluehost
demonstrates its value as a hosting company. I will highlight some of the key
and most important points here in this review.
When it comes to choosing the right plan, it's important to understand that your pricing plan will be greatly affected by whether it's a shared hosting plan or a dedicated hosting plan.
Shared hosting basically means
that you share your hosting space with other websites, whereas dedicated
hosting means that you get to have your own hosting space.
The benefit of shared hosting is
that it's cheaper than dedicated hosting and downside is that it doesn't have
as much speed security or performance, but keep in mind, these shared hosting
plans are what 95% of people use with Bluehost.
These are the plans I've continued
to use for the past few years for dozens of my own websites.
They still perform really well
especially how cheap they are. The cheapest shared hosting plan that Bluehost
offers starts at $3.95/month. There's also a Plus $5.95 and Choice Plus plan
which cost $6.95 per month.
The main difference is that the
Choice Plus will give you a little more protection for your websites.
Also, keep in mind that when you see anything from Bluehost that talks about their shared WordPress hosting plans, this is the exact same thing as their regular hosting plans.They just use this for marketing purposes in order to appeal to those who strictly use WordPress.
Bluehost does have other more
expensive plants as well. This would include their VPS or virtual private
server plans or their dedicated hosting plans. I don’t recommend these plans for
most people in especially anyone just starting out as you'll be responsible for
managing everything yourself.
So, ultimately, the plan I’d recommend most people start with is either the Basic or Choice Plus plan. If you just want hosting for one website or want to spend the least about possible, that go with the Basic plan.
Otherwise, Choice Plus lets you
have unlimited websites, unlimited email accounts, unlimited email storage, and
unmetered website space for $3.00 more per month. Whatever plan you start with,
you can easily upgrade or downgrade whenever it might make sense for you.
So, as great as Bluehost is,
there are some reasons you may want to choose a different hosting service. First,
if you're a more advanced user, than you may find the phone support with Bluehost
customer service at times not be as knowledgeable as you may like.
If you are the type of person who
knows more than most when it comes to web hosting, then you may want to go with
a different option like SiteGround.
SiteGround isn't as friendly and
helpful to those who are less experience, especially compared to Bluehost. They
are more knowledgeable on average, which can make them better for those who
know what questions to ask.
Free site migrations
Bluehost offers free site
migrations. When you create your account, locate the Migration Services page in
the Bluehost Marketplace within your dashboard and download the free migration
plugin. Their team of migration experts will take care of moving your website
to Bluehost.
Bluehost doesn't offer automatic
site backups. The good news is that this is easy enough to get through third-party
apps or services, but if it's something you want your hosting service to
automatically provide, then you may want to go with a different option.
Conclusion
The reason I have continued to
use Bluehost myself for so many years is because of the incredible value in
exceptional support they offer.
When my grandmother wanted to
start her own WordPress site, Bluehost was the one I recommended to her. Not
only because of how cost-effective it was, but at the end of the day, I knew
that if she ever had problems or got stuck not knowing what to do, that there
would be someone friendly and helpful she could talk to, who could patiently
walk her step-by-step through getting her site working properly again.
That's why I love recommending Bluehost.
It is especially great for beginners. It has an extremely user-friendly
interface, which makes it easy to manage your website. You have outstanding
customer support, that’s truly the best of experience in this industry so far.
The performance you get for even
the most basic plans is truly a great value, which is ultimately the reason I
continue to use and recommend them to this day.
Hopefully you found this review
helpful and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.
Great content! Keep up the good work!