Is Bluehost the right host for your website: Review
In this Bluehost review, I will tell you everything about the pros and cons of one of the most popular web hosting companies. They offer a wide range of products, from shared to dedicated hosting, Cloud, various packages for support, security and WordPress optimization, and more. If you’ve been looking for cheap hosting options, I’m sure Bluehost popped up in your search. The company has been around for quite a few years and they’ve since proven to be a great choice for many types of websites: blogs, e-commerce stores, and even business sites.
Disclosure: This website may earn a commission from links to products contained in the article. Please read to the end of the article before clicking a link. We use Bluehost to host all our websites.
PROS:
Affordable
The first pro you’ll find in (almost) any Bluehost review is the affordable price. There are various options available, from Basic to Pro, with features tailored for everyone’s needs. If you start at a smaller price and realize you need more, upgrading is very easy. But this is not everything! All plans include SSL, unmetered bandwidth, and one domain. And if you want to start working on your website, but haven’t picked the domain name yet, that’s OK! You can start creating your website and pick the domain when you are ready. Their basic plan is perfect for those who want to build just one website, be it a blog, a presentation website or an e-commerce store. The Plus and Choice Plus packages come with unlimited websites and extra security. Finally, the Pro plan offers a dedicated IP address and site backup on top of everything the other plans include.
Officially recommended by WordPress
With Bluehost, it is very easy to set up your website and start designing it the way you want it. Especially if you are using WordPress, you will see you can have a basic website up and running in under 30 minutes. Bluehost is, after all, recommended by WordPress, and you will understand why as soon as you start setting up your website. And if you are a complete beginner with WordPress, Bluehost offers some premium website builders. For those who do not want to use WordPress, the cPanel is also easy to use and offers a lot of flexibility regardless of what CMS you want to use or what database management tools you choose.
24/7 customer support
One of the things I love about Bluehost is their customer support. Not only is it available 24/7, but you also have several options for contacting them. You can send them a message, call them, or even easier – they have a live chat option. No more worrying about additional phone costs when you live in a different country or waiting for days or weeks to get an answer to your e-mail. There is usually a waiting time for the live chat, but I don’t recall ever waiting for more than 5 minutes. The people at Bluehost are always supportive and very knowledgable. Personally, I’ve never had a query left unanswered. They even helped me at one point when I had messed up my website due to my own mistake!
Their fantastic customer support is a perfect display of how Bluehost constantly works on improving its services. If you ask around, you will find many people who used Bluehost in 2017 and earlier. They will most likely tell you that it would take many days to get an answer to their queries because the ticketing system back then was very inefficient. Now you will receive a reply in the live chat in 5 minutes!
Cloudflare integration
Bluehost’s servers are not located all over the world. However, they compensate for this small inconvenient by integrating Cloudflare services for free. How does this influence your website? It’s easy. Cloudflare caches your content on servers all over the world. So when someone from the other side of the world accesses your website, it loads the content from a server nearby. This greatly improves the loading speed of the website.
Security
While backups and security solutions are not included in the lower-end plans, they are still available to anyone as an additional purchase. An SSL certificate is available for all websites, though, included those hosted with the Basic plan. Something offered to all users, regarding the plan they choose, is multi-factor authentication. It is an optional layer of security, but when added to a strong password, it makes websites almost impossible to hack.
CONS:
No Bluehost review would be complete without discussing the cons, so here are some of the ones we found.
No option for monthly payments
Despite the prices being listed per month, once you try to purchase your preferred plan, you will notice there’s no option to pay per month. The shortest available period is 12 months. This means you cannot buy just one month to test things out or compare with other hosting companies.
Site migration is not free
The best example here is website migration, which is offered for free by other companies, such as Siteground. Bluehost does offer help migrating your website, but you have to pay. If you are an advanced WordPress user, this will most likely not bother you as you might be able to migrate the website yourself. But for someone less experienced, who wishes to bring their website to Bluehost from another company, this is definitely a minus.
However, we recommend using a backup plug-in that can migrate your site if you want to transfer hosts. It is not likely for Bluehost to go down for any long amount of time but a high-end backup service will be able to migrate a current copy of your site to a new host in a matter of hours.
Other options
To create an honest Bluehost review, we will end by telling you about some of the other options for hosting. Two of the most known options are Siteground and Hostgator. They are both, like Bluehost, created with WordPress users in mind. Both are slightly more expensive. They are also newer on the market and thus don’t have the experience Bluehost has. They are considered good options for small businesses and new bloggers who do not expect a lot of traffic from the beginning. GoDaddy is another alternative. However, their hosting plan is not designed with WordPress users in mind, and beginners will most likely find it difficult to use.
Conclusion
While there are several web hosting options available, our preferred choice is Bluehost. It is a great option for beginners but also for those more advanced. It is customizable, easy to use, affordable, and has great customer services. It does have some inconveniences, such as a less than ideal pricing strategy, it makes up for it through all the other advantages offered.
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