Bluehost Review

Bluehost enables you to get a website up and running in minutes. It’s a reputable web host used by millions to host their online projects, start businesses, and create something new.

What makes Bluehost so popular?

It’s easy to use, even for first-timers, and it’s a great price.

You get a free domain name upon signing up (usually $10-15 per year) and hosting costs as little as $2.95 per month. Bluehost also comes loaded with features to help you get set up quickly.

Find out more about what you get, and why I think Bluehost provides the best value for your money.

Bluehost Compared to the Best Web Hosting Services

Bluehost offers shared hosting plans at an entry-level price. If you’re creating a website as a first-timer, Bluehost is a safe and affordable option. Plus, as I mentioned before, you get a free domain name when you sign up. This is a nice perk that sets it apart from other budget options, along with its customer support options and affordable additional hosting tiers.

Who is Bluehost Best For?

Bluehost is ideal for beginners that are starting a website for the first or second time. Say you’re a blogger getting started in your niche, Bluehost enables you to get an easy start without sweating all the technical details.

Along with their customer support features and easy to navigate cPanel, Bluehost ensures your learning curve is as small as possible and gets your site publicly available to the world with plenty of uptime.

Bluehost: The Pros and Cons

Pros

24/7 customer support: Not every company can boast 24/7 customer support, especially at such a low entry-level price. Bluehost’s customer support is there for you as you start your site, and anytime you need extra support troubleshooting site errors that are bound to happen.

One year of a free domain: Possibly one of Bluehost’s most appealing features is the free domain name you get for a whole year. This eliminates the extra step of going through a third-party domain seller or investing more money at your site’s beginning.

Free SSL certificate: An SSL certificate, otherwise known as Secure Sockets Layer certificate, makes sure to authenticate the identity of your website and encrypts important site information. In other words, it’s a must-have for any site you publish. Thankfully, Bluehost provides SSL certification for free.

Quick site setup: With Bluehost, you can easily get your site up and running in no time with their intuitive and guided step-by-step setup. And if you happen to run into any trouble, you can tap into their chat support feature in real-time.

Beginner-friendly: Bluehost is ideal for anyone venturing into creating and maintaining a website for the first time. This is because there isn’t a need for advanced web management knowledge or coding when you set up your site through it. To sweeten the deal, they’ve partnered with WordPress and ensured that installing WordPress is a seamless part of the process.

Cons

Charges for site migrations: Admittedly, when it comes to migration perks, Bluehost isn’t necessarily your best bet. If you want help migrating your site, Bluehost charges at least $149 to migrate your site to or from another platform.

Not the best fit for high traffic sites: If you’re wanting to scale an already high traffic site and need hosting to meet those specific needs, an entry-level Bluehost plan isn’t going to cut it. You can always upgrade to their more expensive managed WordPress tiers, which we’ll get into below.

Bluehost Pricing

It’s worth noting the price points for each shared hosting tier I review here are only if you purchase a 36-month hosting plan upfront. If you decide to go with a 12 or 24-month plan, the monthly amounts change accordingly.

Going with a month to month plan will also mean your monthly hosting fee will be a tad more expensive. Regardless, Bluehost still stands as the most affordable and value-filled plan you can choose, especially as a beginner.

Shared Hosting

A shared hosting Bluehost plan is hands down one of the easiest ways to get started building your site. You can start with the Basic plan for $2.95, which is good to create one site with 50 GBs of space. That’s generous when you consider they also include free CDN and a free SSL certificate.

You don’t even have to know what a CDN or SSL certificate does–enable them with one click to get a faster, more secure site.

It doesn’t stop there. Are you running a few websites? Then you’ll want to try the Plus tier at $5.45 per month. It includes everything in the basic plan tier, plus the ability to host and manage an unlimited number of sites, and you’ll get access to Microsoft 365 for 30 days.

Not bad. It’s the most convenient tier if you want to reliably start more than one site from scratch without too much overhead cost.

Their most recommended tier, and the one that gets you the most bang for your buck under the shared hosting plan, is the Choice Plus tier at $5.45 per month with added security features.

You get everything in the first and second tier, plus free domain privacy and free automated backup for a whole year. Since internet security is a growing concern in the online world and the price for this tier is the same as the Plus option, this is the clear winner in my book as far as affordable shared hosting plans are concerned. Added security features can only ever be a plus.

Finally, if you’re looking for a bit more than that, consider the Pro tier, sitting at $13.95 a month. With this plan, you’ll get additional CPU resources as well as a free dedicated IP.

As you can see, Bluehost goes out of their way to personalize each tier, so they’re useful in covering what you need. I recommend you take some time to comprehensively look through each tier and its offerings to get the best deal according to your goals.

VPS Hosting

VPS, or virtual private server hosting, is when hosting is within a shared server but acts as a dedicated virtual space for your site. VPS hosting has become very popular, as it is less expensive than dedicated hosting but gives you better security and potentially better performance than shared hosting.

Guaranteed resources are the name of the game when it comes to Bluehost’s VPS Hosting options. They stack up against competitors well, as they charge you only $18.99 for the standard VPN feature. This includes 2 GB of RAM and an additional 1 TB of bandwidth.

Looking through each Bluehost offering, it’s clear they’ve positioned themselves as a beginner-friendly web host, but they also burn the candle at both ends by offering affordable dedicated and VPS hosting.

Conclusion

All in all, Bluehost is a reliable web hosting service that gives you the best value for your money. It offers a great entry-level shared hosting plan for as little as $2.75 a month, one free domain name for a year, as well as free SSL certification, and plenty of customer support you can tap into at a moment’s notice.