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Bluehost Review: What you should know before you sign up

Bluehost is one of the largest web hosting companies. It hosts over 2 million domains. Bluehost offers services including shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, cloud hosting, and WooCommerce hosting. Their servers are powered by PHP 7, HTTP/2, and NGINX+ caching.

Although, Bluehost provides numerous services the one I will be covering is their basic hosting because that’s the one I’m personally familiar with. Back in 2014, I was looking for a hosting company that was reliable and didn’t cost me an arm and a leg. There were a lot of choices out there and some that were too “comprehensive” for me, so many options I didn’t know where to even begin. That’s when I landed on Bluehost, with as many bells and whistles, but presented in a simple non-overwhelming way. And it had enough how-to’s that even a beginner like myself could get started on it right away.

Hosting Plans:

If you are reading this, you’ve already decided you need web hosting for your website. You might already have a domain and are ready to go with a designer and content and everything. Or you might be like most and know you need a website, but don’t know exactly where to start, either way, Bluehost has you covered.

From signing up to having WordPress installed on my free domain from Bluehost, it took me almost 30 minutes. It was 5 minutes to sign up with Bluehost, 5 minutes to install WordPress, and about 20 minutes to come up with a domain name that worked. It’s really that simple. Of course, tweaking and adding content took days, but that’s another article entirely.

For a simple blog or even a small business WordPress site, I have found the basic plan perfect. It’s on shared hosting, which means the resources of the server are shared amongst a group of websites rather than a direct connection. For those who anticipate higher traffic or need a lot more resources because it’s video-heavy or something like that, it would be good to upgrade to the more robust plans. Bluehost is only one of the three officially recommended hosts from WordPress.org.

Now that you know how Bluehost works, let’s cover the pros and cons:

Pro

Great pricing, starting as low as $3.95 a month (3 years or $5.95 a month for 1 year)
Easy to use with great tutorials
Free Domain for the first year and $15.99 yearly renewal
Free SSL certificate (a must if you don’t want the red flag from Google)
99.99% uptime which means your website won’t go down
Tons of integrations and options from Woo-commerce to WordPress
30-day money back
Good customer support from chat, email, knowledgebase, to the community
Easy to use C-panel dashboard

Con

Higher renewal rates (expected from all hosting companies)
Upselling, you have to click no a lot.
No free migration. Will migrate up 5 websites 20 emails from a single hosting company for $149.99

Conclusion:

We recommend Bluehost because of how easy they make it for people who aren’t developers to make a website and have control over it themselves. The pricing is great and they provide a great service.