Review of Bluehost - Honey Web Hosting

Review of Bluehost

bluehost

About Bluehost

Bluehost is a very popular and leading WordPress web hosting company that was founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Provo, Utah in the United States. Today they have more than 750 working staff and over 2 million websites all over the world.

Their WordPress hosting is considered one of the best in the industry. They have a strong reputation in the market and today they are running for almost 20 years.

Now let’s take a brief look at their pros.

The pros of Bluehost:

Uptime guarantee-

When it comes to choosing a web host, uptime is one of the most critical aspects. It should be one of your top priorities because if your site is down users will not be able to access your products or service. They may leave and go elsewhere.

Most of web host has good uptime between 99.91% and 99.93%. Bluehost is no less in this aspect.

Their average uptime during the last six months was 99.95%. so it’s a reliable site with no big outrage.

Cheap introductory price-

Their cheapest plan is priced at $2.95 per month if signed for 1 year. The regular price is $9.99 per month.

When you just one site, you get more than enough at this price. The features are 10 GB SSD storage, free SSL certificate for the 1st year, free CDN, and many more.  So it is worth the price. Also not to forget their fast page loading speeds and stable uptime makes the experience even smoother.

Beginner-friendly

There are some websites that are good for advanced users. But Bluehost is beginner-friendly and easy to use even if you are not tech-savvy.

Their customer panel is simple, self-explanatory and easy to understand.

Money-back guarantee

Bluehost follows the industry standards and for all of their hosting plans, they offer 30-day money-back guarantee like most of the host providers. You can definitely try out their services for 1 month as it is risk-free. If you are not satisfied you will get your refund. But make sure to ask before 30 days as after that your request won’t be approved.

Good customer support

Customer support is provided 24/7 over the phone, email ticketing and live chat. The response is quick and queries will all be answered by the customer support representatives in a very professional and timely manner.

Professional help won’t even be required for most of the time as their support library has a vast knowledge base for any questions be it easy too complex.

Free domain and SSL certificate

On signing up, Bluehost offers a free domain name for the 1st year.

They provide free SSL certificates with all of their plans. SSL protects your personal information, eCommerce transactions, sensitive data and connections between websites and your visitors.

Security

A wide range of security features is offered by Bluehost to protect your site from risks.

To filter out unwanted email, Apache Spam Assassin, Spam Experts, and Spam Hammer are the various spam prevention tools that are offered.  These tools come with Bluehost’s built-in email features that will secure email inboxes.

You will also find Cloudflare that secures your website, makes your site faster, reliable, and private and it provides security from DDoS attacks and malicious bots.

Based on what hosting plan you use, you will also get SSH (Secure Socket Shell) that protects files transfer.

To regularly scan for malware or remove malware, and protect against DDoS attacks and unwanted spam extra security like SiteLock is also provided.

All these security features come with high-tier hosting plans.

Free site transfer-

If you want to switch to the hosting plan of Bluehost when you already have a site then you have an advantage. Free site transfer is offered by them on all of their plans.

To avail of these free services, there are some terms. Firstly, free transfer only if it is a WordPress site.  Next, Site migration should be done within the initial 30 days after signing up with a hosting plan.

Like other web hosts, they too have a few downfalls. Let’s take a look at these.

The cons of Bluehost:

High renewal rate

For the first year, Bluehost offers a cheap price which is $2.95 per month. But once this initial period gets over, their renewal price skyrockets almost three times to $9.99 per month.

The renewal rates after one year:

  • ‘Basic’ introductory price is $2.95/month (renews at $9.99/month)
  • ‘Plus’ introductory price is $5.45/month (renews at $14.99/month)
  • ‘Choice Plus’ introductory price is $5.45/month (renews at $18.99/month)
  • ‘Pro’ introductory price is $13.95/month (renews at $28.99/month)

Limitations in their cheapest plan-

There are some restrictions in features when you choose their cheapest hosting plan.

You only get 1 website, and storage space of 10 GB and the only security feature you get is a free SSL certificate just for the 1st year. You need to purchase a higher-priced plan if you want more security or if you have multiple sites and this is expensive twice the cheapest plan.

This is not something new in the web hosting industry. Many web host providers practice this.

There is competition in the industry about who can provide the cheapest price to attract more users.

Site migration is not free-.

There are many hosting companies that offer free site migration but free migration is not offered by Bluehost to move an existing site to their server unless it is a WordPress site. You can manually migrate the site by uploading website files to the file manager and configuring it. Else you can purchase their migration service. The migration specialist can migrate any website all from their end including 20 email accounts at $149.99 one-time fee.

Servers are located only in U.S-

Their primary data center is located in Utah, USA. So audiences coming outside of North America may experience slow server speed and page loading speed.

No Automatic backup

Automatic backup is not available for Bluehost’s ‘Basic’ and ‘Plus’ shared hosting plans. If you want automatic backup then you need to pay an additional fee of $3.99 per domain per month or $47.88 per domain per year.

Overall review

They provide diverse plans with very good features for every budget type according to your needs. Even if there are some drawbacks their reputation is top-notch and their services have made many customers quite happy. They are a reliable hosting with solid uptime and responsive and good customer support.

The thing that we didn’t like is that they try to upsell a lot and their starter plan has some limitations. But that’s okay if your site is small or you are a novice to this industry.

Is Bluehost recommended?

Yes. It is.

Many websites ranked Bluehost as the no. 1 web hosting provider. To build your website in an easy manner they offer various hosting features with lots of features.

Their customer service agent is knowledgeable and ready to help you 24/7.

Even if your budget is low, they cater to all segments of people and have hosting for all of them. Their starter plan is affordable for people on a tight budget.

So if you are a beginner, you can use their starter plan and once your website grows you can upgrade to the next tier hosting plans correspondingly.

Why should WordPress be used if you are looking to use Bluehost?

They are committed to WordPress and are one of the best WordPress web providers that are running it for more than 10 years. They have WordPress experts in their team who are very dedicated to providing the best to the customers. For their WordPress core development, they also have dedicated engineers. They claim that no one understands WordPress better than them.

What are alternatives to Bluehost?

A2 and DreamHost are better than BlueHost in terms of price and performance. GreenGeeks and SiteGround are also good.

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