Did you know that Bluehost is home to more than 2 million websites?
Having such a vast customer base is enough evidence that they are doing something right. Their uptime is reliable, server speeds are good, and all of their hosting plans pack useful features for beginners and intermediate alike.
Pros of Using Bluehost Hosting
Bluehost has been around since 2003, so they have plenty of experience to know what makes a hosting service excellent.
Their introductory prices are affordable, customer support is easy to reach and helpful, and you get many useful features to go with your hosting plan. In addition, they provide reliable uptime and fast server speeds.
Letâs take a more detailed look at Bluehostâs strong points.
1. Great Uptime Through 12-Months(99.96%)
Uptime is one of the most critical aspects when choosing a web hostâââafter all, if your site is down, your users canât access it. So, consistent uptime should be one of your top priorities when looking at hosting services.
After reviewing over 40 web hosts, our benchmark for âgoodâ uptime is 99.93%. So ideally, we donât want to see anything less than that.
The good news is that Bluehost easily surpasses this benchmark, comfortably keeping our test site live for 99.96% of the time during the last 12 months (February 2020 to January 2021). The total downtime was a bit less than four hours for the whole year.
2. Fast Page Loading Speed (641 ms)
Research conducted by Google found:
âAs page load time goes from 1s to 3s the probability of bounce increases 32%.â
This translates to your visitors being 32% more likely to leave your site. And it only gets worse with longer page load times.
Furthermore, Google is more geared towards mobile-first indexing. This means that your site also needs to be optimized for mobile users, or otherwise, youâre losing traffic.
Either way, a slow website almost always means less traffic and, therefore, lower sales numbers. So right after uptime, page loading time is the second most important thing that can make or break your websiteâs success.
Our test site with Bluehost has offered an average load speed of 641 ms over the past year. While it isnât competing for the top positions, it isnât bad either
3. Low Introductory Pricing ($2.75/mo)
Bluehostâs default pricing starts at $3.95/month, which is an introductory price from the regular $8.99/month rate.
However, the good news is that weâve been able to work out a deal with Bluehost for our readers that takes the starting price down even further to $2.75/month.
For this price, you get pretty much everything you need for a single website. That includes 50 GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, and more. So youâd be getting a pretty good value for the price, plus their consistent uptime and page loading speeds.
Still, the cheapest plan does have a few restrictions that weâre not entirely happy withâââbut more about this later on.
4. Packed with Security Options and Features
Since Bluehost is one of the âcheapestâ options on the market, we are pleased to see that they donât cut too many corners on critical security options and features.
Already with the cheapest plan, Bluehost provides your site with a free SSL certificate. You also get access to great features like a free CDN (Cloudflare), a one-click WordPress install, multiple CMS integrations, and additional eCommerce plugins.
Higher-tier plans come with the Spam Experts add-on, domain privacy protection, and server backups. Also, you get more advanced security features such as SiteLock, which helps prevent malware attacks. Codeguard is another form of protection, which provides daily backups so you can roll back previous versions of a site, should it get hacked. Postini, from Google, is the final security tool worth noting. It provides spam protection for your email, so anything suspicious is prevented from getting into your inbox.
5. Easy to Use for Beginners
Some of the web hosts weâve seen can be considered the best only if youâre an advanced user. But, Bluehost is great for beginners, too.
Their customer portal is intuitive and clean (although, we have experienced it is a bit slow at times). And the layout of the cPanel control panel makes Bluehost even easier to use. Beginners can easily install and start WordPress through cPanel. All you need to do is point and click in most cases.
If you donât want to use WordPress, you can also begin creating a website with a website builder tool (such as Weebly or Drupal). You can then customize a template by just dragging and dropping elements on your page.
Bluehost also has features for advanced users who want to use their code to create their site.
6. 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee with all of their hosting plans.
You can try out the service to see their performance for yourself and ask for a refund if youâre not completely satisfied. We have a few words of caution, though.
According to Bluehostâs terms, hereâs what does and doesnât fall under that guarantee:
You can only get refunds on the web hosting cost, not any other products like domains or other add-ons.
Bluehost would deduct $15.99 if you received a free domain name in your plan.
Bluehost does not refund any requests after 30 days.
Itâs not precisely a no-questions-asked policy like weâve seen from some hosts. So make sure you agree with these points before signing up.
Bluehost provides 24/7 customer support over live chat, phone, and an email ticketing system. On top of that, they have a vast knowledge base packed with answers to frequent questions and useful information.
We went ahead and tested their live chat option, and the experience was pleasant.
We got answers to our questions quickly, and the representative was knowledgeable. Sure, some responses felt copy-pasted, but the follow-up questions prompted improvised and helpful answers.
8. One Free WordPress Site Transfer
If you already have a site and want to switch to Bluehostâs hosting plan, then this perk is for you.
Bluehost only recently started offering a free site transfer with all of their plans.
There are a couple of terms to this free service, though. First, the site needs to be a WordPress site. And secondly, you have to request the migration within the first 30 days after signing up with a hosting plan.
All you need to do is contact their customer support team and follow their directions. The migration usually takes around 1â3 business days to complete.
If you donât have a WordPress website or have more than one then it costs $149.99. This gets you up to 5 website migrations and 20 email account migrations.
9. The Official WordPress.org Recommended Host
WordPress is the most widely used website platform on the marketâââ~47% of the entire Internet is built with WordPress.
Itâs safe to say that they have an authoritative word when it comes to hosting solutions. WordPress only officially recommends three hosting partners to use with a WordPress site:
Of course, you can use almost any web hosting provider to create a WordPress site. But the fact that Bluehost is one of the few officially recognized partners is encouraging.
