Is Bluehost Web Hosting for You?

Spend a few minutes researching the best web hosting providers, and Bluehost will be on your radar almost immediately – it’s widely used and hugely popular. But what sets Bluehost apart from the pack? Does it have exactly what you’re looking for, or would another provider be a better fit?

We’ll cover the most important deciding factors in-depth, but to start, here’s Bluehost at a glance:

We’ve conducted our own user testing of the top hosting providers, and compared our findings for each provider in order to rank each as accurately as possible. Bluehost’s particular strengths were customer support, server uptime, and value for money.

Who Is Bluehost Best For?

Bluehost’s customer support, strong uptime, and affordable beginner plans make it a dependable hosting provider. If you’re looking for old-fashioned reliability, Bluehost is a great choice. That’s why we’ve rated it the best overall hosting provider on the market. Bluehost is also the best choice you can make if you’re hosting a WordPress site – it’s earned the title of best for WordPress hosting in our research, and WordPress.org itself has been recommending Bluehost since 2005. We also think it’s pretty great for photography website hosting, if that’s your kind of thing.

In the video below, Bluehost customer ‘Melty Way’ (a grilled cheese sandwich restaurant in Utah) discusses how Bluehost has helped to grow their small business:

Utah-based Bluehost came onto the scene in 2003. Since then, it’s become one of the leading providers of web hosting services, and is currently owned by The Endurance International Group, which also owns competitor HostGator. Bluehost currently powers more than two million websites worldwide, primarily out of its data center in Utah.

Get to Know Bluehost

If you’re just learning the basics about Bluehost and haven’t visited its website yet, take a moment to familiarize yourself – we won’t go anywhere!

Okay, Show Me Bluehost!

Pros and Cons

Bluehost Pros

Bluehost Cons

Cyber Week deal alert! We’ve spotted Bluehost is currently offering some great Cyber Week discounts, meaning shared hosting prices now start from just $2.65. But hurry – these offers expire soon!

Reliability and Performance

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 uptime percentage comparison chart

Is Bluehost Ticking Your Boxes?

Bluehost is a dependable and affordable host that offers amazing service for WordPress users especially. Explore Bluehost to see if it’s right for you.

Yes, Show Me More of Bluehost!

Types of Hosting and Features

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:

WordPress and Bluehost

WordPress recommends Bluehost as its number one web hosting provider – and that’s no small feat, coming from a company that’s dealt with innumerable web hosts in its time. If you’re already set on having a WordPress site, then Bluehost is the best web host to go with. And if you’re already set on Bluehost, then you should definitely consider setting up your site with WordPress.org – you can install it through your Bluehost dashboard with just one click.

How to Install WordPress on Bluehost

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:

Domain registration	Bluehost offers a free domain to certain users when they sign up for a one-year plan. However, that perk does not include the domain registration fee (between $10 to $15), which you’ll still have to pay for.
Website builder	There’s a drag-and-drop site builder for those who have an idea of what they want to create, but don’t have sharp enough HTML and CSS skills.
Data transfer	Bluehost offers unlimited data transfer on many of its plans. However, Bluehost also provides CPU Protection – more on this below.
cPanel	Bluehost uses the “cPanel” Control Panel, which is a popular site management system. The company also offers free backups so you don’t lose any key site files.
Storage	Depending on the plan you use, Bluehost offers anything from 50GB up to unlimited storage space for your site files. If all you plan to do is run a WordPress blog with words and images, then the 50GB plan will be fine, as it will take a while to use up that much storage.

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.”

Are You Using WordPress?

You won’t find a better WordPress host than Bluehost. Recommended by WordPress since 2005, it has tons to offer – see what it’s got for you today!

Yes! Show Me What Bluehost Has to Offer

Pricing

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:

Did You Spot a Price You Liked?

Bluehost offers a range of hosting plans, so it’s worth comparing them before deciding. Explore its packages, deals, and more on its website!

Yes! Pick My Perfect Bluehost Plan

Bluehost Pricing vs Competitor Pricing

Provider	Shared Hosting	VPS Hosting	Dedicated Hosting	WordPress Hosting
Bluehost	$2.95	$18.99	$79.99	$2.95
HostGator	$2.75	$29.95	$119	$5.95
InMotion	$2.49	$29.19	$105.69	$6.99

“[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.”

Security

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.

Is Security Important to You?

It should be! Luckily, Bluehost pretty much has you covered, so you can get online with peace of mind. See what’s included even on its basic plans.

Yes! Show Me What I Get With Bluehost

Migration

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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!

Help and Support

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:

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%.

Is Expert Support Important to You?

We’ve used Bluehost support ourselves and found it to be quick, helpful, and easy to use. If you need a helping hand, Bluehost is there 24/7.

Yes! I Want to See Bluehost

Customer Satisfaction

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.”

bluehost interface — Clean and intuitive, the Bluehost interface is a dream

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!