Are you looking for the best shared hosting for your WordPress site?
Then you might consider using Bluehost.
Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting providers out there, best known for its beginner-friendly WordPress hosting and services.
In this article, I’ll provide an honest and complete review of Bluehost hosting and you can decide if Bluehost is right choice for you.
When it comes to choosing web hosting, here’re a few important things that we should look into:
- Reliability: To keep your site running 24/7/365.
- Security: To keep your site secure from potential attacks or hacks.
- Customer support: To help with technical issues.
- Pricing: To get access to the best deals and save you money.
- Features: Give all the features and tools needed to build a better site.
In our review, we found that Bluehost to be fast, reliable and affordable with phenomenal customer service. It’s ideal for small business and those who are looking to start their first website/blog.
That’s why we recommend Bluehost as one of the best WordPress hosting providers.
Now, let me get into our detailed review of their hosting services with screenshots.
Review of Bluehost Shared Hosting
Founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Utah, Bluehost has achieved tremendous growth over the past decades.
At present, they’re hosting more than 2 million websites (and still counting). It’s one of the most popular and cheap web hosting services out there.
Bluehost has many different hosting packages for all budgets and sizes such as shared hosting, WordPress managed hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting.
Pros of Bluehost:
- Free domain
- Free SLL certificate
- Easy to setup
- Very good uptime (all the time)
- Good speed
- Unlimited hosting resources
- Best cPanel redesign + feature-packed
Cons of Bluehost:
- Add-on services
You’ll need to pay for add-on services separately such as site migration and domain privacy.
If you want to migrate your WordPress site from your current host, Bluehost will charge an additional $149.99 on top of the hosting plan.
While other hosting companies like Siteground can do it for you 100% FREE.
- No monthly plan
They offer account plans for 12 months, 24months, 36 months, and 60 months. You’ll need to pay at least for the entire year upfront. To get better pricing, you’ve to sign up for the longest term, i.e. 3 years.
Bluehost Reliability
Bluehost provides top-notch hosting services that ensure your site running smoothly with minimum downtime.
What particularly great about Bluehost is that their servers are well-optimized for a WordPress site.
That’s also why Bluehost is officially recommended by WordPress themselves for your WordPress blog. (as in the screenshot below)
Bluehost also supports the latest versions of PHP and MySQL, which provide a powerful and reliable solution for managing extra load occurring on WordPress.
Also, they don’t have any sort of downtime to date. Here’s a screenshot of Bluehost server uptime report.
Features of Bluehost hosting
- Free SSL certificate
If you’re on Bluehost’s hosting plan, here’s the good news, you’re given a free SSL certificate.
In July 2018, Google Chrome announced that a website is only secure if it has an HTTPS connection.
For those who have HTTP (yet to adopted HTTPS encryption) on their website will be labeled as “not secure”.
The primary reason for having SSL certificate is to ensure that your site is secure.
On top of that, people will trust your site more, to safely process personal information such as credit cards, contact details and billing address.
If your site has SSL, it might perform better in Google search rankings too.
Whether you’re running a personal blog or e-commerce store, it’s incredibly important to have SSL certificate on your site.
For new website, Bluehost will automatically assign and install SSL certificate for you. For an existing customer, you can manually enable SSL by following these step-by-step guide.
The best part is you don’t have to understand the technical part to use the SSL. Bluehost just made it easy and straightforward to have your site secured with HTTPS.
- Free domain name
As an added bonus, you’ll get a free domain with Bluehost hosting plans.
Which means along with your hosting plan, domain registration cost is completely FREE.
- Unlimited hosting resources
Bluehost also offers unmetered resources for its hosting plan.
This basically means that you can store and transfer unlimited files and use unlimited bandwidth, as much as you like. With that said, there’s still a limit placed on users according to the fair usage policy.
But Bluehost limit is so high that you can consider it to be the same as unlimited.
In fact, 99.95% of their customers (I’m one for sure) will have more than enough bandwidth and disk space to meet their needs.
Bluehost Hosting Plans and Pricing
If you’re just starting out, Bluehost shared hosting is perfect for your new website/blog.
It’s available in three different packages.
Here’s the details of Bluehost hosting plans, features and terms.
Basic Plan: The cheapest hosting plan offered by Bluehost, starts at $2.95/month for 1 year plan (with my special link).- Plus Plan: Plus Plan provides unlimited websites, limited web space and bandwidth.
- Choice Plus: Feature-rich plan that gives you all benefits of Plus plan, and advanced features such as domain privacy and SiteBackup. You’ll also get $200 free marketing coupons which you can use it to promote your business through Google, Facebook, Bing, and Twitter.
- Pro Plan: The highest plan that comes with free optimized CPU resources and dedicated IP.
Here’s my suggestion:
- If you want to host only one website and don’t have any plan to run more websites in the near future, then Basic plan is the best for you.
- If you’re planning to run more than one website, you should go for Plus Plan.
- If you’re looking for more extra features together with domain privacy and SiteBackup, then you should choose Choice Plus plan.
If you are not sure which Bluehost shared hosting plan is best for you, this quick guide can help you + save you maximum money.
Easy to Use
Bluehost uses cPanel, one of the best control panels for web hosting. It is extremely simple and easy to use by anyone.
Even new users with no technical experience, can easily set up, manage and control websites, domains, emails and more, all in one place.
The interface is very user-friendly. On top of that, Bluehost will automatically install WordPress for you. It’s FREE!
Customer Support and Service
It’s very important to choose a web host that offers help and support when you need it.
Bluehost offers 24/7 support via live chat, phone call and email.
But in most cases, you won’t have any issues with Bluehost because their servers are highly optimized for WordPress hosting.
In case you need to get an instant fix, the easiest way to get help is using live chat or phone. You can be assured that you’ll get great technical support from professional representatives.
In addition, Bluehost also provides a wide range of helpful resources, articles, guides and video tutorials as part of their extensive knowledge base.
This is particularly useful for beginners, in which you can learn about a subject at your own pace as well as resolve a common issue by a simple search.
Conclusion
Bluehost is by far one of the cheapest and fastest shared hosting companies on the market.
For an extremely affordable price of $2.95-$13.95 a month, it doesn’t do a bad job at all in providing hosting with great uptime, support, unlimited options and features.
Plus, Bluehost offers a 30-day money back guarantee. Now you can start using Bluehost plan at NO risk. During your first 30days, at any time, if you feel that it’s not what you want, you can get your money back, no question asked!
If you have any question or problem with Bluehost, I’m here to help, you can contact me here.
Bluehost Coupon
You can get an exclusive 60% off discount and a free domain with our Bluehost coupon code.
- Grab your Bluehost Hosting plan (up to 60% off + one free domain name)
Click on the link and discount will be applied automatically.
Here’s a comprehensive guide to help you choose the Bluehost hosting plan that most suitable for your business needs.
If you‘re new to buying web hosting, I have written a helpful guide to help you start your profitable blog with Bluehost here.
Once you’ve set up your own blog, do let me know about it and remember to send me your link! You can leave a comment below or find me on Facebook or Instagram! Welcome to the Family!
Note – I am a Bluehost affiliate. If you make a purchase through this or any of the links on this post I’ll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. But this doesn’t influence my recommendation. Thank you all for your support!
