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Bluehost enables you to get a website up and running in no time. It’s a reputable web host used by millions to host their online projects, start businesses, and create something new.
What makes Bluehost so popular?
It’s easy to use, even for first-timers, and it’s a great price.
You get a free domain name upon signing up (usually $10-15 per year) and hosting costs as little as $2.95 per month. Bluehost also comes loaded with features to help you get set up quickly.
Find out more about what you get, and why I think Bluehost provides the best value for your money.
Bluehost Compared to the Best Web Hosting Services
Bluehost lets you get on a shared hosting plan at an entry-level price. If you’re diving into creating a website as a first-timer, Bluehost is a safe and affordable option that, as I mentioned before, also lets you have a free domain name as part of their deal. This is a nice perk that sets it apart from the rest, along with its customer support options and affordable additional hosting tiers.
We couldn’t name Bluehost as the hosting provider that gives you the best value for your money without seeing how it measured up to other providers on the market.
To help us determine which hosting provider was genuinely worth your time, we compared dozens of competitors and narrowed it down to the top six choices. See all of our top picks for cheap web hosting to get a more detailed overview of each one and a buying guide.
Who is Bluehost Best For?
Bluehost is ideal for beginners that are starting a website for the first or second time. Say you’re a blogger getting started in your niche, Bluehost enables you to get an easy start without sweating all the technical details.
Along with their customer support features and easy to navigate cPanel, Bluehost ensures your learning curve is as small as possible and gets your site publicly available to the world with plenty of uptime.
On the other hand, if you’re looking to start an ecommerce business with tons of products and need the best site speed and dedicated hosting, you might want to look at other options first.
Bluehost: The Pros and Cons
Pros
24/7 customer support: Not every company can boast 24/7 customer support, especially at such a low entry-level price. Bluehost’s customer support is there for you as you start your site, and anytime you need extra support troubleshooting site errors that are bound to happen.
One year of a free domain: Possibly one of Bluehost’s most appealing features is the free domain name you get for a whole year. This eliminates the extra step of going through a third-party domain seller or investing more money at your site’s beginning.
Free SSL certificate: An SSL certificate, otherwise known as Secure Sockets Layer certificate, makes sure to authenticate the identity of your website and encrypts important site information. In other words, it’s a must-have for any site you publish. Thankfully, Bluehost provides SSL certification for free.
Quick site setup: With Bluehost, you can easily get your site up and running in no time with their intuitive and guided step-by-step setup. And if you happen to run into any trouble, you can tap into their chat support feature in real-time.
Beginner-friendly: Bluehost is ideal for anyone venturing into creating and maintaining a website for the first time. This is because there isn’t a need for advanced web management knowledge or coding when you set up your site through it. To sweeten the deal, they’ve partnered with WordPress and ensured that installing WordPress is a seamless part of the process.
Cons
Charges for site migrations: Admittedly, when it comes to migration perks, Bluehost isn’t necessarily your best bet. If you want help migrating your site, Bluehost charges at least $149 to migrate your site to or from another platform.
Not the best fit for high traffic sites: If you’re wanting to scale an already high traffic site and need hosting to meet those specific needs, an entry-level Bluehost plan isn’t going to cut it. You can always upgrade to their more expensive managed WordPress tiers, which we’ll get into below.
Bluehost Pricing
Bluehost offers several pricing tiers that are pretty clear cut. But after going through them here, you’re still unsure which one can work best for you, reach out to them for a free consultation.
It’s worth noting the price points for each shared hosting tier I review here are only if you purchase a 36-month hosting plan upfront. If you decide to go with a 12 or 24-month plan, the monthly amounts change accordingly.
Going with a month to month plan will also mean your monthly hosting fee will be a tad more expensive. Regardless, Bluehost still stands as the most affordable and value-filled plan you can choose, especially as a beginner.
Now, here’s how each shared hosting tier breaks down along with its value.
Shared Hosting
A shared hosting Bluehost plan is hands down one of the easiest ways to get started building your site. You can start with the Basic plan for $2.95, which is good to create one site with 50 GBs of space. That’s generous when you consider they also include free CDN and a free SSL certificate.
It doesn’t stop there. Are you running a few websites? Then you’ll want to try the Plus tier at $5.45 per month. It includes everything in the basic plan tier, plus the ability to host and manage an unlimited number of sites, and you’ll get access to Office 365 for 30 days. Not bad. It’s the most convenient tier if you want to reliably start more than one site from scratch without too much overhead cost.
Their most recommended tier, and the one that gets you the most bang for your buck under the shared hosting plan, is the Choice Plus tier at $5.45 per month with added security features.
You get everything in the first and second tier, plus free domain privacy and free automated backup for a whole year. Since internet security is a growing concern in the online world and the price for this tier is the same as the Plus option, this is the clear winner in my book as far as affordable shared hosting plans are concerned. Added security features can only ever be a plus.
Finally, if you’re looking for a bit more than that, consider the Pro tier, sitting at $13.95 a month. With this plan, you’ll get additional CPU resources as well as a free dedicated IP.
As you can see, Bluehost goes out of their way to personalize each tier, so they’re useful in covering what you need. I recommend you take some time to comprehensively look through each tier and its offerings to get the best deal according to your goals.
VPS Hosting
VPS, or virtual private server hosting, is when hosting is within a shared server but acts as a dedicated virtual space for your site. VPS hosting has become very popular, as it is less expensive than dedicated hosting but gives you better security and potentially better performance than shared hosting.
Guaranteed resources are the name of the game when it comes to Bluehost’s VPS Hosting options. They stack up against competitors well, as they charge you only $18.99 for the standard VPN feature. This includes 2 GB of RAM and an additional 1 TB of bandwidth.
Guaranteed resources are the name of the game when it comes to Bluehost’s VPS Hosting options. They stack up against competitors well, as they charge you only $18.99 for the standard VPN feature. This includes 2 GB of RAM and an additional 1 TB of bandwidth.
Looking through each Bluehost offering, it’s clear they’ve positioned themselves as a beginner-friendly web host, but they also burn the candle at both ends by offering affordable dedicated and VPS hosting. That’s a double win as far as hosting you can rely on if you ask me.
Dedicated Hosting
The standout benefits of dedicated hosting are security, privacy, and even more control all around. If you know you’ll want the best of the best to host your site for scale and reliability, then a Bluehost dedicated hosting plan is the way to go.
Is your site growing rapidly? Do you see more traffic coming in day after day? Here’s where you’ll want to look into dedicated hosting, yet another reliable Bluehost plan.
To illustrate the power of a dedicated hosting plan, they start you off at a whopping 500 GB of storage space, 4 GB of RAM, and 5 TB of bandwidth for only $79.99 a month. This puts Bluehost as a premium contender in the market, even for their pricier hosting tiers.
Managed WordPress Hosting
This is an all-in-one managed platform that scales to any demand your website has. All pricing plans for managed WordPress hosting through Bluehost include incredibly fast speeds, marketing tools, and multi-tiered security features.
The most dynamic hosting tier Bluehost offers is it’s managed WordPress option. You can either go with the Build, Grow, or Scale option. Each one offers a different hosting package to fit what you’re looking for. To make the best choice if you decide to go with a managed WordPress option, you’ll want to base your decision on the amount of traffic they’re each appropriate for.
Each plan comes equipped with plenty of helpful features built to help your site grow. This means storage space starting at 20 GBs, access to over 200 global servers, scheduled backups, staging environments, and free SSL certification, just to name a few.
What differentiates each managed tier is ultimately their traffic capacity. Here’s a quick overview:
- Build – $19.95 a month, best for 50,000 monthly visitors
- Grow – $29.95 a month, best for 150,000 monthly visitors
- Scale – $49.95 a month, best for 500,000 monthly visitors
Breaking it down by traffic makes it easy to choose a managed WordPress hosting plan that’ll give you peace of mind and plenty of site uptime.
Bluehost Offerings
At this point, you’ve learned about Bluehost’s hosting pricing. But the fun doesn’t stop there. In addition to the hosting plans, Bluehost has other services.
Hosting
Unsurprisingly, shared hosting is Bluehost’s most popular hosting deal because it lets you get your foot in the door as far as getting your site up and running goes.
I’d say the number one reason Bluehost’s shared hosting stacks up high when you’re comparing it to other hosting providers is their free SSL certification and their free domain name deal. But as far as hosting your site on a server where you’ll share space with other sites like yours, it does its job.
Now, while shared hosting might be the best affordable hosting option for beginners, it won’t be what you want to stick with as your site grows.
That’s why there’s dedicated hosting and VPS hosting. Dedicated hosting is a more robust and reliable hosting option for powerful site performance, and VPS hosting offers increased power, flexibility, and control.
Online Stores
If you’ve already decided you’re going to start your online store with WordPress and WooCommerce, it can be as easy as choosing from the Standard or the Premium store hosting tiers to get started.
For a store with a robust payment processing system that comes equipped with plenty of analytics and the ability to create basic store backups, then go with the Standard deal at $15.95 a month.
Your store might be a bit more complex than a simple storefront with your product listings. If you’re going to capture subscriptions or online booking and appointment scheduling, you’re better off with the Premium tier as a very reliable ecommerce option.
I’d say this is my top pick for a multifaceted online store with a lot of moving parts. I’d rather pay a bit more for all the Premium features than need them and not have them for the sake of saving a few extra bucks.
Live WordPress Support
Bluehost offers Blue Sky, a service to teach users how to build, grow, and maintain any WordPress website through individual training and guidance. Live WordPress Support starts at $29 per month for on-demand ticket support and backup assistance and goes as high as $149 per month for SEO tools, help with content optimization and mobile optimization, and access to Constant Contact.
Professional Marketing Services
In addition to hosting services, Bluehost has an offering to assist your business with design and marketing strategies to give you more time to focus on revenue-generating activities and running your business.
The four primary services offered by Bluehost in this realm are:
- Full-service website support with design, marketing, and content help
- SEO services to optimize your website and target keywords
- PPC services to assist with pay-per-click campaigns and best practices to get more customers
- Website migration assistance, including one-on-one consultations to review your website before and after any migration
The cost for these services is not listed on the Bluehost website. You’ll need to contact them to discuss pricing and support options.
The Best Web Hosting Services
It’s never a good idea to make your decision based on only one piece of information. I recommend you check out my list of the top cheap web hosting providers to make sure you’re making the best choice for your specific needs. Here’s a quick overview of all my recommendations:
- Hostinger — Best web hosting plan under $1
- Dreamhost — The lowest spend on day one
- Bluehost — Best for new sites (especially WordPress)
- A2 Hosting — Best web hosting under $3 for online stores
- HostGator — The best way to host your existing site for cheaper
- iPage — Best if you have multiple sites
All in all, Bluehost is a reliable web hosting service that gives you the best value for your money. It offers a great entry-level shared hosting plan for as little as $2.75 a month, one free domain name for a year, as well as free SSL certification, and plenty of customer support you can tap into at a moment’s notice.
Any comments on Bluehost as a great hosting service for beginner websites? Let me know in the comments.
Otherwise, get started with Bluehost here.
