Choosing a hosting provider before you launch your WordPress website is tough – not because there aren’t enough hosting providers – but because there are too many. Each of these hosting providers seem to have different pricing structures and offerings – so how do you pick the best hosting provider?
Among all the other players in the web hosting industry, Bluehost is probably one of the oldest and most recommended hosting providers. In fact, Bluehost is the official recommendation of WordPress. So, is it the right choice for you? Would trusting Bluehost with your most precious business asset – your website – be the right decision for your business?
Let’s find out!
What is Bluehost?
Started in 2003, by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth, Bluehost is a popular hosting provider with 750+ dedicated team members.
Bluehost powers a whopping 2 million websites ( of which over 1 million are WordPress) websites around the world. With its versatile pricing plans and rock-solid customer support services, Bluehost is a popular choice for many websites.
Bluehost offers a variety of web hosting services such as VPS hosting, shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and WordPress hosting. With its low introductory prices and the long-standing relationship it has with WordPress, Bluehost has become one of the most reputed web hosting companies in the market.
Who is Bluehost for?
If you have an idea of how you want your website to look like but don’t know how to code, Bluehost can be an ideal choice for you. If you really want to start a website for your business but can’t invest a ton of money in it right now, Bluehost has good starter plans. If you know absolutely nothing about website building, I would say, Bluehost is the perfect choice for you. Even if you are a trained programmer and know your business well, Bluehost is still recommended.
For novices who want to still build their own website – Bluehost offers a complete package of website builder software. With the help of the website builder software solution, you can simply drag and drop texts or images to build your WordPress website.
Bluehost’s Offerings
Let’s take a look at what Bluehost has to offer, so you can make an informed choice…
Hosting Packages
Bluehost offers six hosting packages including shared hosting, cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, WooCommerce hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting. Each package has around three or four different pricing plans, which gives you multiple options to choose from. If you are just starting out, you could pick a lower plan and upgrade when you are ready to scale your website.
Security Features
With effective antispam tools such as Spam Hammer, Spam Experts, and Apache Span Assassin, Bluehost provides excellent security features for the websites it hosts. Bluehost also offers CloudFlare, which helps in protecting your website and improving its overall performance. By creating appropriate filters, you can customize your very own safety features. WordPress hosting has integrated SiteLock features – SiteLock Security, Advanced CDN and SiteLock WAF.
SEO Tools
As part of Bluehost’s commitment to continuous improvement – it launched a set of SEO Tools earlier this month. This easy-to-use, intuitive tool assigns your website a score and also helps you build a SEO plan – so that you can be prompted for important SEO actions like adding a SSL or creating a profile – and track your SEO milestones right from Bluehost dashboard. You can even choose to sign up for a monthly SEO report for your website with a clear list of action items for you.
Pretty neat, right?
Website Building Tools
Bluehost provides an excellent website builder and lots of website management tools such as managing emails, assessing website statistics, multiple domain management, etc. Building a WordPress website with Bluehost becomes extremely easy, due to the flexibility and functionality of the website builder it offers. Plugins on Mojo’s Marketplace are connected to your dashboard – so you can easily browse and pick one that you need.
Backups
Irrespective of which plan you choose, every Bluehost plan includes dedicated backup storage and all backups are automated – so you can rest assured your data is in safe hands.
Upgrades
As your website gains momentum, you will want to scale – Bluehost allows you to easily add more CPU, RAM, and SAN storage dynamically, whenever you need it with just 1-click.
Customer Support Services
Needless to say, when it comes to your website, you can’t take any chances, with customer support. Customer support offered by Bluehost includes 24×7 telephone support, ticket based support system, self-help system,online chat, as well as a handy knowledge base, detailed guides, and YouTube Video tutorials. Personally, I have had a very good experience with the Bluehost’s customer support and was impressed with their prompt and helpful responses.
Why Bluehost is the right Choice for WordPress Hosting
- Bluehost offers a 30-days money back guarantee, which is a pretty decent deal in a market flooded with web hosting providers
- Bluehost hosting also offers Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) services with localized SEO tactics, which can be extremely helpful for websites to improve their chances to rank on search engines
- The standard cPanel and website builder tools provided by Bluehost make it very easy to build a WordPress website by yourself
- The clean design and accessibility of the control panel, and one-click installation of WordPress makes Bluehost a user-friendly web hosting provider
- Cloud hosting enables websites with heavy traffic including online stores to maintain its uptime and performance level – while also leveraging the added security layer the cloud provides
- Reliable security features make Bluehost hosting a trustworthy web hosting platform
- A business with a conscience –
Bluehost regularly sponsors WordCamps worldwide and has also dedicated two engineers to full-time WordPress CORE development. - Offers – From time to time, Bluehost runs offers that might include a free domain, free SSL with their WordPress Hosting packages.
Bluehost Pricing Plans
Cheaper and scalable introductory prices is one of the most common factors why people opt for Bluehost. Also, the prices, mentioned here may change as the on site offers change.
Shared Hosting
Many clients share one server – you still get unlimited network bandwidth and it is more economical than getting a dedicated server for yourself.
- Basic: $3.95 per month.
- Plus: $5.95 per month.
- Prime: $5.95 per month. (Bluehost-recommended)
Cloud Hosting
If uptime is the most critical success factor for your website, cloud hosting is a safe bet.
With this package, your website is automatically mirrored across three unique storage areas, so should the hardware fail on one of the devices, at least one copy will continue functioning while the other two copies are working to fix the problem.
Minimum features – 2 GB RAM, 2 CPUs, 100 GB of disk space.
- Basic: $6.95 per month.
- Performance: $8.95 per month. (Bluehost-recommended)
- Prime: $15.95 per month.
Managed WordPress Hosting
This is a service in which your hosting provider, in this case, Bluehost – is responsible for keeping your WordPress installation up to date. Built on cPanel, this is a virtual dedicated server offering.
- WP Standard: $19.99 per month. (Bluehost-recommended)
- WP Enhanced: $29.99 per month.
- WP Premium: $39.99 per month.
- WP Ultimate: $49.99 per month.
WooCommerce Hosting
Bluehost is offering a special package, in which WordPress Hosting and WooCommerce Hosting will cost you around $6.95 per month.
VPS Hosting
VPS Hosting with Instant Provisioning – no waiting. Usually, VPS solutions take hours to get up and running, Bluehost however has designed their VPS servers to provision as soon as you sign up.
- Standard: $19.99 per month.
- Enhances: $29.99 per month. (Bluehost-recommended)
- Ultimate: $59.99 per month.
Dedicated Hosting
A dedicated hosting service is literally a single server completely allocated for your website. This is unlike shared hosting services where hundreds of clients might share a single service. If you expect high-volume traffic on your website or you need to support multiple, complicated cloud-based applications, then this package is recommended for your website.
Minimum features – 4 GB RAM, 3 IP addresses, 500 GB of disk space.
- Standard: $79.99 per month.
- Enhanced: $99.99 per month. (Bluehost-recommended)
- Premium: $119.99 per month.
In Conclusion
To sum up the review – Bluehost is a good option for hosting small or mid-sized websites, especially WordPress websites. Reliability and Performance are important focus areas for Bluehost – and that’s why it is one of the most popular web hosting platforms. It’s easy-to-use setup and affordable introductory prices, make it a good hosting provider, worth trying out.
If you are still not sure which package is right for you, simply get online and chat with the Bluehost team – so they can recommend an appropriate plan for you.
6 Comments on “Bluehost Review– ‘WordPress-Recommended’ Hosting Provider”
Hey, what are your thoughts about GoDaddy? My website is currently hosted on that platform and I get an average of 500-1000 visitors on my blog each month shall I upgrade to Bluehost for better speed?
At that traffic level, most hosting providers should be fine. But Bluehost is priced more reasonably than GoDaddy , so you can save some money by switching.
There are other great Wordpress hosting providers in the hosting market. Why not a comparison rather than a Bluehost ad? Whether it’s true or not – this comes across as a referral program that CyberChimps benefit from rather than advice.
I always use the blue host for website hosting. Because the blue host is one of the best WordPress hosting provider.
Blue host is one of the best hosting for WordPress site, I always recommend all to use it,
We’ve been developing WordPress sites for years and there a lot of better options out there than just BlueHost. The only reason you see BlueHost recommended all over the place is that they have a very aggressive affiliate program that pays handsomely for referrals.