Bluehost Reviews & Product Details

Bluehost is famous for its cheap web hosting, especially for WordPress websites and WooCommerce stores. But hype aside, is Bluehost a good choice for your website or online store?

So buckle in, and let’s find out. Here, in this Bluehost review, we’re uncovering everything you need to know about the service.

Bluehost Web Hosting at Glance

What is Bluehost?

Bluehost is one of the largest web hosting providers in the world. At the time of writing, they host over two million web domains. The company was founded in 2003 in Utah. But, Bluehost really gained momentum in 2009 when the company introduced CPU throttling technology to increase the efficiency and speed of its servers.

Fast forward to 2010, and they joined a conglomerate of other web service providers under the Endurance International Group. Since then, Bluehost has become a significant player in the web hosting industry, with an estimated market share of 3.4%.

Bluehost: Features and Functionalities

Now that we’ve covered a bit about who Bluehost is, let’s look closer at its features and functionality…

Bluehost Interface

Bluehost’s easy-to-use interface is one of its many appeals.

In fact, there are two interface options available:

1. Rock: This simplifies the Legacy model (see below). It uses vertical navigation to provide easy access to your websites, WordPress tools, and Bluehost’s marketplace.
2. Legacy: This is Bluehost’s older interface model. You can still access it within your account management panel. That said, it’s being phased out of use. It uses horizontal navigation, and each section is compartmentalized. In other words, you have to go into each section separately to find your websites, WordPress tools, etc.

Dashboard

Within your Bluehost dashboard, you’ll find a one-click setup for WordPress. Installing WordPress is as simple as logging in, finding the website section on your dashboard, and hitting “Install WordPress.”

You’ll then be asked to choose your domain name. At this point, you also need to provide an email address and create a username and password for your new installation.

Bluehost SEO

SEO or (AKA Search Engine Optimization) refers to how easily findable your website is on search engines. Bluehost analyze your website and provides you with an online marketing report that’s divided into easy-to-read sections:

• Start: First, you get an overall score; the higher the score, the better. Essentially, this score reflects how well optimized your website is for SEO.
• Search Engine Submissions: Bluehost will submit your site to Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
• Visitors: This tracks how many website visitors you have and where they come from. In time, you can compare your visitor numbers over 15 days, one month, or three months.
• Rankings: Here, you can check where your site ranks on search engines and see how well your keywords are doing compared with your competitors.
• Site Review: This highlights any technical issues, such as long loading times.
• Search Optimization: Here, you can check how search-engine-friendly your site is. For example, whether your site’s structure is understandable and whether links and titles are in order.
• Content: Regularly uploading high-quality content is one of the best ways to improve your SEO. Bluehost will analyze your content and provide tips for improvement.
• Mobile: Bluehost will analyze your website and inform you whether your site is responsive and loads fast enough on mobile devices.
• Popularity: Popularity is measured by how many backlinks you have; the more links you get from other sites, the better.

Overall, Bluehost provides a wealth of information to help you improve your website’s SEO.

Bluehost Email Hosting

Using Microsoft 365, Bluehost lets you create a custom professional email address where your domain name is simply transferred to your new email. If you already own a web domain, you can add it to your Office 365 subscription through its management dashboard (which you can access via your Bluehost control panel).

There are three email hosting plans to choose from:

1. Email Essentials: at $4.99 per month, you can manage your professional calendar and email.
2. Business Plus: at $9.99 per month, this is suitable for collaborating with a team
3. Business Pro: at $14.99 per month, this unlocks multiple devices and local app access.

All plans include:

• Microsoft Outlook Web Access
• Automatic Microsoft updates
• Microsoft’s 99.9% uptime guarantee
• Security and disaster recovery
• Access to an intuitive management dashboard
• 24/7 support

You’re free to upgrade or cancel your subscription whenever you want (with no cancellation fees). Before canceling your subscription, be sure to download any data you require; however, you can still access this up to 30 days after canceling.

Bluehost Customer Support

Bluehost claims to always be on hand to support its customers. So regardless of your chosen pricing plan, you’re entitled to 24/7 telephone and live chat support. To utilize the latter, hit the “chat now” button on Bluehost’s website. You’ll be asked if you’re a new or existing customer and a way to identify you, such as your web domain, phone number, or email address.

Bluehost also offers a blog, online knowledge base, and resource center. Here you can find answers to questions, how-to guides, and gather more info on topics about business, creating a website, and marketing. An interesting feature in the resource center is that you can filter by skill level: basic, intermediate, or advanced to ensure access to the information you’ll actually understand.

Bluehost cPanel

CPanel (AKA Control Panel) is Bluehost’s website management platform. You can access this via the advanced section of your Bluehost dashboard. From here, you can manage integrations and access a range of applications where you can add useful scripts to your website, such as:

• Server information
• Hit counters
• Mailing lists
• Blogs
• eCommerce functionality
• Password-protected subdirectories
• Searches

Bluehost Integrations

The Bluehost Marketplace is where you browse, purchase, install, and manage your WordPress plugins, add-ons, and themes. You can choose from over 900 themes and tons of plugins.

Simply log into your Bluehost account and locate the marketplace button on the left-hand side menu to access the marketplace. To give you an idea of the kinds of plugins on offer, let’s focus on WooCommerce specifically. There are 18 WooCommerce-related extensions (plugins) covering shipping, scheduling, and payment processing functionality.

More specifically:

• PayPal Pro
• Amazon Pay
• Stripe
• Xero
• WooCommerce Booking

…to name a few.

Bluehost Performance

Performance is imperative when picking the right web hosting service.

The key metrics here are twofold:

1. Uptime: A measure of the reliability of your website’s performance.
2. Site speed: How quickly internet browsers can load pages from your website

Uptime

BlueHost boasts an impressive 99.99% uptime. In theory, this means your website should only experience (roughly) less than an hour (52.56 minutes) of downtime per year, which is a pretty good standard.

When compared to other hosts, Bluehost’s uptime ranks pretty competitively:

1. Siteground – 100% (0 downtime)
2. Bluehost – 99.99% (52 minutes per year downtime)
3. HostGator – 99.99% (52 minutes per year downtime)
4. DreamHost – 99.96% ( 3 hours and 30 minutes per year downtime)
5. Hostinger – 99.92% (7 hours 0 minutes per year downtime)

(According to tooltester and uptime.is).

Site Speed

As we’ve already hinted, site speed refers to the number of seconds it takes for a web page to load. Needless to say, the quicker, the better. According to tooltester and Pingdom, here’s how Bluehost fares against its competitors:

As you can see, Bluehost takes a lower ranking for this mark as it needs c. 0.91s to fully load the website while the best tested host (iPage) needs just c. 0.30s. It’s not the worst, but it’s certainly not the best either. However, there are remedies to this issue. If you expect high traffic volumes, there’s a cache setting you can utilize to improve your website’s performance. Caching allows you to store assets in a temporary storage location to load your site faster. You can find this feature in your Bluehost portal under ‘My Site’ and then “Performance.”

Security

We’re living in an age where digital fraud is rife, and, as such, secure web hosting is essential. With that in mind, let’s see what Bluehost offers:

• Paid and free SSL certificates:
  • Free: All Bluehost plans come with a free SSL certificate.
  • Paid: You can also purchase a private SSL certificate for extra encryption. Prices start at $49 per certificate.
• CDN: Bluehost uses Cloudflare’s content delivery network to ensure secure interactions between your website and visitors. You’ll receive a free CDN certificate will all plans.
• Firewalls and attack protection:
• SiteLock: This is a PCI-compliant service for managing your website security. The cost of this service is charged annually and includes malware protection, page scanning, and firewall security (more on this below).
• CSF: This is a free firewall plugin for VPS and dedicated servers.

Creating Your Website with Bluehost

WordPress website creation can be a daunting task, but Bluehost tries to make the process as easy and quick as possible:

#1: Getting Web Hosting and a Domain Name

For the uninitiated, web hosting refers to a website’s allotted space on a web server. The website’s files are stored here: code, images, etc. This enables your website to be accessible on the web.

In contrast, a web domain is simply your website’s URL address. The issue that many great domain names are already taken so you have to be quite creative when choosing one.

Give it a go and see if the domain name you like is available:

You need both web hosting and domain name to launch a website. To hit the ground running with this, click “Get Started” or “Start Building.” From there, choose the plan you want. Bluehost offers three pricing plans and makes it easy to understand what’s included in each.

But, in a nutshell:

Basic at $2.95 per month: This is “Perfect for bloggers and personal websites.”

Plus at $5.95 per month: is considered “Perfect for business sites.”

Online Store at $15.95 per month: as the name suggests, this is “perfect for online stores with product shipping.”

All plans include web hosting, unlimited websites (which means you can host as many websites as you need), and over 300 templates. You also have unlimited access to their image library, email marketing tools, and blog post management features.

The Plus and Online Store options unlock additional features, including extra premium template designs, domain privacy, and online selling features.

Once you’ve chosen your plan, if you already have a web domain name, enter it now. Or you can skip this step if you want to tackle this later. If you’re creating a new web domain, enter your desired URL, and Bluehost will tell you whether it’s available. If it is, then you can proceed. It’s worth noting that your web domain is free for only a year; after that, you’ll need to pay.

Next, you’ll be asked to enter your personal details and agree to their terms and conditions.

Bluehost wants to tailor the user experience as much as possible. So they’ll ask a few short questions about the type of website you intend to make, your goals, and how comfortable you are with website creation.

#2: Building Your WordPress Website

Bluehost automatically provides a default website design for you, which you can view by clicking “visit site.”

However, you’ll probably want to change this as it’s very simplistic. WordPress is pre-installed to save you the hassle of doing this yourself.

To create, edit, and design your website, head to your WordPress dashboard. First, you’ll most likely want to select a theme for your website. To do this, click on “Appearance,” then “Themes,” and finally, “Add a new theme.” From here, you can search for a theme. Scrolling through the vast array of options can seem overwhelming. But you can use the filters to help narrow down your search.

Some themes are free, while others have a price tag. The best theme for your website comes down to what you visualize your website looking like. You may find it worthwhile paying a little bit for the look you want, but the choice is yours. When you find a template you’re happy with, simply install it and then hit “Activate.”

Step 3: Editing Made Easy

After logging onto your Bluehost control panel, go to “My site” found on the left-hand menu, followed by the “manage site” button. This takes you to your WordPress dashboard, where you can click “website builder.”

From there, you can begin editing as you like. You can click on any web page and select the different elements you want to change. For example, you can edit text, text on buttons, images, color preferences, and background. You can also edit the pictures by searching through Bluehost’s vast library of images or uploading your own.

Whatever aesthetic you’re after, WordPress can help you achieve it. You can even change the headers and logos using the “customize” button.

To add new pages, simply click on the “pages” tab on the left menu and then locate “add new” by the “Pages” title.

Bluehost’s drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to edit your template and add features to your website. Overall, creating and editing your website with Bluehost is really that simple. What it really takes is a bit of exploration and an idea of what you want your finished product to look like.

Bluehost Pricing & Web Hosting Options

Bluehost provides many different web hosting plans to choose from. We’ve made a short summary table so you can get your head around all of them.

In this review we will focus on three most popular options, namely:

1. Shared Hosting
2. VPS
3. Dedicated

Let’s take a look at what these mean:

Bluehost Shared Hosting Pricing

In shared hosting you share server resources with other customers. It’s by far the most popular hosting plan thanks its affordability and it’s perfect for those creating a website or blog for the first time. When considering shared hosting, there are a further four 12 month plans to pick from:

Please note: All above presented prices are promotional for the first term only and renew at the regular rates.

Besides the above mentioned key features all plans also include:

• Custom themes
• 24/7 customer support
• Access to the easy-to-use WordPress website builder
• An SSL Certificate
• Resource protection
• Domain manager: where you can update, purchase, transfer, and manage in one place
• Google Ads credit

Bluehost VPS (Virtual Private Server) Pricing

Considered perfect for expanding websites needing more control. There are three plans available: Standard, Enhanced and Ultimate.

All plans come with 24/7 customer support, and each program runs on a 36-month basis.

Please note: All above presented prices are promotional for the first term only and renew at the regular rates.

Bluehost Dedicated Hosting Pricing

Aptly named, the Dedicated plan provides a dedicated server for just one individual, application, or organization. In other words, you won’t be sharing a server with anyone else. If you’re running a business or your website’s snowballing, you may want to consider this option. But, ultimately, you have to decide whether it makes sense for your budget and business plans.

There are three plans to choose from:

Please note: All above presented prices are promotional for the first term only and renew at the regular rates.

Bluehost: Pros and Cons

We’ve covered lots of information here, so let’s condense what we’ve discussed into a quick pro-cons list:

Blueshost Affiliate Program

Bluehost also offers an affiliate program. You can find Bluehost’s affiliate program by scrolling to the bottom of their home page and clicking ‘Affiliates’. The affiliate scheme is free to join. You just have to sign up, and you’re immediately provided with a unique tracking code and affiliate links or custom banners (or both).

Then, for every visitor who clicks on the link and signs up to Bluehost, you receive a commission starting at $65 and increasing with a volume of referred customers. From there, you can earn an unlimited amount: the more people who sign up to Bluehost via your link, the more money you’ll make.

Overall, this affiliate marketing scheme is pretty decent and has one of the better payouts in the web hosting space. What’s more, Bluehost provides you with support and promotional resources to give you the best shot at earning as much as possible.

Bluehost Alternatives

If you decide Bluehost isn’t for you, don’t fret. There are plenty of other great options to choose from:

Hostinger: Most Affordable Web Host

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Hostinger is a European-based web hosting company boasting decent website speeds and affordable hosting plans. Their shared hosting package starts at $1.99 a month (for a 12-month subscription and a renewal rate of $5.99). You can host up to 100 websites with this plan, and you’ll get a free web domain. Other freebies include an SSL certificate, Google Ad credit, and weekly site backups. On the downside, they have a lower uptime score than Bluehost, and they don’t have their own website builder.

Try Hostinger

Hostgator: Web Hosting with a Website Builder

Hostgator is a popular US-based web hosting solution. They’ve been around since 2002 and have made their mark, offering low, competitive prices. From $2.75 a month, you can expect to host one website, connect a custom domain, and have an SSL certificate. In addition, Hostgator boasts good uptime speed, so you can be sure of its reliability. You’ll also have access to an AI-fuelled website builder, so you can set up a WordPress site in just a few clicks.

Hostgator’s drawbacks lie in its poor customer service. For example, they have notoriously long waiting times for their support chats. In addition, customers have complained that their team didn’t have a good technical understanding of website management. Also, as noted above, they have one of the slowest website speeds of all the competitors listed here.

Try Hostgator

Siteground: Best Shared Host Customer Support

SiteGround is an excellent choice if you’re looking for quick website speeds and reliable uptime as they reign supreme in both areas. They’re another European-based provider gradually gaining popularity for their well-priced and fast hosting services.

Their Starter plan of $2.99 (per month) gives you one website, SSL, and CDN certificate. You also receive free daily backups, access to their website builder tool, and free firewall security built into your website. Finally, they also have WooCommerce integration options available.

On the downside, Siteground only offers shared hosting plans. They don’t provide VPS hosting or dedicated servers. Your resource space is also considerably limited (10 GB) compared to competitors. Moreover, it doesn’t offer a free domain name.

Try Siteground

Bluehost: Our Final Thoughts

So, there you have it. This concludes our Bluehost review. We hope we’ve provided everything you need to decide whether they’re a good choice for your website. There are many aspects to consider, from security to functionality to ease of use. But, Bluehost is regarded as one of the best overall hosting providers on the market.

As we’ve discussed, it allows you to design, optimize and host your website for a reasonably low price. The price hike for renewing your subscription is still pretty reasonable for beginners looking to get their business off the ground.

All in all, Bluehost provides everything you need to kickstart your online business, from an intuitive website builder to web domains to helpful plugins – and tons more to boot!

Is Bluehost the right choice for your business? Tell us your thoughts in the comments box below!

We hope this review was useful. Click below to let us know what you think or leave a comment in the comment section!