Bluehost Review: Is It the Best Host for Your Site?

We said Bluehost was dependable, and we meant it: Bluehost has a great uptime guarantee of 99.98%. No web host can provide 100% uptime, so 99.98% is a strong showing – it translates to roughly one hour and 45 minutes of downtime per year. That’s second only to Hostgator, which offers 99.99% uptime.

Bluehost offers six different types of hosting: Shared, Shared WordPress, WooCommerce, VPS, Managed WordPress, and Dedicated. We’ve broken down the details of each type in our Bluehost Pricing Review, but generally, you can think of the differences like this:

• Shared: the cheapest and easiest general service
• Shared WordPress: the cheapest and easiest way to host a WordPress site
• WooCommerce: the best way to host an online store with WordPress
• VPS: not as expensive as dedicated hosting, and still good for business sites that need to go beyond the basics
• Managed WordPress: even more features for your hosted WordPress site
• Dedicated: the most expensive, but also the most powerful hosting service

This step-by-step tutorial shows just how easy it is to setup a WordPress website with Bluehost:

Other Bluehost Features

Seamless WordPress integration is Bluehost’s most impressive feature, but definitely not its only feature. We’ve compiled the rest of Bluehost’s best offerings below:

The fact that you can get so much in one place is a big draw for customers. When we reached out to our email database for first-hand experiences of Bluehost, Steffi, a consultant, said:

“I used Bluehost, because I could do all in one place: domain registration, email-admin, hosting, unlimited sub-spaces. The documentation was very good and what I needed at the time.”

Bluehost ranks highly in our research for value for money, with a score of 4.6/5. The best part? All Bluehost plans come with a 30-day money back guarantee. Shared hosting is Bluehost’s cheapest plan, at $2.95/month for the first year and $7.99/month after that. Dedicated hosting is the most expensive plan, starting at $79.99/month.

Bluehost Starting Prices:

• Shared hosting: $2.95 per month, renews at $7.99 per month
• Shared WordPress hosting: $2.95 per month, renews at $7.99 per month
• WooCommerce hosting: $15.95 per month, renews at $24.95 per month
• VPS hosting: $18.99 per month, renews at $29.99 per month
• Managed WordPress hosting: $19.95 per month, renews at $29.99 per month
• Dedicated hosting: $79.99 per month, renews at $119.99 per month

Bluehost Pricing vs Competitor Pricing

Which Plan Is the Best Value for Money?

If you’re new to web hosting or your site isn’t massive, then we recommend starting with Bluehost’s Shared or Shared WordPress plans. They’re the cheapest, and still offer a decent variety of features. When your site outgrows these shared plans, you can always upgrade to the pricier but better-equipped options.

Bluehost Additional Costs

Unfortunately, most hosting providers will fill your virtual basket with add-on items during checkout. These odds and ends will hike up the price of your plan, but you can always uncheck them before making your purchase.

However, some of these additional items will be worth the money, depending on the type of website you’re looking to get off the ground. Here’s an overview of the most common extras you’ll run into:

Learn more about these extra items, and whether or not you’ll need them, in our full Bluehost Pricing Review.

Canceling Your Bluehost Plan

Bluehost’s 30-day money back guarantee means that you get some time to test out the platform and see if it’s for you. But it’s important to make this decision within the first 30 days, because afterwards, Bluehost doesn’t offer any refunds or cancellations.

When we reached out to our email database for reviews of Bluehost, the price of add-ons came up as an area for improvement. One reader said:

“[Bluehost is] pricey. The more add-ons you buy, the more expensive it is.”

When asked about the one improvement they’d make to Bluehost, the same reader suggested:

“Create different level bundles for add-ons and features.”

The best indication of a secure website is an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. SSL certificates let users know that any information they share on your site will be safe, and these certificates are indicated by the padlock icon and the “https” at the beginning of a web address.

Every Bluehost plan comes with a free SSL certificate, so you never have to worry about visitors getting a warning that your site is insecure. For more advanced security, you can also purchase a premium SSL certificate at $49.99/year. This would be a worthy investment for ecommerce sites, or any site where users will be logging in with a username and password and/or providing sensitive information (like credit card details).

Other free Bluehost security features include Spam Assassin protection, hotlink protection, and Secure Shell access. Basically, Bluehost includes more than enough security measures to get a standard site off the ground – but if you’re looking to scale your site or sell online, you may want to invest in a few extras.

Bluehost offers a lot of additional security measures to choose from, but they can quickly add up and increase your bill, so it’s important to choose wisely. For example, SiteLock Find (advanced security for ecommerce) only costs $1.99/month, but if you want to buy it, it must be billed annually at $23.88/year. That’s still not a lot to ensure the protection of your online shoppers, but it can be hard not to feel blindsided at checkout.

We know a large proportion of you read our hosting reviews because you’re unhappy with your current hosting provider, and looking to switch. With this in mind, we’ve examined how easy it is to make the switch to Bluehost.

The good news is, it’s pretty simple. There’s a DIY approach we’ll cover in brief below, or you can pay Bluehost to move your site for you. There’s even a bonus free migration on offer for qualifying websites:

1. Moving your own site to Bluehost

Doing the migration process yourself is pretty simple with Bluehost, because it uses the standard cPanel dashboard, so you can follow a general guide to migrating your site (like ours!) without encountering any surprises.

It’s a step-by-step process which can take some time, and people without much technical confidence may feel nervous giving it a go.

2. Paying for site migration

For $149.99, Bluehost will take complete control of moving your site to its servers (You can actually move up to five websites and 20 email accounts for this price).

Bluehost guarantees no downtime in this process, and 24/7 support during and after it’s complete. For many people, just having someone else own this process will be worth every penny.

It’s worth noting that this service is not available for reseller, VPS, or dedicated server accounts.

Not many hosting providers offer such an end to end migration service, so that’s a huge tick in the box for us!

3. Free site migration for (most) WordPress sites

Some WordPress sites are actually eligible to be migrated to Bluehost free of charge! Just fill in the form on Bluehost’s website once you’ve signed up for a hosting plan, and as long as there aren’t any complicated extras, a Bluehost expert will migrate your site free of charge!

Bluehost ranks number one in our research for customer support, earning a perfect 5/5. It has a variety of support options, including live chat, email support tickets, and 24/7 phone support. One user rated Bluehost’s customer support as “top notch,” citing his own experiences with the live chat option:

“I’ve had a few issues caused mainly by my own errors, and they’ve always helped me rectify them. They’re easy to contact via live chat, and I genuinely don’t think I’ve had to wait more than ten minutes to chat to someone.”

…But we wanted firsthand knowledge of Bluehost’s customer support, so we tried it out ourselves. Specifically, we tested the ease-of-use and effectiveness of two important features: Bluehost’s knowledge base, and Bluehost’s live chat. Overall, these features exceeded our expectations by 9%. Although we were impressed in both areas, we were more impressed by Bluehost’s expansive, searchable knowledge center than its live chat capabilities. We would have liked Bluehost’s live chat team to make it clearer how we could reach the same team member again in the future, in case we had more questions.

However, there’s still a lot to like about Bluehost’s live chat feature. When we tested it ourselves, agents’ responsiveness to our questions singled Bluehost out from other top competitors:

“All my questions were answered quickly and accurately, and the conversation felt friendly and natural throughout.”

But it wasn’t just response time that impressed our testers, it was also response quality:

“The agent always responded with relevant and helpful information, often including links and longer replies than I was expecting. They definitely seemed knowledgeable, and in a good position to help me.”

And if live chat isn’t your preferred method of communication, Bluehost offers three different technical support numbers that you can call instead, depending on your needs:

• General enquiries
• VPS and dedicated hosting
• WordPress assistance

A nice thing about Bluehost’s website is that it offers instant answers right on the primary help page for some of the more common issues. Say, for example, you can’t figure out how to transfer your WordPress site from another host – you can click on that issue on the help page, then be shown multiple ways to solve your issue, including a help article, live chat, and the specific phone number you should call.

If you’re feeling especially tech-savvy, it’s worth trying to find the answer yourself on Bluehost’s support forums. It’s often quicker to do the research independently, and it will ultimately provide a better understanding of how a site works.

In general, Bluehost surpassed our customer service expectations the most compared to the three other hosting providers we tested. For example, where Bluehost exceeded our expectations by 9%, HostGator only exceeded them by 3%. Other providers like A2 Hosting and InMotion didn’t even meet our customer service expectations, which started at a baseline of 80%.

Bluehost customers are most impressed with the platform’s help and support services. One user named Robin wrote:

“I’ve used Bluehost for over five years on my WordPress website. I’ve had a couple of times when my site has gone down due to installed plugin problems, and I couldn’t figure out what to do. Each time they helped me fix the issue quickly. Highly recommended.”

Michael, another Bluehost user, had this to say:

“I’m not a website expert, so I think it’s better to ask someone before I click around and break something. Whenever I’ve had a question, I’ve used the live chat – with an average waiting time of three seconds for someone to join me. I’ve always received a quick, clear answer from a friendly rep in under five minutes.”

Aside from customer support, uptime and WordPress integration are also standout strengths for Bluehost. It performs well in value for money, too – as long as you remember to keep your eyes peeled for add-on costs during checkout. Michael even went on to write:

“Just read everything carefully to know what you’re signing up for. Also, pay attention to the plans and extras – know what your website requires, and simply avoid the rest.”

And we’d have to agree!

Limitations

Many Bluehost customers have expressed frustration with the lack of pre-installed features. It’s true that Bluehost has a lot to offer, but it’s also true that you have to actively pick and choose which of those offerings you want on your site – and often at an additional cost.

We now know about the additional costs that must be purchased outside of your Bluehost plan. But there are a lot of additions that do come included in every Bluehost plan. In fact, the most basic, bare-bones plan you can purchase with Bluehost (the Basic Shared plan, $2.75/month introductory price) still comes with:

• 50 GB SSD storage
• Unmetered bandwidth
• Free SSL certificate (remember those?!)
• 1 domain included
• 5 parked domains
• 25 sub domains

And if you venture one tier upwards to the Plus Shared plan (at an introductory price of $4.95/month), the number of websites, SSD storage, domains, parked domains, and sub domains all become unlimited. Plus Shared also gives you 30 free days with one Office 365 mailbox, and anti-spam email filtering through Spam Experts.

In our overall hosting rankings, Bluehost comes in first, ahead of hosting heavyweights such as HostGator and GoDaddy. In individual categories, Bluehost ranks first for customer service, second for uptime, and second for value for money. It’s also the best hosting provider to manage a WordPress site with.

If seamless features are your top priority, then you may be better off with InMotion rather than Bluehost – as we’ve seen, Bluehost’s extras and additional costs can be confusing.

Our conclusion? It all depends on your site goals – but if you’re looking for affordability and reliability, Bluehost is a solid provider.