Bluehost is a web Hosting company that is the best choice by many website owners. In this Bluehost review, you will learn the Pros and Cons of choosing Bluehost as your website hosting provider and decide where it is the best choice.

Details:

• Website: www.bluehost.com
• Founders: Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth
• Company Location: Provo, Utah
• Year Founded: 1996
• Number of Employees: 750

Bluehost web hosting was founded by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Provo, UTAH. They currently have a total of 750 people working for them. They are a recommended web host by Wordpress.org for their 1-Click installs in all plans.

The one name you know in the world of web hosting, that is Bluehost because it is one of the top web hosting companies along with Just Host and Wealthy Affiliate. Bluehost started back in the year of 1996 making it ancient by web standards but they still going strong with regular updates.

This review will show you the features along with special for you to get started with your web hosting.

Pros of Bluehost Hosting

• Most of the plans include unlimited disk storage, domain hosting, email address, and bandwidth.
• Get a free domain name for a year included with your hosting plan purchase.
• The easy to use enhanced cPanel that gives you fast access to features.
• The excellent security features.
• The many databases that are available include MySQL, PostgreSQL, CGI-BIN, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, and much more.
• Lots of free website scripts available that includes social networking, blog support, mailing lists, messaging forums, Joomla, Drupal, and Tikiwiki.
• eCommerce features with multiple shopping carts to choose from with SSL security.
• Many customers report Bluehost hosting as fast and if you integrate with Cloudflare you will get better performance.
• If you can afford it the WordPress hosting provided by Bluehost hosting is top-notch.

Cons of Bluehost Hosting:

• There are many useful add-ons available to you, however, you will need to install many of them separately to get the full functionality you need.
• The mixed reviews for their customer service.
• Too many upsell reported by customers that can be annoying especially if on a budget.
• WordPress plans have genuinely nice features, however, they can be awfully expensive compared to their competitors. Wealthy Affiliate, for example, offers over 3,000 WordPress themes to choose from with their monthly premium service unlike Bluehost WordPress plans only offering 100 WordPress themes.

Customer Dashboard

By the time you are done reading this review, you will know what to expect from Bluehost and what not to expect from them.

Bluehost has built a solid reputation over the years, especially in WordPress hosting.

Bluehost is one of the officials recommended hosting providers for WordPress blogs and offers and plenty of great tools, bonuses, and other resources to their WordPress customers.

Ready to learn more? We are going to dive deep into the details in this Bluehost review. However, let us get started with a few fast facts first.

• The plans appear cheap at first glance, but not all of them are cheap as they may seem. You can start for as little as $2,95 per month with shared hosting. The starter plan usually costs $7.99 per month, which is still reasonable. However, WordPress plans run even more expensive starting at $12.49 monthly.
• Get unmetered bandwidth will all hosting accounts.
• The starter plan comes with hundred email accounts and the plus and business pro plans offer unlimited email accounts.
• Receive up to $200 in marketing offer bonuses
• cPanel that is easy to configure and control your sites.

Which level of hosting service should you choose?

Bluehost web hosting offers five different types of hosting plans:

• Shared Hosting
• VPS Hosting
• Dedicated Hosting
• WordPress Hosting
• Cloud Sites

If you are looking for web hosting that is inexpensive and basic, then shared hosting is probably the plan you need. This is a good choice for small businesses and beginners.  The dedicated hosting is the more expensive hosting plan which is suitable for large commercial businesses that need full control of their resources.

The dedicated hosting, you are renting a physical server. The VPS hosting is a middle-ground option where you share the physical server with others however you have your virtual operating system, which operates as if it is physically yours. The WordPress hosting is what it sounds like, hosting that is optimized for WordPress customers.

Let us look deeper into each Bluehost Hosting Plan.

Shared Bluehost Hosting Plan:

• Basic Hosting Plan: Starting at $3.49 per month, plan jumps to $7.99 per month at the regular price.
• Plus, Hosting Plan: Regularly $10.99 per month
• Choice Plus Hosting Plan: $23.99 per month

These prices are good. The basic level you get one website with 50GB of space and unmetered bandwidth.  You will also get one domain, five parked domains, and twenty-five subdomains. Additional features include five email accounts with 100 MB storage each.

The Plus or Choice web hosting plans get unlimited websites and unmetered space and bandwidth, that is great. One domain included with unlimited parked domains and subdomains.

The email accounts and storage are unlimited, you get the $200 in marketing offers. It includes Global CDN and one Spam Experts that is over twenty-four dollars per year in extra benefits.

The highest-level hosting plan is the business pro. The business pro plan includes up to $180 in extra annual benefits including two Spam Experts, one premium SSL, one dedicated IP, domain privacy, enhanced performance, and Site Backup Pro.

VPS Hosting Plan:

• Standard hosting plan: $19.99 the first month and up to $29.99 per month afterward
• Enhanced hosting plan: $29.99 the first month and up to $59.99 per month afterward
• Ultimate hosting plan: $59.99 the first month and up to $119.99 per month afterward

The prices are in line with the typical cost for the VPS hosting industry. The speed for the first 2 plans is two CPU cores, up to 3 and 4 cores for the top hosting plan. You will get 30GB SAN storage at the lowest tier, up to 120GB at the highest level. RAM ranges from two GB up to eight GB. You will get 1 TB of bandwidth at the standard level, up to three TB at the ultimate level. Each tier level includes one domain. The standard plan includes one IP address and two with the other plans. Each plan is backed by 24/7 support and their money-back guarantee.

Dedicated Web Hosting:

• Standard hosting plan: $79.99 your first month, and $119.99 per month afterward.
• Enhanced hosting plan: $99.99 your first month, $159.99 per month afterward
• Premium hosting plan: $119.99 your first month, $209.99 per month afterward.

The standard or enhanced plan, you will get a 4×2.5GHz CPU. The premium plan offers you a 4×3.3GHz CPU. The storage ranges from 500GB to 1TB mirrored, and the RAM starts at 4GB at the standard level, ranging up to 16GB for the premium tier. You will get 5 TB of bandwidth at the standard tier level, 10 TB at the enhanced tier level, and 15 TB at the premium level. One domain name is included with every plan. You will also get three IP addresses with Standard plan, for with enhanced plan, and five with the premium plan. Again, all plans backed by 24/7 service and their money-back guarantee.

WordPress Hosting Plans

• Basic Plan: Starting at $2.95 a month with a 36-month subscription.
• Plus, Plan: Starting at $5.45 a month with a 36-month subscription.
• Choice Plus Plan: Starting at $5.45 a month with a 36-month subscription.

These plans look like the shared hosting plans and cost about the same.  However, at the end of 2018 Bluehost introduced a new category WordPress Pro.

Recommend Reading “7 Best Website Hosting Affiliate Programs” to help with choice of website hosting.

WordPress Pro Hosting:

These plans are expensive compared to their simple WordPress hosting and what some competitors offer. Many competitors sell WordPress hosting plans at the same price as general-purpose shared hosting.

WordPress Pro hosting at Bluehost is a big deal and one of the company’s most popular services. They currently have more than a million sites hosted with them that are WordPress driven.

Their pro plans are running on high-performance VPS and offer improved site speed.

Features at the building level include basic jetpack site analytics, marketing center, 100 free themes, daily backups, along with malware detection and removal for added security.

Their grow plan is to step up with jetpack pro. The business review tools let your website visitors leave positive yelp, google, yahoo, and Bing reviews for your business directly from your website. The SEO tools will give you real-time optimization tips on how to increase your search engine rankings. It is integrated into the marketing center where you can see stats on how you are doing in major search engines.

The top-level scale plan will give you PayPal integration and elastic search.

It is worth knowing that you will get live support with the growth and scale plan. It will give you hands-on assistance with design, functionality, or any general questions from real WordPress experts 24/7.

All these plans come with positive wildcard SSL, 24/7 customer service, and their money-back guarantee. These plans also come with automatic plug-in updates and regular backups along with a staging environment that will allow you to build and test your WordPress site before publishing.

The feature that is probably not used by many is the unlimited video compression. You can upload your videos without having to optimize them for the web. Bluehost takes care of that for you. There are no restrictions on how many videos you stream.

These are all great features, but you may be asking, “Why should I pay this much for WordPress hosting?” Bluehost plays an active role in the WordPress community and has a core staff of many developers. This means that Bluehost can offer first-class customer support and troubleshoot even complex problems that are unique to WordPress.

This is not to say Bluehost will be your only or best option. However, competition website hosting like SiteGround.com can easily compete with lower cost.

Blue Flash Support

Are you new to both Bluehost and WordPress? Bluehost makes it easy to get started with this special feature called Blue Flash support. This service is included for free with your hosting package. It takes the form of professional consultation over the phone with a WordPress expert.

The Blue Flash support gives you a guided tour of the dashboard so that you can identify all the features and options you can use for posting briefly. You will have the chance to get answers to your questions during this orientation phase.  WordPress can be daunting if you are first time user, this is a big saver and helps make the process of getting off the ground lot faster. (You can also get WordPress Training for Free at WealthyAffiliate.com).

During the call, you will be able to quickly get set up with your account and have the chance to pick a theme that is suited to the style and purpose of your website. The options that are shown to you will already be vetted in advance according to your requirements.

The specialists with Blue Flash Support will even suggest appropriate plugins for you to use. This way you can take advantage of everything that WordPress has to offer for your website needs.

The Blue Flash support team is available 24/7, which means no matter where you are located you can get up and running fast with WordPress and get to work on your website.

If you need additional assistance with WordPress after you are done using the free service, you have the option of signing up for WordPress Live Support for $99 a month. This is a lot of cash for extra support (You can get unlimited WordPress Support through the WealthyAffiliate.com community for no additional charge).

Domain Name & Email Address:

When it comes to building a business brand awareness, building trust and relationships in any business, a domain name and email address goes a long way. If you decide to purchase a hosting plan from Bluehost, you will have the option of signing up for your own domain name and email address.

The basic plan, email essentials, including emails and calendars, outlook web access, and fifteen GB email storage. If you signup for the business plus plan, the plan includes the same features together with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Office online along with one TB OneDrive.

The business pro plan adds Microsoft Office for your desktop access plus publisher for desktop, Outlook customer manager, along with tools for bookings and invoicing.

All plans include software updates automatically, and you can benefit from the security and recovery services offered through Microsoft Office 365. A simple user-friendly interface makes it easy to manage your account using a single login. There is a 99.9% uptime guarantee and your plans are backed by 24/7 customer support.

Also, you will be allowed to use multiple devices to access these programs and tools. That means wherever you are located, you can access your account on any device and work on your website projects.

Domain name email plans start at just a few dollars per month which is an impressively low cost and can add significant value to your hosting plan.

eCommerce Feature:

Bluehost offers easy setup of an online store that includes many different shopping carts: Cube, Zen, Agora, and OS Commerce. You will get SSL security for your transactions, a certificate generated for free, and OpenPGP/GPG Encryption.

The fact you will get unlimited storage space starting at the plus level with shared hosting means you are ready to go start adding as many products as you want to your online shop, Unmetered bandwidth means that your costs are steady and predictable even if you have months where you will get lots of traffic (like holidays or along with as your business grows).

They provided $200 in free marketing credits will be of big help if you are a store owner. You can use the bonuses to promote your store through Google, Facebook, Bing, and Twitter.

All of these being said, Bluehost is not best known for eCommerce and some competitors’ sites like shopify.com make it easier and faster to set up an online store. However, Bluehost is an economical choice and you will get access to a lot of great features to help you sell online.

Security Feature:

Bluehost hosting excels in security. You will get three layers of anti-spam protection in the form of spam experts, spam hammer, and apache spam assassin.  You will also get protection for your inbox as well with easy to set up filters. All your directories are password protected.

If you will need block access to your website, you will have the option to blacklist IP addresses. Another one of Bluehost features is a secure shell (SSH) access. This will allow you to access configuration files separately and securely.

Bluehost offers single-click integration with Cloudflare, that provides even more security features and speeds up your website! Cloudflare is good for thwarting DDOS attacks.

You will have options to upgrade:

Bluehost Refund Policy

Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. This means if you cancel within your first 30 days, you will receive a full refund. If you choose to cancel after 30 days, you will not get the prorated refund for the period of your hosting term which you have not used. There is no refund on domain names.

Easy use

Bluehost makes it easy to set up your website and manage it. Their enhanced cPanel interface is easy to use, you can just click on the icons to get where you need to go.

You will be able to take care of everything with your websites and email addresses in just one location. You can also customize the layout of the control panel to fit your needs, this way you can get quick access to your favorite features.

Bluehost Customer Service

Bluehost gets mixed reviews based on their customer service. Lots of customers report positive experiences with fast, helpful, friendly customer service agents. However, there are lots of customers who say that they were not able to get the help they needed even with many phone calls.

Another problem that customers do not like is the excessive upselling. Bluehost hosting likes to try to sell you extra add on and upgrades and there are some areas you will need the add on services for full functionality. This will be a problem with you are on a tight budget. (If on a tight budget I recommend WealthyAffiliate.com).

Is Bluehost Hosting for You?

• If you are looking for reliable website hosting with a strong reputation with one of the oldest names in the industry and has built brand awareness, then Bluehost is for you.
• If you are a WordPress customer who can pay extra to get access to more features and the dedicated support team of WordPress experts, then Bluehost is for you.
• If you are an owner of a large or small business. Bluehost hosting will be fine if you are on a budget and just like a basic purpose shared hosting. I just recommend watching out for the upsells.

Final Thoughts on Bluehost Hosting

There are lots of great features and extras that are included at every price point and the different choices of plans can fit any budget. Whatever you are looking to build with your website, Bluehost offers with their packages.

Even though there is some negative feedback regarding Bluehost hosting, most of their customers are incredibly happy with their services. There is a reason for Bluehost having such a strong reputation for over twenty years.

In summary, Bluehost is one of the top few websites hosting companies that I would recommend to everyone. If you are looking for a website hosting with an excellent reputation, then look only at Bluehost.

With their plans, you can customize your solution and in just a few moments be up and running.

Affiliate Disclosure: I am an affiliate with Bluehost Hosting, and I will receive a commission when you click on the Bluehost links provided in this review and signup for their services. It will not cost you anything to click on the links. This is how this website is maintained by earning commissions.