Bluehost powers more than two million websites. It does a great job of demystifying the process of setting up a website for beginners. Especially if you want to use WordPress. All plans include a free domain for the first year, great uptime (based on real-life data), a free CDN, an easy website builder, and a free SSL certificate. Everything you need is one place. Is it right for your next website? Let’s find out.
Bluehost Compared to The Best Web Hosting Services
After two weeks of rigorous testing, which included signing up, building a website, talking to customer support, and 30 days’ worth of uptime and speed testing, Bluehost came in at #5 in our list of the eight best web hosting providers. Although other hosts outperformed Bluehost, it’s still an excellent choice and our top pick if you’re looking for a free, beginner-friendly WordPress drag-and-drop site builder.
If that’s not something you care about, there may be a better option. See all of our top picks to check out in-depth reviews by a team of researchers who’ve actually used the products, our scoring strategy, and which one is best depending on what you need.
Bluehost: The Good and The Bad
Bluehost: The Pros and Cons
Pros
24/7 customer support: Not every company can boast 24/7 customer support, especially at such a low entry-level price. Bluehost’s customer support is there for you as you start your site, and anytime you need extra support troubleshooting site errors that are bound to happen.
One year of a free domain: Possibly one of Bluehost’s most appealing features is the free domain name you get for a whole year. This eliminates the extra step of going through a third-party domain seller or investing more money at your site’s beginning.
Free SSL certificate: An SSL certificate, otherwise known as Secure Sockets Layer certificate, makes sure to authenticate the identity of your website and encrypts important site information. In other words, it’s a must-have for any site you publish. Thankfully, Bluehost provides SSL certification for free.
Quick site setup: With Bluehost, you can easily get your site up and running in no time with their intuitive and guided step-by-step setup. And if you happen to run into any trouble, you can tap into their chat support feature in real-time.
Beginner-friendly: Bluehost is ideal for anyone venturing into creating and maintaining a website for the first time. This is because there isn’t a need for advanced web management knowledge or coding when you set up your site through it. To sweeten the deal, they’ve partnered with WordPress and ensured that installing WordPress is a seamless part of the process.
Cons
Charges for site migrations: Admittedly, when it comes to migration perks, Bluehost isn’t necessarily your best bet. If you want help migrating your site, Bluehost charges at least $149 to migrate your site to or from another platform.
Not the best fit for high traffic sites: If you’re wanting to scale an already high traffic site and need hosting to meet those specific needs, an entry-level Bluehost plan isn’t going to cut it. You can always upgrade to their more expensive managed WordPress tiers, which we’ll get into below.
Bluehost Pricing and Options
Bluehost offers quite a few pricing plans for individual website goals and needs. Let’s break it down into each level.
Bluehost Pricing
The great thing about Bluehost is that it has a wide variety of options at an affordable price. It offers three main business niches, with different pricing plans according to said niches. These include shared hosting, online stores, and managed WordPress.
The shared hosting plan offers the most flexibility and is most popular with Bluehost users. The thing about Bluehost pricing is that it’s much cheaper on a 36-month plan, instead of a 12-month plan, so let’s compare these two. This plan has four pricing options, including:
- Basic: $4.95/month on a 12-month term; $2.95/month on a 36-month term
- Plus: $7.45/month on a 12-month term; $5.45/month on a 36-month term
- Choice Plus: $7.45/month on a 12-month term; $5.45/month on a 36-month term
- Pro: $18.95/month on a 12-month term; $13.95/month on a 36-month term
As you can see, the pricing for 36-month terms is much cheaper than 12-month terms. Bluehost also offers a 24-month term, but that’s only a tad cheaper than the 12-month option.
With that said, all pricing plans include a free domain for one year, free CDN, free SSL certificate, custom themes, and 24/7 support.
The Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro plans have unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage, and free Office 365 for 30 days.
Online Store Plan
The Bluehost online store plan feels a lot less complicated than its shared hosting plans. These specific plans are best for ecommerce stores, where you can build, promote, and start selling through your store that’s packed with WooCommerce tools.
This plan has two pricing options for 12-month and 36-month terms, including:
- Standard: $15.95/month on a 12-month term; $12.95/month on a 36-month term
- Premium: $32.95/month on a 12-month term; $24.95/month on a 36-month term
Both plans come with unlimited products, WooCommerce installed, 24/7 customer support, payment processing, discount codes, and CodeGuard Backup Basic.
Managed WordPress Plan
This powerful plan focuses on users who are building their website through WordPress. It allows you to purchase a plan that offers scalability, security, speed, and support for your professional WordPress website.
This plan has three pricing options, all on 36-month terms, including:
- Build: $9.95/month
- Grow: $14.95/month
- Scale: $27.95/month
All plans include top features like one WordPress website, 200+ global edge servers, free SSL, built-in high availability, staging environment, and best for up to 50,000 visitors per month.
You can also expect daily scheduled backups, malware detection and removal, and domain privacy and protection.
Bluehost Offerings
Bluehost offers quite a few web hosting-related products that cater to most users. Here’s an in-depth look at some different products from Bluehost:
WordPress Hosting
Bluehost and WordPress go hand-in-hand, and there’s no better way to run your website than with its official WordPress hosting. Bluehost crafted this specific hosting package to boost your website, with resources and tools that seamlessly integrate with WordPress.
With maximum compatibility with any WordPress website, this hosting plan will work best for blogs, websites, or online stores. Bluehost offers features like automatic WordPress installation, automatic WordPress updates, and Google My Business verification.
Not only that, but you get to choose from a unique range of themes and templates from the Bluehost Marketplace, that is specifically tailored to WordPress. You get full design freedom with customization features and easy-to-install plugins.
Some other features of WordPress hosting include:
- Microsoft Office 365
- Free domain for one year
- Secure login setup
- 24/7 WordPress hosting support
This hosting package has different pricing plans to the Managed WordPress plans. You can get specific WordPress hosting under three plans on 36-month terms, including:
- Basic: $2.95/month
- Plus: $5.45/month
- Choice Plus: $5.45/month
Shared Hosting
Just like we discussed earlier, the shared hosting package is the most popular among Bluehost users because it’s the easiest way to get your website up and running at an affordable price.
To put it simply, shared hosting allows multiple users to run their website on one server. This specific package is best for blogging, hobbies, or small business websites.
The best feature about the shared hosting package is that Bluehost manages and monitors the server, so users don’t need to worry about server management or platform patches.
Some features of the shared hosting package include:
- Domain manager
- Resource protection
- SSL certificates
- Google Ads
Small businesses would reap most of the benefits of a shared hosting plan because it’s more simple and affordable. Because shared hosting doesn’t guarantee RAM or CPU, small businesses aren’t as affected as larger businesses that need the extra space.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is an excellent package for larger-scale businesses that need an increase in storage, power, and control. This package is on the high-end side of web hosting, so it focuses on performance and security.
Unlike shared hosting, a dedicated hosting server provides the highest level of protection, security, and control to its users. These servers are separate from one another, so each user gets full access to the server without being affected or affecting another user’s experience.
With Bluehost dedicated hosting, it guarantees every user stable and predictable website performance, with full control and privacy.
This package is best for users that have high traffic websites, as you will need the full spectrum of RAM and CPU to run your website efficiently—which is exactly what dedicated hosting does.
Some supportive features for dedicated hosting include:
- Extreme speed
- Fast provisioning
- RAID storage
- Root access
- Dedicated support
- Storage upgrades
- Free domain for one year
However, Bluehost’s dedicated hosting does not go for cheap. It offers three pricing plans, including:
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