I’m sure you’ve come across many web hosting providers offering users exceptional hosting features…
If you want to a simple web hosting service that cares about your hosting needs and is scalable, then you must take care when choosing a hosting company.
The truth is that there are many factors that you will need to consider before taking that leap…
I personally don’t choose a service because of the promises made by the provider. I depend on a lot on reviews and word of mouth publicity.
Having said that, your choice of web host should not be taken lightly and certain criteria should guide you. This article is a Bluehost review and covers all the important features required when choosing a web hosting company. By the end of this review, you’ll uncover the features of this hosting company, and be able to decide which of their service plans is suitable for your website.
Bluehost Web Hosting Review
Since 1996, Bluehost has been providing premium hosting services to thousands of businesses and personal website owners. Today, they are known as one of the most prestigious web hosting companies in the industry with more than 1.6M domain names hosted.
Bluehost does a good job of balancing price and outstanding features for website owners that need a bit of hand-holding, while also providing many options to experienced administrators. Bluehost hosting packages are wide and varied, and one of the reasons there are many Bluehost reviews online. Below are the products offered by Bluehost:
• Shared Hosting
A shared Bluehost hosting package includes a free domain name that you can keep as long as you use Bluehost—free domain name transfer is also available.
For years, Bluehost has been a favorite of many webmasters in the shared and WordPress hosting sectors. They adhere to hosting best practices, and their customer service delivery is excellent. For the many users, Bluehost server hosting plans will suit all hosting needs from basic websites to more complex web applications. Once you outgrow the traffic allowances of shared hosting, you can scale to a Bluehost VPS or dedicated server with ease.
• VPS Hosting
VPS hosting with Bluehost is another product that is worth raving about, and one of the most talked about in Bluehost reviews online. If you want more power, expect high volumes of traffic, or have special compliance needs that make shared hosting unsuitable, Bluehost’s virtual private server (or VPS) are an ideal choice.
Bluehost offers three types of Linux-based VPS hosting, starting from the $29.99 monthly for a Standard 30GB SSD, 2GB RAM, and unlimited monthly bandwidth. Just like the shared hosting plan, the VPS hosting plan includes discounts for longer-term contracts.
• Cloud Hosting
This Bluehost hosting service, your website data will be automatically mirrored to three servers so if one server fails, there will be an automatic switch to another server. This guarantees a 100% uptime, an ideal option for websites that can’t afford any downtime at all.
This is a huge advantage because there will always be at least one copy of your site data always available and live for your site visitors.
• WordPress
WordPress officially recommends Bluehost, so if you’re looking to create a WP-powered site, then this should be your go-to-hosting provider. They have four Linux-based packages that all come with extended features as the price advances. The below are monthly costs of a one year contract.
• WP Standard ($39.99),
• WP Enhanced ($59.99),
• Wp Premium ($89.99), and
• WP Ultimate ($129).
All WordPress plans are on a managed server and this means that Bluehost carries out all site backups plus caching, and protects your installation with the appropriate security measures.
Wondering how to install WordPress on Bluehost? Don’t fuss, you don’t need to install it because it comes pre-installed. Although your traffic is capped based on the number of monthly visitors that come to your site, you can upgrade to a higher-end plan for more server resources.
• Woocommerce Hosting
Bluehost is an industry leader in web hosting and now they provide WooCommerce (a comprehensive shopping cart system to online store owners) hosting. WooCommerce is powered by WordPress and is a versatile shopping cart that provides you with everything you need to build and manage your online store with an amazing look and functionality.
The great thing about WooCommerce is that it’s suitable for newbies and experienced web administrators alike. Even the most inexperienced beginner will feel at home building their store with this straightforward, point-and-click e-commerce interface. Also, experienced developers will appreciate the freedom of editing their websites’ PHP scripts and implementing more advanced features on the back end.
• Dedicated Hosting
The functionalities offered by Bluehost’s dedicated server hosting is just as advanced as others you will find in the industry. The fact that you have root access to fully manage your server makes this plan the perfect option for developers of complex web applications.
When choosing a plan, you will need to decide on the power (RAM and bandwidth) that is needed to run your web app. Understand that Bluehost makes it reasonably easy to upgrade and scale to a better option whenever you choose. Overall, you will be hard pressed to find any other dedicated server that offers as many incredible features as what you’ll find with Bluehost—at the same price.
Bluehost has different dedicated server packages, starting as low as $109 per month. Hosted on a Linux OS with a minimum of 500GB storage, 4GB of RAM, and 5TB of data transfers monthly. These are solid numbers and is comparable with the best professional hosting services.
• Domains
I didn’t find any special Bluehost review on their domain services. Just like other providers, you search, find and purchase your domain. However, they have a custom domain manager dashboard that helps with domain transfers, tracking, purchases and overall administration. making domain administration a breeze.
What Does Bluehost Offer?
• Website builder
• A free domain with every new account
• Custom email accounts for all hosting plans
• Free marketing credits for Google and Yahoo/Bing ads
• Ability to accept credit cards and PayPal payments
• An SSL certificate for enhanced security and encryption
• Exceptional, mobile-friendly templates for designing a professional store
Main Features of Bluehost
For those who are just getting started on their first website, I’d like to point out that the company has revamped its user interface, making it one of the most awesome features they offer. Users will find the dashboard and overall user interface to be welcoming — as easy for newcomers as web hosting gets. If you’re in search of the best WordPress hosting, you have come to the right place.
Bluehost is one of the few providers recommended by the WordPress development team. You can install the blogging platform via the control panel in a single click, or get the managed services team to take care of it for you. Check out the below awesome features offered by the company:
Website Hosting Options
Bluehost offers premium web hosting services such as VPS hosting, WordPress hosting and even cloud hosting services. Setting up your own website does not have to be difficult. Technological advancements have made it possible for people to create advanced web applications at the click of a button and Bluehost helps its users access this technology with little hassle.
Affordable
Affordable web hosting services with the most competitive prices. Bluehost offers its users the most affordable prices that you can’t find anywhere else on the internet.
Dedicated customer care
Bluehost also has top notch dedicated customer care services which ensure that customers are never left confused. With a live chat feature and efficient email response times, Bluehost’s customer service is perhaps the best in the web hosting industry.
Ease to use
Simplified interface with easy to understand features. Unlike other web hosts that provide complicated user interfaces, Bluehost makes it very simple, by offering its users the most intuitive and easy to use environment where you can easily map multiple domain names to your web hosting plan without complications.
WordPress Officially Recommends BlueHost
We all know that blogging is not blogging if you aren’t using WordPress. With Bluehost, you don’t have to continually worry about the usual WP problems like white pages and Error 405 pages. Your WordPress blog will be built on an innovative platform, that was created and designed with WordPress in mind. They also offer you everything you need to make your WordPress website easy to use, secure, and extremely fast.
Fast Server Provisioning
As mentioned earlier, Bluehost also ranks high in server hosting — offering great performance at competitive prices. With two to four cores and guaranteed resources, your VPS or dedicated hosting server will be powerful and online 24/7. The Bluehost team uses industry leading technologies, such as OpenStack and KVM, to harness the power of their hosting servers and tap into more performance, leaving you with optimal reliability and flexibility. Virtual private servers and dedicated hosting packages include instant provisioning because waiting for your server is so 2010!
Enhanced Speed and Security
Bluehost hosting is built on a powerful VPS server that provides enhanced speed as well as security. The techy tidbit is that the server is built on NGINX for faster speed and supports for W3 caching. SiteLock offers comprehensive website security packages and Web Application Firewall (WAF) to keep your files and website secure.
Solid Server Performance
I’ve been using a Bluehost shared server for about 10 years. I started out with a plan that was called the Platinum Pak, and after one decade with them, I have never experienced any downtime. They are one of the most stable web hosts with an impressive back-to-back 100% uptime. Not too bad a host that charges you less than $10 per month.
CloudFlare Integration
Bluehost has a superior content caching system that is integrated with CloudFlare. CloudFlare is a service that provides a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which is an optimization network that offers you features like:
– Load Balancing to reduce latency or lag. CloudFlare balances traffic across several servers or by routing your website’s traffic to the nearest server to your customer.’
– Increased firewall protection to automatically discover and secure your site from common vulnerabilities like SQL injections, cross-site forgery, and scripting.
– An advanced caching system that keeps a copy of your website’s resources on the CloudFlare data centers to increase your loading speeds and save your server’s bandwidth.
– Uptime support if Bluehost’s servers were ever down, CloudFlare will have a copy of your website cached on its servers and will continue to offer your content to your website visitors.
With a CloudFlare partnership, Bluehost can offer you all these benefits without the need to expand your server resources.
Server Hosting Flexibility
Another important feature of Bluehost servers is that you can add extra resources any time like CPU and RAM. This flexibility ensures that your website is scalable for when you start to get more traffic and don’t want to worry about your site being slow or going down. All you need to do is add extra resources from your hosting panel in a few clicks.
You have the ability to increase these hosting resources temporarily too. Just in case the traffic increase is as a result of a marketing campaign, you can decrease these resourced when you no longer need them. This is not the same for Shared Hosting though, where an increase in resources is a permanent upgrade.
Simple Refund Policy
Many hosting providers offer a money back guarantee, but when you really need them to pull through on that promise, they exhaust you with an endless runaround. But this is different with Bluehost, you can cancel your account anytime of the year and still get a refund. If you cancel after the first 30 days, they do a prorated refund based on the months of usage.
Pros of My Bluehost Review
• They offer free domain and a free site builder that comes with free templates.
• They have a special offer for WPBeginner users.
• Easy Google Apps Integration
• They offer a money-back guarantee that I have tried on several occasions, and I can attest that it is genuine.
• Shared Hosting is as cheap as $2.95 monthly, which is one of the cheapest in the industry considering the level of service provided.
Cons of My Bluehost Review
• Due to the size of the company, customers don’t really get a personalized service
• Lacks Windows-based servers
• Bluehost does not offer a month-by-month shared hosting service. Instead, users must sign up for the annual plan.
Bluehost Review Conclusion
Hopefully, you can now appreciate the quality service provided by Bluehost. Even though they only provide service plans for the Linux OS, Windows developers will benefit from using this service if it were available. Hopefully, Bluehost will expand its offerings to Windows applications someday soon.
When creating your website, it is very important that you use a web hosting service that is easy, affordable and scalable. Most users tend to stay clear of complex web host services with overly complicated interfaces and features. Bluehost simplifies all of that for you, and with their extremely efficient customer service equipped with live chat functionality, you would never get stranded
Bluehost embodies reliability, performance, affordability, and user-friendliness — four major tenets that many people look out for when choosing a web hosting provider. Having personally been a Bluehost customer for years, I can confirm that the company’s commitment to the hosting community is genuine.
Bluehost Offers a Money Back Guarantee. So Give Them a Try!
If you have any comments about Bluehost or any suggestions, please comment below. I will keep this review updated so that you’ll have the most recent information on this hosting provider. But you can also stay informed by signing up below.