Summary

Their services offer a well rounded platform for both beginner and high traffic websites to scale and grow at a fair price.

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Introduction

On our quest to find the best web host for your online presence, our team ranked the Best Web Hosting Companies. Bluehost certainly packs a lot of value for beginners to advanced users alike, offering competitive pricing, full featured plans, and access to 24×7 live customer support.

In our Bluehost review, we dig into this popular web hosting provider to help you determine if it’s the right fit for your website. By reviewing pricing, features, user interface and support quality, you can determine if Bluehost is a good choice for you.

Plans and Pricing

Bluehost offers web hosting ranging from shared, WordPress, Managed WordPress, VPS (virtual private server), Dedicated (dedicated resources), to Ecommerce hosting.

Bluehost Shared Hosting

Exclusive Bluehost shared hosting plan: 36 month plan – $2.75 per month ($99 total cost)

Bluehost shared hosting plans pack a lot of value. There are 4 plan types: Basic, Plus, Choice Plus (Recommended) and Pro.

Basic – $2.75 per month

Choice Plus (Recommended)* & Plus – $5.45 per month

Pro – $13.95 per month

Basic is a great price tag at $2.75 per month if you’re looking to host just 1 website. You also get a whopping 50 GB of storage, which is pretty generous.

Choice Plus (Recommended) is definitely the best value in terms of money and features. At $5.45 per month, you can host unlimited websites, you get unlimited storage, free domain privacy, and free automated backups for 1 year.

Plus is also priced at $5.45 per month but with less features. We recommend taking advantage of the discount on Choice Plus to get more bang for your buck.

The Pro plan at $13.95 is more than double the price of Choice Plus, however it does give you all essential features plus automated backups for the entirety of your hosting subscription. If data backups are important to your project, Pro would be a good pick.

All Bluehost shared hosting plans include a free SSL certificate, free CDN, 24×7 customer support, and a free domain name registration for 1 year. Considering you can get all of that for $2.75 per month to start, they definitely know how to provide value.

Bluehost WordPress Hosting

Exclusive Bluehost WordPress hosting plan: 36 month plan – $2.75 per month ($99 total cost)

WordPress Hosting by Bluehost comes packaged similar to the shared hosting plans however in 3 plan types and geared towards hosting WordPress websites.

There are 3 plan types: Basic, Plus, Choice Plus (Recommended).

Basic – $2.75 per month

Plus – $5.45 per month

Choice Plus (Recommended) – $5.45 per month

On Basic, you can host 1 WordPress website and get 50 GB of storage for $2.75 per month. Plus comes with unlimited storage and WordPress websites for $5.45 per month.

Choice Plus (Recommended) is also $5.45 per month and lets you host unlimited WordPress websites. You also get 1 year of free automated backups and free domain name privacy. Choice Plus also gives you unlimited storage.

If you’re planning to host multiple WordPress websites, Choice Plus definitely packs a lot of value at a generous discount.

All of the WordPress Plans at Bluehost come with WordPress installed for you, automatic WordPress updates, and access to the full WordPress plugins and themes library.

You also get a free domain name for 1 year across all plans.

Bluehost Managed WordPress

Bluehost also offers Managed WordPress plans. We’ll be honest, it’s pricier, starting at $9.95 per month and all plans are limited to hosting only to 1 WordPress website.

However, the Managed WordPress plans come with a lot of professional tools, such as:

You can even get access to priority ticket support, that can definitely be helpful instead of waiting on a chat or phone.

For mission critical websites requiring speed and efficient support, Managed WordPress is a good option.

Bluehost VPS Plans

Bluehost provides virtual private servers (VPS) hosting for high-traffic websites requiring dedicated resources.

There are 3 plan types: Standard, Enhanced (Recommended) and Ultimate.

Standard – $17.99 per month

Enhanced – $27.99 per month

Ultimate – $57.99 per month

The VPS plans are pretty generous with storage too: 30 GB (Standard), 60 GB (Enhanced), and 120 GB storage (Ultimate).

Powered by Linux and self-managed, all the VPS plans include 24×7 customer support and a free domain name for your 1st year.

If budget is important, their Standard VPS for $17.99 per month is a very good deal.

Bluehost Ecommerce

If you’d like to run a WooCommerce online store, make sure to check out their Ecommerce plans starting at $12.95 per month.

Bluehost Dedicated Hosting

Their Dedicated Hosting starts off at $73.99 per month gives you your very own server.

Another great thing is that no matter the hosting plan or price tag, Bluehost guarantees a 30-day money back guarantee, just in case.

Core features

Bluehost offers a wide range of high-value features across their hosting services. They are exceptionally generous with their unlimited allowance, offering the ability to host unlimited websites for as low as $5.45 per month on their shared and WordPress hosting plans. They also provide unlimited storage on virtually all plans above standard and basic.

There are several other notable features worth mentioning. All Bluehost hosting plans come with free SSL certificates, a free domain name for 1 year, a Google My Business verification tool and free Microsoft 365 subscription bundled into all Plus plans and above.

If you have an existing WordPress website, Bluehost makes the migration easy by giving you a free migration plugin. Their customer support team helps fill in the gaps as you migrate and update your DNS once completed.

The WordPress migration for new hosting accounts is absolutely free, so you won’t pay anything extra when you’re moving from a different hosting company.

Interface

All Bluehost plans also come with a control panel known as cPanel, giving you a wide range of tools from backup, email, DNS zone, subdomain, and addon domain management.

Control panel in action

The cPanel control panel also comes equipped with the 1-click App installer included on all Bluehost shared hosting plans. This allows you to install popular Apps such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and Drupal to build your website.

There are other noteworthy tools available through cPanel including catch-all emails, email forwarders, spam filters, and even website analytics. Although the website analytics is very rudimentary and doesn’t come anywhere close to Google Analytics, the raw data can provide great insights and it’s automatically set up for you.

If you have WordPress sites, you also get a WordPress management dashboard called My Sites where you can access all of your WordPress website dashboard using single sign-on, or create new WordPress sites using a 1-click installer.

You’ll also find a Marketplace where you can purchase tools to further boost your online presence. Featured products include advanced SSL certificates, security by SiteLock, backups, and premium WordPress Themes.

Our favorite feature from the Marketplace is the integration with Google My Business which allows you to easily list and verify your business on Google with a few clicks. Bluehost advertises this as a free service, although this is true, Google My Business is in fact offered free of charge already by Google. A bit of a marketing spin, however the Bluehost integration certainly makes things easier.

All in all, Bluehost offers a fully featured hosting control panel to manage your website, domain names and email accounts.

Support options and quality

When it comes to customer service, Bluehost focuses on live support channels, primarily phone and live chat. It is available 24×7, 365 days a year. Their support center also contains an extensive library of resources for common web hosting, WordPress, email, and domain name questions.

Although live support is available 24×7, our experience was long wait times. Wait times on chat could range anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour. At peak times, it can be more.

Phone support would average about the same or longer. This can be a bit frustrating or nerve racking if something is mission critical.

Bluehost does offer priority ticket, phone and live chat support through Blue Sky, however at $149 per month to get on demand support, it’s not something most people will want to purchase.

The support center articles contain answers to more general questions, however we found some of the articles lacked depth. The lack of visuals and screenshots on the majority of the tutorials also didn’t help things either.

That said, when you do get through to Bluehost live support, the support staff are friendly and will do their best to help you. If they can’t, their team does escalate issues to management for follow up. So, you will get an answer eventually, however, depending on the complexity of your question, it might take a few hours or days to get a solution.

The competition

Bluehost is an excellent beginner friendly web hosting company that provides a lot of value at accessible pricing. However, there are several solid alternatives.

A great option is Skystra which put an emphasis on quality performance, speed, and support for WordPress websites and WooCommerce online stores. Prices start at $7 per month to host 1 WordPress website and all hosting plans come with a free SSL certificate, free CDN, free email, and advanced options such as premium caching to boost your website speed by up to 125%.

Skystra’s biggest difference between themselves and Bluehost is their support team.

Read our Skystra review to learn more.

Another solid alternative is HostGator, with plans starting off at $2.75 per month for shared hosting and a website builder (for beginners) available for only $3.84 per month. All of HostGator’s plans come with free SSL certificate, a free domain name on year 1, and 24×7 live support. Read our HostGator review to find out more.

Final verdict

Bluehost is a budget-friendly hosting company that offers a full range of hosting services with features for beginner to advanced websites and users. Although an industry veteran, Bluehost lacks the refinement and finesse in its presentation and service offering one would expect from so many years in business. That said, its WordPress management dashboard, free domain name for 1 year, and low price point introductory pricing satisfies the beginner looking for a deal.

We certainly see the value of using Bluehost for a beginner website, however performance, reliability, and customer service wait times tend to be pain points many Bluehost customers complain about. Another point to watch out for is the significant hike in renewal pricing and expensive addon services that can skyrocket your hosting bill.

Ultimately, Bluehost offers a beginner-friendly service with useful tools however we’d recommend looking at more performance focused hosting companies if a fast website and knowledgeable support are critical to your online presence.

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Nexym's editorial team handpicks all of the products and services it recommends, regardless of external influences. Affiliate links appear in some of our stories. We may receive an affiliate commission if you purchase something through one of these links, which helps us stay independent and support our great team.