From 2017 to the present, we have been a paying customer of Bluehost Web. For all these three years we have been monitoring their cheapest “basic” shared hosting plan performance for average load time and uptime.
In this review about Bluehost counts largely on data, overall experience with their hosting features, and level of efficiency in customer support.
Like many other website hosting companies, Bluehost also offers a free domain to their customers for the first year. Normally, all Bluehost plans give their customers many offerings like 24/7 live chat, unmetered bandwidth, and also they offer five email accounts. Their plans include improved security, backups, and free SSL certificate which help to keep your blog or website guarded. You can find these plans starting from $2.75/mo.
The most specific fact is that the great performance of Bluehost for the last 2 years. It is at the top with its uptime in 99.99% and a fast load time of 405ms in 0.4 seconds.
There are lots of advantages and disadvantages of using Bluehost hosting.
Advantages of Using Bluehost Hosting.
Best Uptime throughout the year (99.99%)
The most important fact that the consumers are searching for when selecting a hosting company is Uptime. When you are connecting with your users, and if your site gets down, your users find it difficult to access it. Therefore, it is essential to give your priority to good uptime. Bluehost is the best solution for this issue. It was keeping their test site live for 99.99% the last 2 years, from 2018 to 2020.
If you pay attention to the monthly breakdown of Bluehost of the past 12 months, you can see that for over 7 months it has shown 100% uptime. The breakdown of other 5 months was also not bad, because they all were mentioned above 99.96%.
So, the above given data proves that, there is no doubt that Bluehost is one of the most reliable web hosting providers.
One of the Top 5 Website “Load” Speed-405ms
A research conducted by Google last year found that the majority of mobile websites are very slow in “Load” speed.
This affect brings two disadvantages for your website. One is that based on its loading speeds your website can elevate or hide in user searches by Google’s mobile-first index. The other disadvantage is those websites that are slow are always translated into lower sales.
By this, you can understand that the loading times of the page of your host are the second most important thing which would affect the success or failure of your site.
We have been using Pingdom, which is a third-party tool since February 2018, to keep track the performance of Bluehost hosting. This also gave us good results once again showing that Bluehost is the 5th fastest site in average loading speed of 405ms, out of all others that we have tested.
Low Introductory pricing ($2.75/mo)
Given below are the full pricing and plans of Bluehost.
The lowest advertised price in Bluehost is $3.95 per month. We can find it as a reasonable amount to the customers because Bluehost has reduced the amount up to $3.95 per month from almost $7.99 which is the amount that they usually charge per month.
For $3.95, you can get lots of advantages from a single website. These advantages include 50GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, etc.
This proves that their service is really valued for the price you are paying them initially because of their consistent uptime and loading speeds of pages.
We have already done an agreement with Bluehost which would be greater relief for our readers. The deal we have done with them is that Bluehost agreed to charge just only 2.75 per month as the starting price from our readers.
As you see this is one of the best deals in the current market for a new affordable host like you!
Best Security Options
We all know that many of the cheap product options in the market do not give you better security choices. But we can guarantee that even though the Bluehost is cheaper, they do not cut the security options of your website.
As we mentioned earlier, Bluehost has a huge number of security options, especially including the free SSL certificate for each plan.
In order to prevent hackers from finding and using your personal details for phishing schemes to trouble you or hack your over sensitive information, Bluehost has included a domain privacy feature. This domain privacy feature will help you to keep your personal data that you have used to sign up for a domain private.
Malware attacks are very common on all WordPress sites. To prevent from these attacks Bluehost has included SiteLock feature too. They have also included CodeGuards which is another security option and it will help you to backup your information from previous versions of a site if the site has got hacked.
You can keep your inbox of email safe from getting unwanted emails as you have the world’s safest spam protection tool, Postini, from Google.
After considering all the above-mentioned facts regarding security, without any doubt, you can see that this offers the best security package to keep your site safe.
Many Integrations, Apps, and eCommerce Features
Bluehost provides access to many different types of apps and integrations and as a result, you can enjoy the most popular services on the web.
Let me give you an example.
If you just purchase or manage multiple domains, Bluehost offers you a domain manager. If you want, you can set daily, weekly, or monthly backups too.
WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, run an e-commerce shop are some of the popular content management systems (CMS) that you can install Bluehost.
In order to keep your site quick, Bluehost will also include access to a Content Delivery Network (CDN). At the same time, these host your images and large files, taking the work off your servers, and to deliver your work faster to your users around the world.
“Official” Wordpess.org Recommended Host
Bluehost is among the three “officially” recommended hosting partners to use with a WordPress site. The other two are Dreamhost and SiteGround.
This shows the way that Bluehost earned its reputation in an important website like WordPress.
Easy to Use for Beginners
We can say that Bluehost is a user-friendly interface for both experts and non-experts. The layout of Bluehost’s control panel (cPanel) is very simple and easy to use.
Some of the web hosts like LiquidWeb are very difficult to control by a beginner. You need expert knowledge for such a web host. But, Bluehost consists of features for beginners as well as for advanced users too.
The beginners also can get the help of the Bluehost website builder tools like Weebly or Drupal. By using them, they can start with a template and customize it as they want.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Bluehost offers 30- day money-back guarantee on their plans. You can try their services as a trial and if you are not satisfied with their service, then you can grant for a refund from them. But there are certain rules and conditions for this:
- Your refund will be only the web-hosting cost. Any other products like domains or other add-ons are not included in the refund.
- If you received a free domain name in your plan, a $15.99 fee will be deducted.
- No refund will be issued for any requests after 30 days.
It is essential to read the above policies and understand them before you sign up.
Customer Support
If you have any questions on Bluehost, you can directly contact their customer support team. There you have options like, live chat, email ticket support, or phone support.
We tried to contact them via live chat option and within two minutes Vinutha from Bluehost connected with us. We had a friendly and professional communication with each other and Vinutha directly gave solutions for our issues.
Disadvantages of Using Bluehost Hosting
Even though Bluehost performs well all the time, there are some issues that we find in Bluehost.
Higher Renewal Rates which is common in the Web Hosting Industry
In order to save a reasonable amount of money, it is better to select prepay packages at least for three years. By doing so, you can save up to hundreds of dollars within those three years.
The other issue is higher renewal rates. Right after your introductory period, you have to pay a high amount for the renewal process. The above mentioned prepaid option is also a good option for this issue as you have to pay for a full three years at $3.95.
Anyway, after completing this term, you have to pay according to their “Normal “rates which range from $7.99 to $8.99 per month.
Site Migrations Are Not Free
Most of the web hosts do free migrations for their customers. But we cannot find this offer in Bluehost. We have to pay a high amount like $149.99 to Bluehost in order to get access to free migrations. This is a one-time fee and it includes the migrations of up to 5 websites, 20 email accounts, and other database files for these sites.
Even though you have to pay such a huge amount of money, Bluehost claims that it will be very quick and as a result, you will not experience any delays or downtime.
Bluehost Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, you have to pay $3.95/mo for the Basic plan. But with our discount, you have to only pay $2.75.
The options, Plus plan and Choice plans are for the same price of $5.45/mo. They allow you to manage unlimited domains, parked domains, and subdomains. They also give you the option for unlimited websites, SSD storage, and bandwidth.
If you want all the above-mentioned features with the highest performance, then you have to select the Pro plan which starts at $13.95 per month.
Bluehost also possesses all major web hosting types, including VPS, cloud, and dedicated data centers.