With over 2 million websites worldwide, Bluehost is the most popular web host on the market. With secure hosting options, domain registration, and other professional services, we believe Bluehost is not only the most popular web host but also one of the best overall, especially for users creating a website on WordPress.
Bluehost offers full integration and the most advanced features for WordPress users, but also offers security, design freedom, and easy setup for all users building on top of any CMS at an affordable price.
Bluehost will make sure you don’t sweat when you build your professional website, making it a more inclusive hosting service for both beginners and veterans alike.
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Bluehost Compared to The Best Web Hosting Services
Compared to the best web hosting services out there, Bluehost is popular for good reason. With complete scalability, excellent 24/7 customer support and affordable prices, Bluehost is a comprehensive and inclusive option for most users.
Bluehost is what we love for its simplicity and WordPress integration, and that’s why it’s so popular. Not only that, but Bluehost also offers great security options, affordable shared plans for beginners, and continuous plan improvements for growth.
We’ve looked at dozens of web hosting services on the market and narrowed them down to the top eight. We’ve taken a look at each option to see who it’s best for, what features to consider, and how to find the one that’s right for you.
The Official WordPress.org Recommended Host
As per research, WordPress is the most widely used website platform on the market – ~44% of the entire Internet is built with WordPress.
We can say that they have an authoritative promise when it comes to hosting solutions. WordPress officially recommends three hosting partners to use with a WordPress site:
- Bluehost
- DreamHost
- SiteGround
Obviously, you can use almost any web hosting provider to create a WordPress site. But the fact that Bluehost is one of the few officially recognized partners is encouraging.
Pros of Using Bluehost Hosting
- Good Uptime
- Fast Page Loading Speed
- Low Pricing
- Packed with Security Options and Features
- Easy to Use for Beginners
- 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
- One Free WordPress Site Transfer
- Reliability
- Free domain for the first year when you signup
- Free CDN + SSL
Cons of Using Bluehost Hosting
- Higher domain renewal price. Their free domain renewal price is higher than average.
- Cheapest Plan Restrictions
- Upselling Addons: They have an aggressive upsell process during signup. But you can easily uncheck all the addons if you don’t need them.
Good Uptime Through 12-Months (99.95%)
Uptime is one of the most critical aspects when choosing a web host – after all, if your site is down, your users can’t access it. So, consistent uptime should be one of your top priorities when looking at hosting services.
After reviewing many web hosts, our benchmark for “good” uptime is 99.93%. So ideally, we don’t want to see anything less than that.
The good news is that Bluehost easily surpasses this benchmark, comfortably keeping our test site live for 99.95% of the time during the last 12 months. The total downtime was a bit less than five hours for the whole year.
Bluehost Pricing and Options
Bluehost offers quite a few pricing plans for individual website goals and needs. Let’s break it down into each level.
The great thing about Bluehost is that it has a wide variety of options at an affordable price. It offers three main business niches, with different pricing plans according to said niches. These include shared hosting, online stores, and managed WordPress.
Shared Hosting Plan
The shared hosting plan offers the most flexibility and is most popular with Bluehost users. The thing about Bluehost pricing is that it’s much cheaper on a 36-month plan, instead of a 12-month plan, so let’s compare these two. This plan has four pricing options, including:
- Basic: $4.95/month on a 12-month term; $2.95/month on a 36-month term
- Plus: $7.45/month on a 12-month term; $5.45/month on a 36-month term
- Choice Plus: $7.45/month on a 12-month term; $5.45/month on a 36-month term
- Pro: $18.95/month on a 12-month term; $13.95/month on a 36-month term
As you can see, the pricing for 36-month terms is much cheaper than 12-month terms. Bluehost also offers a 24-month term, but that’s only a tad cheaper than the 12-month option.
With that said, all pricing plans include a free domain for one year, free CDN, free SSL certificate, custom themes, and 24/7 support.
Some features of the shared hosting package include:
- Domain manager
- Resource protection
- SSL certificates
- Google Ads
Small businesses would reap most of the benefits of a shared hosting plan because it’s more simple and affordable. Because shared hosting doesn’t guarantee RAM or CPU, small businesses aren’t as affected as larger businesses that need the extra space.
Online Store Plan
The Bluehost online store plan feels a lot less complicated than its shared hosting plans. These specific plans are best for eCommerce stores, where you can build, promote, and start selling through your store that’s packed with WooCommerce tools.
This plan has two pricing options for 12-month and 36-month terms, including:
- Standard: $15.95/month on a 12-month term; $12.95/month on a 36-month term
- Premium: $32.95/month on a 12-month term; $24.95/month on a 36-month term
Both plans come with unlimited products, WooCommerce installed, 24/7 customer support, payment processing, discount codes, and CodeGuard Backup Basic.
Managed WordPress Plan
This powerful plan focuses on users who are building their websites through WordPress. It allows you to purchase a plan that offers scalability, security, speed, and support for your professional WordPress website.
This plan has three pricing options, all on 36-month terms, including:
- Build: $9.95/month
- Grow: $14.95/month
- Scale: $27.95/month
All plans include top features like one WordPress website, 200+ global edge servers, free SSL, built-in high availability, staging environment, and best for up to 50,000 visitors per month.
You can also expect daily scheduled backups, malware detection and removal, and domain privacy and protection.
WordPress Hosting
Bluehost and WordPress go hand-in-hand, and there’s no better way to run your website than with its official WordPress hosting. Bluehost crafted this specific hosting package to boost your website, with resources and tools that seamlessly integrate with WordPress.
With maximum compatibility with any WordPress website, this hosting plan will work best for blogs, websites, or online stores. Bluehost offers features like automatic WordPress installation, automatic WordPress updates, and Google My Business verification.
Not only that, but you get to choose from a unique range of themes and templates from the Bluehost Marketplace, that is specifically tailored to WordPress. You get full design freedom with customization features and easy-to-install plugins.
Some other features of WordPress hosting include:
- Microsoft Office 365
- Free domain for one year
- Secure login setup
- 24/7 WordPress hosting support
This hosting package has different pricing plans to the Managed WordPress plans. You can get specific WordPress hosting under three plans on 36-month terms, including:
- Basic: $2.95/month
- Plus: $5.45/month
- Choice Plus: $5.45/month
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is an excellent package for larger-scale businesses that need an increase in storage, power, and control. This package is on the high-end side of Bluehost web hosting, so it focuses on performance and security.
Unlike shared hosting, a dedicated hosting server provides the highest level of protection, security, and control to its users. These servers are separate from one another, so each user gets full access to the server without being affected or affecting another user’s experience.
With Bluehost dedicated hosting, it guarantees every user stable and predictable website performance, with full control and privacy.
This package is best for users that have high traffic websites, as you will need the full spectrum of RAM and CPU to run your website efficiently—which is exactly what dedicated hosting does.
Some supportive features for dedicated hosting include:
- Extreme speed
- Fast provisioning
- RAID storage
- Root access
- Dedicated support
- Storage upgrades
- Free domain for one year
However, Bluehost’s dedicated hosting does not go for cheap. It offers three pricing plans, including:
- Standard: $79.99 per month with 500GB storage and 4GB RAM
- Enhanced: $99.99 per month with 1TB storage and 8GB RAM
- Premium: $119.99 per month with 1TB storage and 16GB RAM
- All pricing plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
VPS Hosting
- Standard: $19.99 for 36 months plan, otherwise $29.99 monthly
- Enhanced: $29.99 for 36 months plan, otherwise $59.99 monthly
- Ultimate: $59.99 for 36 months plan, otherwise $119.99 monthly
These prices are in line with typical costs for VPS hosting industry-wide. The speed for the first two plans is 2 CPU cores, up to three and four cores for the top plan. You get 30GB SSD storage at the lowest tier, up to 120GB at the highest level. RAM ranges from 2 GB up to 8 GB. You get 1 TB of bandwidth at the Standard level, up to 3 TB at the Ultimate level. Each tier includes one domain. The Standard tier includes one IP address; you get two with the rest. Every plan is backed by 24/7 support and a money-back guarantee.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee with all of its hosting plans.
You can try out the service to see their performance for yourself and ask for a refund if you’re not completely satisfied. We have a few words of caution, though.
According to Bluehost’s terms, here’s what does and doesn’t fall under that guarantee:
- You can only get refunds on the web hosting cost, not any other products like domains or other add-ons.
- Bluehost would deduct $15.99 if you received a free domain name in your plan.
- Bluehost does not refund any requests after 30 days.
24/7 Customer Support
We all need technical help. It is very important that you choose a web hosting company that offers help and support when you need it.
Bluehost maintains a huge library of articles, step-by-step guides, and video tutorials as part of its extensive knowledge base. This is a great help for beginners and the most common problems can be solved quickly with a simple search.
However, sometimes you may need to speak to a person for further help.
Bluehost offers a 24/7 support system where you can speak with representatives of their support team via live chat or phone support. This is really useful when you need quick help from technical support staff.
Bluehost has an amazing live chat support system that can save you a lot of time-solving technical problems. Bluehost recently decided to remove ticket-based support to focus on the personal approach to live chat and phone support.
However, some users may still miss out on the ticket-based support system, which is particularly good if their issue cannot be resolved in a live chat or phone session.
Comparing the Best Web Hosting Services On The Market
We have put so much effort into reviewing different web hosting services. Below are some of the other web hosting providers.
- Hostinger – Best web hosting for most users. Read full review.
- HostGator – Best web hosting service for scaling on a budget. Read full review.
Overall, Bluehost is the most popular web hosting service for good reason.
With extensive product offerings like WordPress hosting, shared hosting, and dedicated hosting and multi-tiered pricing plans, we think most users will enjoy the Bluehost experience.
So what are you waiting for? Bluehost can be a great and reliable option for your websites. That too at a reasonable price.
Is Bluehost a good hosting company?
Bluehost’s customer support, good uptime, and affordable beginner plans make it a reliable hosting provider. If you are looking for greater reliability, Bluehost is a great option. That is why we have rated it as the best overall hosting provider on the market.
Is Bluehost good for beginners?
Bluehost particularly appeals to beginners because it offers the basic needs for a WordPress site to be up and running. With plans starting at $ 2.95 a month, 24/7 live chat support, and a free SSL certificate and domain name included for the first year, bloggers and small businesses they can start their blog at affordable prices.
Is Bluehost better than GoDaddy?
Overall, Bluehost offers better value, with plans starting at just $2.95/month. The pricing of all Bluehost plans does increase after your initial hosting period, but overall they still work out to be cheaper than GoDaddy. Bluehost also offers more storage than GoDaddy, free SSL and free domain.