Bluehost review, is it worth it in 2024?

Hi, I am Praneeth,

In this blog, you will learn everything related to whether is Bluehost a good hosting company or not.

Without further ado let’s get started,

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What is Bluehost and what are their top plans and features?

Bluehost is a web hosting company owned by EIG.

Bluehost is one of the largest of the top 20 web hosting providers in the world.

Bluehost has been founded in 2003 and so far it has hosted over 2 million websites.

Bluehost sells things including these,

  • Shared hosting.
  • Managed wordpress hosting.
  • VPS hosting.
  • Dedicated hosting.
  • Domain names.

Since Bluehost is famous for its cheap shared hosting plans,

Here is a breakdown of shared hosting plans and features in a table form.

All the pricing offers are for 36 months plan of Bluehost shared hosting, the pricing increases for 24 and 12 months plan of the shared hosting.

You can see the shared hosting plan pricing on its official website here.

If you are interested in higher plans of Bluehost, you can check out the higher plans here,

Is Bluehost worth it.

Bluehost is a good hosting company as a lot of good things are there about Bluehost which are worth noticing.

By the way, click on the link to activate your special discount of 65% off on your first signup with Bluehost.

Let’s see some good things and bad things about Bluehost hosting you should know before checking it out.

Here is a quick overview of the good things and bad things about Bluehost hosting company.

Serial NumberGood things about Bluehost hosting.Problems with Bluehost hosting.
1.It is a cheap web hosting service.Backups.
2.It offers a free domain and SSL certificate.Higher renewal charges.
3.It has 24 by 7 customer support.

Being acquired and owned by

EIG.

4.It has 99% uptime and loading speed of the websiteServers are located in the USA only
5.The hosting this officially recommended by WordPressThe cheapest price is only for 36 months plan without a monthly subscription.
6.The hosting is highly optimized for WordPress.It has upsold for additional functionalities and features.
7.Improve website security. 
8.It offers unlimited storage and bandwidth in all the plans. 
9.it has a beginner-friendly control panel and dashboard. 
10.It has a 30-day money-back guarantee 
11.It has hosted over 2 million websites. 
12.you can install any other open-source software. 
13.It is easy to upgrade to higher plans. 
14.It has a high overall customer satisfaction rate. 

Let’s see all the advantages or benefits of Bluehost in detail.

before that if you want to signup to bluehost hosting then,

14 good things about Bluehost hosting.

Here are 14 advantages of choosing Bluehost hosting for your website.

  1. It is cheap

Bluehost’s cheapest plan starts from 199 INR or 2.95 USD a month.

It is cheap because we get a lot of things for free inclusion in the plan.

  • Free domain and SSL.
  • Free CDN and caching.
  • Free wordpress security updates.

And much more,

  1. You get a domain name, domain privacy, and SSL Certificate free for a year.

starting from the shared plans to all the different plans and stages that Bluehost offers like VPS and dedicated hosting, you get a domain name and SSL certificate for free in all the plans for a year.

In most of the plans apart from the basic shared hosting plan, you also get unlimited subdomains and parked domains for free.

You also get domain privacy protection for free for higher shared hosting plans apart from the basic one.

Speaking about SSL certificates,

Google made SSL certificates an important part of website security and Google is very cautious to make sure that websites have an SSL certificate and stop ranking websites that won’t have this in search results because SSL certificate keeps crucial information of users like,

  • Credit card information.
  • Bank numbers and details.
  • Account passwords and details.

Safe from hackers by turning the information that is encrypted between user and website.

It stops hackers from hacking the important details of the user when he enters those details on the website.

it’s very important to have an SSL certificate installed or enabled on your website as it is a huge factor of website security to users

  1. It has 24/7 customer support and excellent resources. 

Bluehost also offers 24/7 phone call support, live chat support, email support, social media support.

If there is something that highly differentiates Bluehost from other hosting providers is its customer support.

Other than human level interaction in customer support you also have a lot of extensive and comprehensive resources at your fingertips.

There are a lot of blogs, guides, and video tutorials, which can come in handy while solving problems with your website.

You as the user also have the freedom to rate your experience with the customer support team at the end of every live chat support to make sure that you get a good experience or you can make sure rating less for that person for bad customer support.

  1. It has great Uptime and loading speed of the website.

As per website builder expert, Bluehost has an uptime of 99.98% in their experiment and the loading speed of the average website is 581 ms.

Other than that Bluehost offers a few other features that increase one of the most important aspects of web hosting and websites.

There are a few features and things about Bluehost hosting that contribute to improving the speed and uptime of servers and website,

  • Inbuilt browser level caching.
  • Connect website to Cloudflare CDN.
  • Optimize your website for faster speed in Cpanel.
  • Easily and safely manage files of a website with SFTP and SSH to improve speed.
  • Latest WordPress version and PHP level installation for faster loading speed.
  • HTTP 2 support for faster website loading on the browser.
  • Regular maintenance of hosting servers and improved security of data centers to deliver faster server response time and speed of websites.

The loading speed and uptime of the website is really good and there is no compromise in the performance of the Bluehost hosting.

  1. The hosting is officially recommended by wordpress since 2005.

Bluehost hosting is been recommended by wordpress CMS which powers over 39% of all the websites on the internet.

WordPress recommends Bluehost as the top wordpress hosting since 2005.

Hence it is worth noticing.

  1. The hosting is highly optimized for WordPress websites.

Because wordpress itself which is the largest open source content management system in the world recommends hosting so Bluehost is assuming the responsibility quite well.

To make its hosting more optimized for wordpress websites there are many features which help it to do so like,

  • One-click automatic wordpress installation with a softaculous auto-installer.
  • Automatic wordpress security updates.
  • Custom themes for WordPress.
  • Free wordpress guided tour with blue flash that connects wordpress users to Bluehost experts mostly useful for beginners of WordPress.
  • Latest WordPress version and PHP 7.3 installation.
  • Free 1 wordpress site migration.
  • Free WordPress staging environment to test things.

There is a big reason why Bluehost is considered to be one of the best wordpress hosting services on the internet, now you know why Bluehost is the best for WordPress.

  1. Improved Website security.

With Bluehost, there are many security features which you can enjoy including things like these,

  • Free Firewall protection of your website.
  • 24/7 monitoring of traffic to the servers to avoid hacks and attacks.
  • Free SSL certificates.
  • Free domain privacy protection in some plans.
  •  Codeguard basic for automatic backups downloads the backups on your computer and one-click restoration option.
  • Two-factor authentication of your Bluehost account login.
  • Sitelock features to protect your website from malware and other online threats.
  • Automatic WordPress security and latest versions of updates and easy upgrades
  • Website backups for free
  • Notifications of themes and plugins updates.
  • Free hotlink protection.
  • Free spam protection.
  • Free SSH and SFTP Access.
  • Improved Architecture of data centers and safety of hosting servers at priority.

The security of the websites of Bluehost is not compromised.

  1. It offers Unlimited storage and bandwidth in all the plans.

Another thing that comes in handy with Bluehost hosting is that you get unlimited storage capacity and unlimited bandwidth in all the plans and stages of the hosting.

Of course in the shared hosting basic plan you get only 50 GB of limited storage but it is quite abundant or I should say unlimited because websites do not need storage more than 10GB irrespective of how large it is, they don’t take much storage.

Talking about the bandwidth it is unlimited in shared hosting all the plans from basic to Pro and in all stages of hosting.

Unlimited bandwidth there is no limitation to the traffic of the website you can have unlimited traffic to your website without any large hassles even in the basic plan of shared hosting.

  1. It has a Great beginner’s friendly dashboard and control panel.

One of the good things that make Bluehost the best hosting for beginners and wordpress is that it has got a great dashboard and control panel.

The dashboard is the basic setup of your Bluehost account from where you can easily navigate to different sections and complete important things about your host and login to your website.

Control panel is a place where you can control all the settings or options and things of your website including things like these,

  • Website database with servers like SFTP and SSH access.
  • Install wordpress or any other open-source software.
  • You can manage all your emails and configurations.
  • You can manage all of your domains and sub-domains and create new ones easily.
  • You can enable or disable the SSL certificate of your website.

The Bluehost control panel is one of the highly simplistic yet easy to understand and beginner-focused control panels among the different hosting providers.

  1. It provides a 30-day money-back guarantee.

You can get a 30 days money-back guarantee after signing up for the hosting irrespective of which plan or for which stage you have got the plan you will get your money back without any questions asked in a couple of working days.

If you include a free domain name while buying the hosting then,

15 dollars will be deducted from your refund amount due to the domain charge and you can keep the domain with you forever as long as you keep on renewing it.

  1. It has hosted 2 million websites so far.

Currently, Bluehost manages over 2 million websites on the internet, to be honest, this is a very big number and achievement of Bluehost.

With this, you can rely on their hosting for sure because it manages a large number of websites other than yours so it is a highly reliable hosting option.

  1. You can install much other open-source software with auto-installer.

You can install much other open-source software like these,

  • Drupal.
  • Joomla.
  • Weebly.
  • Magneto.
  • Message forums.
  • Social networking scripts.
  • Moodle.

You can install up to 75such scripts and software in a single click like wordpress using softaculous auto installer software 

  1. Easy to upgrade to higher plans without any issues.

You can easily start from the basic plan of Bluehost in shared hosting and upgrade to higher plans without any hassles like moving the website or changes which might affect the traffic to your website in some way.

you can easily scale to higher plans with just a click of buttons.

  1. It has a higher overall customer satisfaction rate.

The overall customer satisfaction rate is pretty high with Bluehost hosting it offers everything that a beginner needs in a budget-friendly web host.

Apart from which basic shared plan you get unlimited website hosting access in all the other shared hosting plans with pretty good performance and reliability with features like Cloudflare, page speed grader, and Google apps integration.

You also get unlimited email accounts to access all the other shared hosting plans apart from the basic ones in your hosting plan.

With that said, let’s see the disadvantages of Bluehost.

6 bad things or problems with Bluehost.

Look, 

Nothing is perfect in the world,

No company in the world is perfect everyone has their flaws.

Bluehost is one of the largest 20 web hosting service providers has its disadvantages or drawbacks.

Let’s talk about all the drawbacks you could have if you use Bluehost hosting.

1. Higher renewal charges.

Renewal prices of Bluehost are quite expensive.

The prices and all the features that you get for free are only for the first sign up and as you continue using the hosting you will have to pay more to enjoy the features that you are currently using for free like domain name domain privacy and other features of the hosting.

You can see in the image below the renewal prices of the hosting plans.

They are double the price that you pay now for the first sign up.

This is not a big deal in hosting companies, the same scenario is happening with other hosting companies like siteground and dream host which are not a part of the EIG group.

This is how the hosting companies make their profit by giving the resources for free initially and costing it more after completion of the first term while renewing it.

This is the basic business model of all the web hosting companies.

You just can’t blame Bluehost alone for this thing.

This is the reason why you should use a 36-month term plan to get the most of Bluehost hosting at minimal costs and better features.

2. Being acquired and owned by EIG.

The main reason why those people hate Bluehost is because of this thing.

Bluehost is sold to Endurance International Group (EIG) on February 6, 2011.

EIG is an international IT services company which specializes in web hosting service.

EIG also owns several other hosting companies other than Bluehost including,

  • Host gator.
  • Hostinger.
  • Big rock.
  • Constant contact.
  • Image.
  • Reseller club.
  • Website builder.

The list is pretty big, you can see the list here.

The problem with EIG is that it has a bad reputation for things like,

  • Buying a lot of Webhosting companies and drastically making changes in its hosting like reducing features, changes in CPanel, changing equipment, moving its servers and data centers in its network.
  • It has a bad reputation for changing the current operational staff of the hosting to its staff to reduced costs.
  • It also reduces the customer support facilities which is why a few users complain Bluehost has slow customer support response rates and inexperienced customer support services.
  • It has complete control over the pricing on the hosting plans.
  • The hosting companies which are owned under EIG have seen many outrages like in 2013 and 2017 including Bluehost and Hostgator where servers crashed a lot due to excessive load of different websites on few servers which led to lots of technical issues and loading problems but it is not repeated anymore now.

Anyhow, Bluehost hosting does not seem to have much effect from EIG after that.

It is not all negative either.

They did take some positive changes in recent times including updating its data centers, improving its security and adding new security features, and improving customer support and servers.

We can see the changes results in improved performance of the hosting and customer support.

People complain the customer support is not experienced or slow, I have not seen much difference in any way in my experience.

If you are complaining about customer support without being able to wait for a couple of minutes then you should wait.

Don’t be too judgemental, at least in my experience I have not seen any issues with performance and customer support.

3. Servers location.

The hosting servers are located in a 50000 square feet facility in Utah employing more than 750 people for the work and maintenance.

The servers are located in America only so bloggers who own websites in countries other than America like India might face low loading times.

Bluehost offers the ideal solution for bloggers who have traffic from countries other than America by offering free worldwide CDN.

The Bluehost has connected with Cloudflare CDN to increase speed which can solve most of its loading issues.

For your kind information, CDN is the content delivery network where it is a network of different servers, and when your website is connected with this network, 

A copy of your website is created on all of these different servers located in different places, the copy of the website gets updated from time to time but it helps load the website fast.

CDN makes it easy for websites to load fast by connecting the browser which is requesting the webpage and website by showing the website from the nearest server available to the browser which is connected by CDN,

This reduces initial server response time and reducing the loading speed of the website.

It is in the simple sense, the smaller the distance of the server from users the lower the loading speed of the website will be and vice versa.

4. The cheapest price and discount are for 36 months without the monthly subscription.

The cheapest price of hosting is available for only a 36-month plan.

It is not for 12 months plan.

There is no monthly subscription plan, you either have to take 12 months, 24 months, 36 months, or 60 months plan at once.

The positive thing about this thing with a cheap plan being for 36 months is that, 

It costs very less for you, you can host unlimited websites, keep working on your website for longer than wasting your money or losing motivation for work.

You can save a lot of money and time with the amazing features that hosting offers.

5. Lots of upsells for higher features.

There are a lot of upsells that Bluehost does while checking the details of hosting and during final payment lines.

Bluehost includes things like these.

Upsells include,

  • Site guard for security of website from malware.
  • Codeguard for automated backups.
  • SEO tools that Bluehost offers for better ranking in search engines with its tools.
  • Domain privacy for basic shared plans and free for a year in higher plans.
  • Premium SSL certificates, 50 USD for a positive SSL which is basic in premium SSL add-on for a year.
  • Dedicated IP addresses were 5.99 USD in shared plan and 18 USD in higher stages like VPS and dedicated for a month billed annually.
  • Spam experts mail filtering for 3 USD a month as renewal price, free in higher plans other than basic shared for a year.
  • Install plugins and themes automatically in wordpress like jetpack and optimistic.
  • Upsell premium themes, plugins, and services in the Bluehost marketplace in the dashboard.

Though there are these upsells nothing is too aggressive.

You can easily uncheck them while completing your payment.

Overall the Bluehost hosting is definitely a good web hosting and if you want to use Bluehost hosting for your website,

Ending remarks.

There you go, I have answered everything related to Bluehost hosting whether it is a good company or not in detail.

Do comment on what do you think about blue host hosting in the comment section below.

Share the blog with your family and friends if you found it helpful, sharing is caring.

I will catch you next time till then keep, learning and keep growing.