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The Inside Scoop on Blue Host- An in depth review

Last Updated Feb 21, 2021

Bluehost is one of the ‘top’ hosting companies on the internet. Many bloggers turn to them for their affordable plans, and name recognition. In our opinion BlueHost is great for hosting small projects and eCommerce websites.

In terms of age, Bluehost is one of the oldest web hosts around, which is a good thing. Years of experience usually translates to better quality products; and with Bluehost their long standing in the market has allowed them to grow to be one of the biggest and most popular web host around. In-fact, they rank in the top five largest web hosts in the US and the world.

Although BlueHost is widely popular this may not directly translate to premium products or services. Many users complain of technical issues, and lackluster customer/technical support. We’ll dedicate a whole section to this later and let you know what we think.

Shared Hosting

BlueHost offers a slew of different hosting packages, essentially something for everyone. Their packages offer industry standard features such as “unlimited domains”, SSD storage, and 24/7 support; along with industry standard pricing.

Overall, there are a few plans and scenarios under which we might recommend BlueHost. If you’re looking to host a single domain, or a very simple type of website, BlueHost offers affordable options for that type of project.

We are also quite fond of the eCommerce hosting packages as they offer a lot great extras and helpful features for running online stores. Bloggers and professionals who want to host a lot of sites, and need awesome speed and technical support would be better off looking elsewhere.

PLANS and PRICE

Bluehost offers a few different types of hosting packages, depending on your needs. They cater basically to everyone; from a single website start up to dedicated VPS hosting for larger business.

• Basic Plan:

Their ‘Basic Plan’ starts at $2.95 USD/Month or $35 dollars/ year. Have a look at what it includes:

• 1 Website
• 50 GB SSD Storage
• Unmetered Bandwidth
• Free SSL Certificate
• Standard Performance
• 1 Included Domain
• 5 Parked Domains  
• 25 Sub Domains
• CDN network

This might be a good deal for someone who need a portfolio website, or something basic. If you are a developer, or plan on making more than one website, this would not be the plan for you.

Choice Plus

This is basically the plan that they try and push most people into
Here’s what it offers:

• Unlimited Websites
• Unlimited SSD Storage
• Unmetered Bandwidth
• Free SSL Certificate
• Standard Performance
• Unlimited Domains
• Unlimited Parked Domains
• Unlimited Sub Domains
• Spam Experts (no longer offered)
• Domain Privacy + Protection
• Site Backup – CodeGuard Basic
• 1 Office 365 Mailbox – Free 30 Days
• Automatic updates for 1 year
• CDN network

As you can see the main difference is you get unlimited websites, domains, and a site backup. This might be a good option for people who have several domains or need more storage on their website due to large amounts of content.

Pro Plan

This plan includes all the goodies. You get to have automated back ups for the entire length of your subscription, a dedicated IP, and a higher tier of performance.

• Unlimited Websites
• Unlimited SSD Storage
• Unmetered Bandwidth
• Free SSL Certificate
• Optimized Performance
• Domain Privacy + Protection
• Site Backup – CodeGuard Basic
• 1 Office 365 Mailbox – Free 30 Days
• Automatic updates
• CDN network

Renewal Rates

Opinion

Overall the plans and features are OK. We think they deliver a decent product at a mid-range price point. The “unlimited” SSD storage is something you’ll be hard pressed to find elsewhere, which is a pretty nice feature.

They are now also claiming that shared hosting resources are “protected”, shielding you from downtime and resource drain from other websites on the same shared server.

Our bottom line is that if you’re planning on hosting something simple like a portfolio, or just a basic landing page BlueHost is actually a pretty good option. For those who are running businesses online, have high traffic websites, or are into web development we recommend that you look elsewhere.

WordPress Hosting

WordPress hosting is basically just regular shared hosting that has been optimized for the use of WordPress. Boasting better security and speed, WordPress hosting might appeal to those who are looking for those features.

BlueHost offer WordPress hosting, and has recently (as of Oct 2020) added “Managed WP Hosting” packages, as well as WP eCommerce hosting. Let’s take a look.

Our Opinion

As you can see the plans are surprisingly similar to the shared hosting plans. There are a few differences:

• Automatic WordPress Core Updates
• Automatic WordPress Installation

We really enjoy the automatic WordPress core updates, but the automatic WordPress installation is hardly a feature. We’ve used many cPanels with 1 click installations, and we can confirm that manually installing WordPress on a cPanel website takes less than 3 minutes.

Overall, BlueHost WP hosting is essentially the same as the standard Shared Hosting, therefore we aren’t too excited about it. Unless you opt for their Managed plan, which offers extras like a dedicated IP address, we don’t see any great reasons to jump at these WP hosting plans.

All-in-all, if you’re using WordPress and like the Choice Plus plan, go for the WP package instead of the regular shared hosting.

BlueHost Managed WordPress

The Managed plans are for ONLY 1 WP website offering;

• unlimited web storage
• a staging environment
• unlimited traffic
• malware scan/removal
• multi-layered caching for increased speed
• Auto-scalability for traffic surges
• Advanced analytics and social media controls
• Daily Backups
• Jetpack Premium or Professional

One interesting feature of these BlueHost Managed WP plans is the included video compression. If your site is video or content-heavy this could prove extremely useful. The plans also boast extra features like “Marketing Center”, and BlueHost SEO tools- a place where you can monitor your traffic and social media from one dashboard.

Marketing Center

Manage your SEO, Social Media and Email traffic channels all in one dashboard. Monitor the performance of your website and marketing efforts from the same dashboard.

Detailed Analytics

Monitor your website traffic performance on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis. Already use Google Analytics? You can easily integrate your existing Google Analytics account into the Marketing Center to view your traffic channels

BlueHost

Renewal Rates

Opinion

We do like the marketing and SEO tools, as they are intuitive, easy to use, and overall and awesome feature. But once again, many of these features can be set up manually with a few plug-ins and some elbow grease.

Therefore, they mostly appeal to users who are unfamiliar with what’s actually available in terms of plug-ins and freemium applications. The added Jetpack Premium and Professional packages are great as they are worth about $100 in value, plus the domain privacy and malware protection are well worth it as well, adding great value for money.

The bottom line: If you have a single website that needs hosting, then the Managed WordPress plans are a great option. The renewal rate are quite steep, but if all you need is one site the overall cost isn’t too bad.

Nevertheless, we recommend bloggers and online entrepreneurs should look at packages that can accommodate more domains with more ‘fair’ renewal rates.

eCommerce/ WooCommerce Plans

If you run an online store, you’ve probably heard of WooCommerce. BlueHosts offers a special WordPress hosting for eCommerce sites. This includes extras like WooCommerce auto install, and a free domain.

Some store owners might be intrigued by these plans, offering some awesome integrations such as; shipping, payment, and accounting integrations. We always welcome stuff like this, but if you want to save money, most of these features can be found with free plugins and freemium services.

The downside of doing it yourself with plugins is; possible site bloat from too many plugins and disconnected dashboards, making managing them a little bet less convenient. Whereas, BlueHost will allow you to manage all these things from one convenient dashboard.

Features/BreakDown:

• A 2 hour call to help with site set up
• Host multiple websites
• Integrated payment options, calendar booking, and shipment options
• Choose your preferred shipping company
  • UPS
  • USPS
  • FedEX
• WooSlider
• Amazon Pay
• Stripe
• PayPal Pro
• Premium package includes a “plug-in bundle”
  • Access over $200 worth of the best WooCommerce plugins
• Currency Converter Widget
• Xero
  • Great for accounting and book keeping

Renewal Rates

Opinon

Out of all the plans that BlueHost is currently offering, we think that the eCommerce plans are the best thing they have on offer. The slew of integrations, plug-ins, and extra features really pumps the value of these plans to the next level.

You can host as many sites as you like on these plans as well. Meaning if you have a main eCommerce site, and a few side blogs this would be a pretty good option.

Nevertheless, some of the premium plugins will be restricted to your main store as the licenses are only valid for one website. With the addition of JetPack Premium and site monitoring tools, BlueHost really delivers with their eCommerce packages.

VPS and Dedicated Options

These options are available for those who require or want more from their web hosting. BlueHost prices and performance are about ‘industry standard’ in comparison to other big web hosts that offer VPS and dedicated hosting.

VPS:

Their VPS services offers:

• cPanel,
• root access,
• a free domain,
• 30-day money back guarantee
• 24/7 support

Keep in mind there are renewal fees for these plans as well. $29.99/mo for the standard plan $59.99/mo for the Enhanced plan, and $119.99/mo for the Ultimate plan. Lastly, you should consider looking at these plans if you’re starting off on shared hosting but plan, or hope to grow your business to a level that might require these types of plans. As you will likely be forced to move on to a VPS plan if your current BlueHost hosting exceeds their fair usage policy.

Dedicated Hosting

If you need the most robust hosting possible, BlueHost has you covered.

Hype, What Customers Have to Say and Our Take

If you go searching around Google, looking for “The Best Web Hosts” or “BlueHost Review”, you’re likely to come across quite the number of blogs and websites recommending BlueHost. Our goal here is to give you a honest review so you can make an informed decision about your purchases, not just recommend you something that might not be the best fit for you.

We want to address some of the drama floating around about BlueHost and hopefully set the record straight. They mainly concern: issues with customer support, reliability and speed.

We’ve seen that some people have mentioned low inodes, CPU, and RAM resources on the shared hosting. We contacted BlueHost directly to inquire about the issues, this is what they told us.

Inode count

are from 200k-300k depending on the tier of shared hosting. Some users were claiming they were as low as 50,000, which isn’t true.

CPU and RAM:

Typically hosts will offer 1-4 CPU cores on a plan, and 0.5-4GB of RAM. BlueHost was unable to give me an exact estimate on this but told me that an entire server runs on 512GB of ram split between all of the sites on that server. Therefore RAM allocation will differ depending on resource demand and package selection. They said “typically we’ll run a shared server with 16 CPU cores”

Customer Support:

We’ve seen recently that there has been an uptick in bad reviews about customer support. We will partially put part of this down to the fact that just like many other businesses they’ve been having to cope with the pressures of the COVID pandemic. Dealing with fewer staff, workplace restrictions and all the other issues that have popped up lately has had some effect on their staff, customer and technical support, but can you really blame them?

We’re also hesitant to just take all the complaints at face-value. Their customer, and social support team has arduously taken the time to reach out to the disgruntled customers and offer them some sort of recompense, which we find admirable.

We’ve had many conversations with BlueHost staff over the past few weeks. I never had to wait more than 30 seconds to speak with someone over chat, and they’ve been really friendly and did their best to help me. Sometimes they wouldn’t know the answers, but would quickly find out what I wanted to know and made sure all my questions were answered. Furthermore, our actually experience using their product has been fairly hassle free and without any issues. From our experience, it’s hard to relate to a lot of the complaints we’ve seen.

All-in-all BlueHost is somewhat of a mixed bag when it comes to customer support. Many people are totally happy, and leave great reviews. Our experience with them has been good, but it’s hard to ignore the swath of upset reviews. Once again we’re taking most of these customer comments with a grain of salt, as we know customer can be unfair and overly critical of something that in reality is actually OK.

Speed and Reliability:

We’ve seen some complaints about speed, but we’re going to have to disregard these as customers who have poor website hygiene. We’ll stick rather to the hard numbers, rather than anecdotal evidence. What do we mean by website hygiene? We mean customers who’ve not taken general good practice methods of running a website. Compressing images, using a caching service, differing Javascript, minimizing CSS and style sheets, etc..

Bluehost does well in the speed department. They are not technically the fastest, but among their competitors they offer speed which is fairly comparable. On average their page speed is around 400ms, which is comparatively puts them in the top 5 fastest load times.

Wrap Up

Overall Bluehost is a solid choice for small and medium endeavors. They offer solid service with almost no downtime, good speed, and options such as integrated advertising offers from Google, Yahoo, Bing, to help boost your online presence. They are recommended by WordPress and in our opinion offer pretty awesome eCommerce plans. Although the introductory prices are great, we’re not a fan of their high renewal rates. Many famous blogs have been hosted on BlueHost in the past, but have since outgrown their shared hosting services, and is perhaps one of the reasons why BlueHost has such a large reputation in the hosting arena.

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