Bluehost Review: 7 good points and 4 bad (we tested the server speed!)
Bluehost is a great choice for those who are just starting out and want to create their first website or business blog. With its automated WordPress startup process and installation, it offers true ease of use. While it doesn’t yet offer the best service or value for money, it is a functional product.
If you’re still hesitating to choose Bluehost as your web hosting provider, rest assured: you’re in the right place.
After creating a Bluehost account, we did some performance testing on its shared hosting package. Today we have all the information we need to give you the most detailed review of Bluehost that we can find on the Internet.
But before we start, let’s get to know our web host a little bit.
Some information about Bluehost
Founded by Matt Heaton, then just coming of age, and Danny Ashworth in 2003, Bluehost is something of a dinosaur in the web hosting industry.
But that’s not a bad thing: being around for so long has allowed the Bluehost team to learn a thing or two about web hosting. Today it can offer its customers a top-notch user experience.
Although known and used by Internet users around the world, Bluehost has only one data center, located in the United States. This data center powers all the websites hosted by the company, which represents a whopping 2 million sites. A figure that grows by several thousand per day!
Bluehost has clearly made a splash in the market, as in just 7 years it has gained the favor of hosting giant Endurance International Group, which has integrated it into the EIG conglomerate.
With EIG’s support, Bluehost has managed to expand its once confidential team to a team of 750 employees, allowing it to offer its customers 24-hour support.
Still not convinced?
This should convince you. Bluehost is also one of the 3 web hosting providers recommended by WordPress!
If you’re wondering why this is so important, you should know that 30% of the sites across the web world run on WordPress. Simply put, this is the star of the internet, and getting endorsed by it is like getting complimented on your muscularity by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
Now that you’ve gotten to know Bluehost, let’s see why, in our humble opinion, Bluehost is a web hosting heavyweight!
7 great reasons to choose Bluehost!
1. Bluehost is surprisingly easy to use
If you’ve ever created a website and used a web hosting provider with a horrible interface, you know the pain of logging into a dashboard and… not knowing what to do.
Bluehost‘s startup process pleasantly surprised us. After completing the registration, we logged into the dashboard, and with a few clicks, poof! the magic happened: WordPress was installed and ready to use.
But a picture is worth a thousand words. Here are a few to show you what appears after logging in.
Bluehost will begin by asking you a series of questions about the type of site you are creating. Select an option from the drop-down menu, then click “Continue. It’s easy.
You will then be asked what type of site you are going to create, whether it is a blog, an e-commerce site, or a niche site selling tagada strawberry flavored wrapping paper
The smart guys at Bluehost will want to know more about your site but don’t worry, they only mean well. Give your site a name, think of a slogan, and indicate your level of website creation on their experience scale.
Then all you have to do is choose a theme, then…
… boom, WordPress is automatically installed! No need to worry about installing it in the wrong folder, or messing up with the wrong manipulation.
Bluehost will take care of the back-end, and all you have to do is customize your site and make it look nice.
If you’re new to building sites, I’m pretty sure you’ll have no problem building yours with Bluehost. Even those of us who are a little more experienced will appreciate the ease of use of the dashboard.
Admire the beauty of this custom cPanel interface. Nothing to do with the joyful mess that is the standard cPanel.
2. Surprisingly fast service anywhere in the world!
According to thinkwithgoogle, site load speed is important to the success of online businesses, and server response time plays a HUGE role in load speed.
Still, with only one data center located in the United States, we didn’t think Bluehost would score very well when passing our proprietary server speed test.
Using our test site hosted via the basic package, we traveled and tested response times. We quickly realized how wrong we were.
The American host has reacted exceptionally well, achieving response times well below the 200 ms recommended by Google in all countries except Bangalore.
It is obviously the fastest in the United States since the data center is located there, but it is not outdone in countries or areas located on the other side of the world like Singapore, Sydney, or Japan!
With an overall response time of 153ms, Bluehost is one of the fastest A-rated hosts we’ve had the chance to test. You can rest assured that no matter where in the world your audience resides, Bluehost will be able to provide you with quality services!
3. High-performance servers
Those of you who plan to run large-scale e-commerce sites or reddit-like forums will be happy to know that Bluehost offers high-performance servers tailored to your needs.
Why is this important?
Well, with shared web hosting, the purpose of the server is literally in the name. You share the space with other users, which helps to reduce the cost.
However, some users may accidentally (or intentionally) use far more resources than they are allotted, which means that all other users who share the server with that user will experience slowdowns on their sites. Sometimes, their site won’t load at all.
With high-performance servers, Bluehost allocates fewer users per server, and each user gets a total of 300,000 files. This means more computing resources per user, consistent site load speeds, and less downtime caused by unwanted users!
BUT!
As with all good things, there is always a catch.
High-performance servers are only available with the Pro package, which is much more expensive than the rest of the shared hosting packages.
So if you want good performance, you’ll have to pay for it.
We trust these servers completely. Our test site is only hosted with the Basic plan, and even then, the availability is close to 100% since April 2018!
If shared hosting servers can produce such uptime, we can at least expect the same from high-performance servers.
4. Fantastic security options
When we talk about security, we don’t mean features that only protect your website from those evil and dishonest hackers.
We’re talking about security in terms of peace of mind and protection from spam in the sanctuary of your brand new email.
Let’s look at the peace of mind issue first.
You don’t want to spend days, weeks, or months customizing and tweaking your company’s website to make it look perfect and fit for a first page Google ranking, only to load it up and find out that someone has screwed up and your entire website is gone.
To do this, Bluehost provides its users with a CodeGuard Basic service for $2.50 per month.
CodeGuard Basic
The name sounds cool, but it’s actually just a nice name for the daily backup service. This one is really efficient: it frequently monitors your website or database, notifies you in case of changes, and automatically makes backups.
The basic version offers 1 GB of storage space, daily backup and monitoring, and 3 restores per month.
If you need more, CodeGuard also comes in Professional, Premium, and Enterprise versions, but these versions will cost you more.
SpamExperts
You can rest easy. Bluehost will not send you an expert in the delicate art of spam.
SpamExperts is actually the term for an advanced email filter. It scans incoming emails for spam, viruses, phishing, and other spammers’ attacks, and filters them with 99.98% accuracy before they reach your inbox.
Basically, it keeps your inbox clean and free of spam.
SiteLock
When it comes to protecting your website, Bluehost comes with a basic firewall that offers a minimal level of protection against external threats.
However, if you want extra protection, you can get it in the form of a site lock.
SiteLock comes in three levels: Essential, Prevent, and Prevent Plus.
With the Essential level, you get automatic malware removal, which is not very helpful against DDOS attacks or any other serious threat.
With Prevent, the level of security is a bit higher thanks to automatic malware removal, protection against DDoS attacks, 6-hour response time, and image optimization (….). Quite frankly, I don’t know what image optimization has to do with security, but I’m not going to complain about it.
Prevent Plus does everything Prevent can do, but with the added benefit of having a daily scan frequency.
SiteLock is good too, but the fact is that it’s an add-on, which means you’ll have to pay more money for it. Opt for Bluehost, you can afford to give your customers a little extra security for free!
5. A whole buffet of benefits
Gone are the days when you had to carefully plan how many sites to launch and what kind of resources you’d need to manage them effectively.
Bluehost‘s shared hosting packages offer all sorts of benefits, and the best part is that almost everything is unlimited! That is:
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Unlimited parked domains
- Unlimited sub-domains
- Unrestricted bandwidth
You are basically free to create as many websites as you want! And you don’t have to worry about the number of visitors to your site!
But beware: having too many visitors at once can consume too many resources, and Bluehost is known to disable/remove unwanted sites.
6. Support is super fast!
One of the most frustrating things in life is waiting for support to respond, especially if your site needs attention IMMEDIATELY.
When we set up our test site, we were very pleased to find that support responded very quickly via live chat. We usually wait at least 15 minutes for live chat support teams to respond, but the Bluehost team always responded within 5 minutes.
We haven’t tried phone or email support, but with such responsive live chat, we don’t think either method is necessary, although it’s nice to have them in case of an emergency.
You also won’t have to worry about support in different time zones, as Bluehost support is available 24/7.
7. The free extras that count
Some companies will entice you to sign up for their service by luring you with tasteless gifts. These companies often market regular services as “free”, such as “free” 24/7 support, or “free” WordPress installation.
Not Bluehost.
The American company offers freebies that will make a difference in your bank account.
With every shared hosting plan purchased, Bluehost gives you a free domain name for the first year. To put that in perspective, domain names can cost anywhere from €6 to €700 million (yes, you read that right). Here’s the proof.
You’ll also get free SSL – it may not be much, but every little bit helps make a difference for a young entrepreneur
The 4 cons we found about Bluehost
They say that every rose has its thorns. Well, it turns out that Bluehost is rather thorny in its kind.
1. Bluehost only has one datacenter
We’ve said before that we were very impressed with the speed of Bluehost‘s 1 datacenter, and we still are.
However, every millisecond counts when it comes to site load speed, and it’s a safe bet that Bluehost could perform better if it had more data centers on other continents.
Bluehost may offer one of the fastest speeds in the world among all the web hosting services we’ve tested. But if another hosting provider like SiteGround has a data center in Asia, it’s obvious that sites will load faster for the intended audience.
2. Poorly trained employees
I hate to say this because we all start somewhere, but you really have to be wary of inexperienced support teams.
Bluehost doesn’t really make an effort to hide the fact that they outsource their support team to India, which in itself isn’t a problem. I don’t mind, as long as it’s efficient and fast.
But what I do have a problem with is the bad advice given by the employees. When setting up our test site, we asked the support team a very simple question: “Does Bluehost provide an uptime guarantee?”
Support didn’t know what an uptime guarantee was.
Maybe it was a translation issue. We explained what we were looking for and the answer was YES, Bluehost has an uptime guarantee!
So we asked them to tell us the terms of the guarantee and after reviewing it, we finally discovered that the provider did not guarantee availability.
Fortunately, this is only a minor issue. Let’s hope this young man doesn’t give bad advice on a more serious problem by causing real damage to our sites.
Bluehost, if you are reading this, PLEASE train your employees. This is not acceptable.
3. No guarantee of availability
Even though I touched on it just above, I am compelled to make a specific point about no uptime guarantee here.
Downtime is very detrimental to any website. You lose potential sales or conversions with each slowdown. Also, search engines worth their salt may not even bother to index your site.
That’s why an uptime guarantee is so important.
It shows you that the provider is committed to keeping your site up and running and is willing to compensate customers if downtime exceeds a certain percentage.
Not having one is a huge red flag.
That being said, we have to give Bluehost its due. Its uptime is actually fantastic, as proven by the data collected on our test site.
For the lazy ones, it’s been 100% since April 2018. That’s an impressive feat!
4. Questionable practices at checkout
Chances are, you know the sleazy used car salesman who tries to slyly sell you extra options you don’t really need, just to inflate his sales.
Making a purchase with Bluehost is a bit like dealing with that dealer.
When you order, the SEO and Sitelock boxes will be automatically checked, which brings the price up to almost $50 per year.
It’s nice to have these options, but they’re far from necessary, and unsuspecting buyers might just click the next button and make the purchase without knowing it. That’s what happened to me.
Make sure to uncheck these boxes before making your purchase (unless you really want these features).
Bluehost’s plans and pricing
Shared hosting
Bluehost shared hosting comes with (but is not limited to) 3 plans – Basic, Choice Plus, and Pro.
Tip: subscribe for 36 months to benefit from lower prices, otherwise you will pay a little more for renewals. Renewal prices (monthly) are $9.99, $14, and $20, from Basic to Pro.
VPS hosting
If you need VPS hosting, Bluehost’s virtual private servers will certainly please you. With SSD storage, you’ll have all the power, flexibility, and control you need for your VPS needs.
Packages range from $16 to $50 per month.
Dedicated hosting
Bluehost’s dedicated hosting plans allow users to have unlimited access to their servers. Thanks to their robust, industry-leading platform, you can enjoy powerful and flexible hosting at decent prices.
Packages range from $65 to $95 per month.
Conclusion
One thing to keep in mind: Bluehost still uses cPanel, which is great news for those of us who are used to using it. Since cPanel raised its prices, most web hosting providers have decided to move away from it, but so far there is no indication that Bluehost is following the same trajectory.
The very fact that companies are willing to put their money where their mouth is is a sign of trust. Bluehost does the exact opposite with no uptime guarantee… what happens if the hosted websites are down for a whole week?
Anyone can promise to work hard to keep the network and server up and running,” but that’s worthless if you can’t pick up the tab when things go down.
However, credit where credit is due: we’ve never had a problem with Bluehost‘s actual availability. In fact, this one is close to 100% on our test site since April 2018!
Our humble opinion is that Bluehost is a pretty solid hosting provider. Maybe not the fastest or the best, but if you’re just looking to host a simple website, they have all the tools you’ll need to do it effectively.
