Bluehost Web Hosting Review 2022

Founded in 2003, Bluehost has spent the last two decades establishing itself as one of the largest web hosts providers, home to over two million domain names. In addition to providing a variety of shared resources, VPS and dedicated hosting plans, the provider has focused its energy for the last 10 years on being the best WordPress Hosting provider in the market.

The hosting provider prides itself on having optimized plans for WordPress and Woo Commerce Hosting. Bluehost has an experienced team of WordPress specialists available to address any queries you may have to get the most out of your server implementation.

While the plans may seem a bit more expensive than their peers, a quick look at the features on offer will dispel such notions. Unlike other hosting providers that charge a premium for some of the most basic features like SSL Certificates Bluehost offers a number of features as part of all of their plans.

Bluehost does not offer low-priced underpowered plans that lack essential features, forcing you to upgrade to more expensive premium plans. You can take advantage of the 30-day free trial to determine if Bluehost's plans can meet your needs before making a long-term commitment.

Bluehost subscription options:

12-month plan: $2.75 per month ($33 total cost):

Email hosting options are limited with only 5 supported accounts and a tiny 100MB inbox for each, and unfortunately this is not detailed in the website comparison table. Still, otherwise, it is a perfectly adequate product for many users and is reasonably priced at $2.95 per month for 36 months, which increases to $7.99 on renewal. (Sign up for a minimum of 12 months and you'll pay an initial $4.95.)

The Choice plus Plan supports unlimited email accounts, can be used with as many domains as you need, and adds site support, privacy, and domain protection. It is available from $5.45 a month for 36 months, which is tempting, though it renews at $14.99 (opt for the annual plan and its $7.95 a month initially).

The Pro Account boosts performance, offers a dedicated IP, and offers a premium SSL certificate starting at $13.95/month for 36 months ($14.95/year), $23.99 on renewal.

Payments are protected by a 30-day money-back guarantee. That is the industry standard and should be enough to confirm that Bluehost is the right host for you, but some providers go further. In Motion Hosting, for example, offers an exceptional 90-day guarantee.

If you need more information, there is a detailed list of what is included in each shared hosting plan on Bluehost Support Page. Bluehost offers quality WordPress plans with some powerful extras 

Bluehost has only a minimal range of app hosting plans, but it pretty much manages to cover the essentials: WordPress and simple eCommerce.

The WordPress Hosting Planit's little more than the same shared hosting plans, with the same price (starting at $2.95/month initially, $7.99 on renewal), and more emphasis on some WordPress-specific features (Bluehost updates WordPress automatically, plus there's some documentation and support WordPress decent).

Bluehost's Plan WordPress Pro more capable, giving you unlimited storage, bandwidth and websites, spam filtering, CDN integration and more.

Powerful WordPress-related extras include a staging environment, a convenient way to create and work on a copy of your existing site. If you're making some big changes, like replacing a theme, swapping one plugin for another, the staging feature allows you to test them without risking causing issues on your production site.

Business-oriented features include Jetpack Site Analytics, Premium or Pro (depending on your plan), a marketing center, PayPal integration, and more.

These are capable products and prices are reasonable from a standard $19.95 a month for three years ($29.99 on renewal) to $49.95 ($59.99).

If you only manage one site and don't need the commercial features, check out WordPress Pro from IONOS., too. It limits your storage and supports only one website, but gives you dedicated resources (from 1 vCPU and 1 GB RAM) and Varnish-based caching on the Pro plan. Prices start at $18/month, no contract required long-term.

Bluehost's eCommerce product it's essentially shared hosting with WordPress, Woo-Commerce, and Storefront themes pre-installed, a dedicated IP address, and some marketing credits (spend $25 on a Microsoft Advertising or Google Ads account, get $100 credit).

Again, prices are reasonable, starting at $6.95 a month (renewal at $13.99). Plans can be useful if you're new to eCommerce, but experienced users can get the same results if they find their preferred shared hosting package and use Softaculous (or any other auto-installer) to set up a web store themselves.

Servers:

Bluehost's VPS Plans It may not seem cheap, at least initially, but that's because the company doesn't try to cut corners to hit a low title price.

VPS products start at $18.99 for 36 months ($29.99) on renewal, for example, more expensive than some. But the specs are decent and include 2 CPU cores and 2GB of RAM, double the allocation you'll get with many starter VPS setups, along with 30GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth. Bluehost's custom control panel also makes their service easy to manage.

If you agree to a more basic system, Hostwinds Managed VPS Plansthey start at $5.17 per month (renews at $10.99). But that only gets you 1 CPU core, 1GB of RAM, 30GB of storage, and 1TB of bandwidth. Upgrade to a Hostwinds plan with 2 cores, 4GB RAM, and 2TB bandwidth and you'll pay $18.80, renewing at $39.99, comparable to Bluehost's price considering the specs.

Bluehost's range of dedicated hostingit's limited, with just three basic plans and no significant configuration options. The hardware specs are decent though, and with prices starting at $79.99 per month for 3 years (renewing at $119.99) for a quad-core configuration, 500GB of storage, 4GB of RAM, and 5TB of bandwidth, they are cheaper than high-end VPS products from some providers.

Creating a website:

Paying for our Bluehost plan was quick and easy, and after handing over our cash, a wizard walked us through the initial setup of the site. This was much more interesting than the usual “what is your site called?” questions, asking, for example, if we needed a blog, where your posts should appear (the home page, somewhere else), and more. That's good news, as it allows Bluehost to do a much better job of configuring the site to suit your needs.

Another message asked if we needed a web store. Okay, the wizard also installs and activates Woo Commerce, the powerful WordPress eCommerce platform.

After asking us about the goals of our website and allowing us to choose a theme, the wizard finally installed WordPress and redirected us to the Bluehost control panel.

While many web hosts send you to a bland landing page with basic details about your account, or perhaps a highly technical control panel, Bluehost starts with a simple task-based control panel.

For example, the site presented us with five actions: customize the site design (colors, fonts, layouts), add a contact page, add content, set up your store, add a product or service (to the store).

This approach can't do everything for you. When we chose 'Add Content', for example, we were taken to the WordPress 'Pages' manual, but it was left to us to figure out how to add or edit a new page. Still, that's only to be expected, and Bluehost's overall system offers a lot more help and assistance to beginners than is normal on the course.

Experienced users probably won't be interested in any of this grip, but Bluehost hasn't forgotten them. Tapping on the Advanced option in the sidebar gives users access to a full-featured cPanel setup with a file manager, FTP settings, phpMyAdmin and MySQL administration, email account creation, metrics, security options and more.

If you haven't installed WordPress before, Softaculous is available to automatically configure hundreds of top applications: Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop, osCommerce and other blogs, wikis, forums, image galleries and more (see the full list on the softaculous site). 24/7 support starts with a comprehensive knowledge base (Image credit: Bluehost)

Bluehost support starts on the website with a convenient system alert page. Not only does this provide general warnings about major outages, but you can also use it to check information on any domain or server (this even allows you to see server load).

Bluehost's knowledge base organizes your content into various well-chosen categories: FAQ, Domain, Email, WordPress, Dashboard, Account, and more.

Click on any category and the site will display a decent selection of starter articles. For example, click Email and you'll see articles including Create an account, Set up an email client, and Manage your accounts—what you're most likely to want to know about.

You can also search for your preferred keywords, and the engine does a reasonable job of finding reasonable results.

When we searched for 'import WordPress', for example, the site listed 'How to migrate an existing WordPress.com site' and 'How to migrate a WordPress site' as its first two articles, and there were other relevant articles just a little way down the list. the list ('How to transfer Blogger to your WordPress').

Here too there is quality content. Articles like ' How to install WordPress' are short but to the point and (where possible) give you several options to solve your current problem. They also usually link to related content, so once you've found a relevant article, it will usually direct you to many more.

If the website can't help you, support is available 24/7 via email, phone, and live chat.

We tested live chat support by providing our email address and details and posting a simple question about the product. Within a couple of minutes, an agent arrived, told us everything we needed to know, and answered a couple of follow-up questions with ease.

We use google's pagespeed insight website speed test, and Bitcatcha to test the performance of our Bluehost site 

Performance:

To test Bluehost's performance, we set up a very simple static website and used Uptime.com to check its availability and response time for a week.

The company managed 100% uptime, which works for us. Note that we were also testing the most basic shared hosting plan; if Bluehost is going to have problems, we hope they show up here.

Response times ranged from 257ms to 629ms, with an average of 332ms, putting the company 19th out of 27 vendors we were monitoring at the time. While that's not great, keep in mind that the differences in response times between the good providers are generally very small (only 60ms separates the ten hosts immediately above Bluehost). Unless you're running your own benchmarks, you may not notice any difference.

Bluehost Scored Best in Dotcom-Tools' Website Speed Test, which measures site download speed from 16 locations in Europe and the US Average page load time was 748ms, faster than top providers and twice as fast as some top-tier competitors short.

To complete our tests, we ran the Bitcatcha Server Speed Checker on our test site. This type of one-time testing can't tell us as much as Uptime.com's ongoing monitoring, but it was still good to see Bluehost returning to excellent speeds, particularly from US locations. Bitcatcha was certainly impressed, giving our server the highest rating. A+ highest.

Final Verdict:

Bluehost's products are not as configurable as some of the competition. However, their plans are well specified, with 100% uptime and fast download times during testing, and quality live chat support available if you need it.