BlueHost WordPress Hosting Review – Pros, Cons, & Alternatives

Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting providers. Search for anything related to “web hosting” or “website building” and you’ll have Bluehost on top of your list. In short many bloggers and digital marketers highly it.

But customer reviews tell a different story. On Capterra, Bluehost scores 3.9, and on G2, it’s 3.5. That’s pretty low for a company with such a big reputation.

I dug into reviews on these sites and Reddit. And some of the common complaints were about poor customer support and performance.

Which left me wondering:

Is Bluehost any good—or does it just offer high commissions to its affiliates which is why most of them recommend it?

The only way to find out was to test its web hosting services.

I’ve been using Bluehost for the last 8 months to see where it thrives and lacks especially when it comes to:

• User-friendliness
• Speed and uptime performance
• Customer support
• Its overall hosting technology
• Pricing

In this detailed Bluehost review, I’ll share my experience using its services and if it’s worth your money.

Introduction to Bluehost

Bluehost is an American worldwide web hosting company that provides website hosting and domain registration services.

It was founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton and Cliff Baltzley and then acquired by the  EIG Group in 2011 which is the same company that owns HostGator and Ipage.

The company is based in Orem, Utah, the United States with its data centers located in Utah, London, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Hong Kong.

It has over 2 million customers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly each month with new features added to its services.

Bluehost Web Hosting Plans

Bluehost offers affordable shared hosting, VPS, and Dedicated servers to its customers.

The Shared hosting plan which is one of their most popular hosting packages is offered under three tiers.

• Basic Plan: The cheapest option for hosting one website with 10 GB SSD storage, 5 email accounts, and a free domain for the first year. Suitable for low-traffic websites and blogs. Costs $2.95/month for 12 months.
• Choice Plus Plan: comes with 40 GB SSD storage, free domain privacy, and CodeGuard Basic for the first year. Offers more security and backup features for websites. Costs $5.45/month for 12 months.
• Online Store: has all the features in Choice Plus but allows you to sell products online. Give you access to exclusive custom themes, Bookings & Appointment tools, and shipping Labels among other features. Costs $9.95/mo for 12 months.
• Pro Plan: The most advanced option for hosting unlimited websites with 100 GB SSD storage, unlimited email accounts, and a free domain for the first year. Also includes $200 marketing offers, SpamExperts for two domains, a premium SSL certificate, and an optimized CPU performance. Designed for high-traffic and resource-intensive websites. Costs $9.95/month for 12 months.

Bluehost also offers WordPress-managed hosting at a competitive price.

If you want the WordPress management roles taken off your hands their team of experts makes sure that the WordPress site is optimized for performance.

Suppose you want to scale big?

Bluehost offers VPS and Dedicated servers. This enables you to improve the performance of your website and its security.

In each plan provides the following features:

• A free SSL certificate
• A free domain name
• Unmetered Bandwidth
• A good web hosting space
• Unlimited email accounts
• Around-the-clock customer support
• Ability to scale big

Bluehost Pricing Review: Value for Money

Bluehost has a lower pricing threshold but puts hard limits on resources.

Bluehost offers budget-friendly plans for newcomers to web hosting, offering services starting at $2.95 per month, which includes a free domain for the first year.

However, this attractive pricing comes with limitations, such as a cap of 10 GB on storage space, allowing for the hosting of a single website only. Additionally, the plan excludes daily site backups and malware scanning, which are available for an additional $2.99 monthly fee through CodeGuard.

In comparison, Hostinger, nearly matching Bluehost’s price point, provides a more generous storage capacity of 100 GB. It also includes free weekly backups and a website builder featuring 150 templates, making it a compelling option for those seeking more resources and tools with their hosting plan.

Bluehost pricing quadruples during renewals.

Bluehost’s pricing strategy involves a significant increase upon renewal, often quadrupling the initial promotional rate. For instance, while the basic hosting plan is advertised at $2.95 per month for the first year, the renewal fee escalates to $11.99 per month—which is almost x4 of the promo price.

Here’s a breakdown of Bluehost promotion vs renewal price.

However, this practice is not unique to Bluehost—it is common among hosting providers to offer attractive introductory prices and then raise the rates at the time of renewal.

When comparing Bluehost’s renewal prices with those of its competitors, it’s clear that Bluehost’s fees are relatively high. For example, Hostinger’s and DreamHost’s renewal rates are lower, at $9.99 and $6.99 per month, respectively, compared to Bluehost’s $11.99.

Here’s a table comparing Bluehost renewal pricing to its competitors.

Bluehost Review: User Experience

Bluehost dashboard is clean and minimalistic. It allows you to perform most hosting management tasks including installing plugins, creating backups and cpanel emails, without necessarily logging into your cPanel.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Bluehost UI is how easy it is to install a new WordPress website.

Compared to other web hosting services, the process is straightforward and doesn’t require users to go through a tedious process of logging into their cPanel account.

Just hit the “Add Site” button under the “Website” menu and Bluehost will automatically, launch a setup wizard that will guide you step-by-step to install WordPress.

You can also quickly access your WordPress core files via the File Manager, access PHPMyAdmin, or even launch a website in a staging environment without leaving your Bluehost dashboard.

However, one of the things I didn’t like about the Bluehost interface is that they try to upsell everywhere—which can be annoying. Every time you log into the platform you’re hit with promotional messages like this one.

Overall, I found Bluehost easy to use. If you’ve used any other web hosting provider before, you’ll likely find Bluehost to be even easier.

Bluehost Review: Web Hosting Technology

Many web hosting companies don’t disclose the technology they use and if some do, most customers don’t know why it matters.

The truth is the web hosting technology that your host plays a big role in your website performance.  Up-to-date technology ensures a better site performance which improves your bottomline.

So, how does Bluehost fair?

Bluehost uses Apache web server software which is okay for small websites but not ideal for high-traffic sites.

Bluehost does not use high-end enterprise server software such as LiteSpeed or NGINX that most modern hosting companies like Hostinger, Kinsta, and Chemicloud use to provide fast hosting. Instead, it uses Apache.

Apache is a good web server software for small websites with low traffic due to its reliability and compatibility with most servers’ OS. However, it’s more resource-hungry compared to NGINX and LiteSpeed.

It requires more processing power and memory to handle a large number of concurrent users, which can cause performance issues during traffic spikes. If you have a high-traffic website and want exceptional performance you’ll want to look elsewhere.

Still stuck with traditional SSD storage.

Storage technology is another crucial factor to consider when choosing a web hosting provider because it directly impacts your website’s performance,

Faster storage translates to faster loading times for your website. Traditional HDDs are slow, while SSDs offer significant speed improvements. NVMe SSDs take it a step further by providing even lower latency and faster data transfer rates compared to regular SSDs.

Most hosts modern web hosting providers are moving away from HDDs and regular SSDs to NVMes to provide better performance—Chemicloud, A2 Hosting Rocket and WPX hosting are some of them.

Meanwhile, Bluehost uses regular SSDs in a RAID 1 configuration. While they’re typically faster, NVMes offer better performance especially if you have a high-traffic site.

Data centers across 6 locations.

Bluehost has 6 data centers across the US, Europe, China, and South East Asia allowing you to choose the location close to your target audience.

You have the flexibility to choose from the following preferred locations:

• Mumbai,
• Utah
• Orem
• London
• Shanghai
• Hong Kong

This allows you to offer better performance for your audience.

Propriety caching system.

Bluehost offers an in-house caching system to boost your website performance and reduce HTTP requests for returning visitors. Caching is automatically enabled for all WordPress installations but you also get the flexibility to choose from three options:

• Assets Only — cache static files like images, CSS, and JavaScript but not the HTML pages themselves.
• Assets & Web Pages — caches both static files and your website’s HTML pages.
• Assets & Web Pages – Extended — This is the most aggressive caching option and caches everything, including any dynamic content on your website.

This is a good-to-have feature as it removes the need for installing a third-party caching system which can add an extra kilobyte to your website file.

Automatic CloudFlare Integration

Bluehost automatically integrates your website to Cloudflare allowing you to enjoy the performance and security perks that come with the CDN such as:

• Faster DNS
• DDoS attack protection
• Traffic Filtering
• HTTP/2 protocol
• Browser caching

Most hosts require you to manually integrate a CDN —which can be a daunting task for the less technically savvy users. However, Bluehost does it for you. You have the flexibility to enable or disable the CDN but this option is limited to medium and high-tier plans. The basic plan does not offer this option to disable the Cloudflare.

Bluehost Review: Speed and Uptime Performance

As we had discussed earlier, Bluehost offers a pretty average web hosting technology. But considering the cheap price it comes with, as it targets small websites it’s easy to see why.

Rather than relying on assumptions, we decided to gather concrete data. Our goal was to assess the responsiveness and speed of Bluehost’s servers.

In that case, we started by setting up a demo website. Since Bluehost web hosting is highly optimized for WordPress, we created the site using WordPress.

We intentionally refrained from installing any caching or speed optimization plugins. Additionally, we disabled Bluehost’s in-house caching and Cloudflare integration to get real-time results. Our setup included importing five demo pages to simulate a real-world website. With everything in place, we initiated our speed test experiment.

Bluehost speed test using Pingdom in different locations

This test focused on assessing the loading speed of a website hosted on Bluehost. To kick off our experiments, we used Pingdom, selecting San Francisco as our initial test location.

Remarkably, the website loaded in a mere 703 microseconds. Keep in mind that we intentionally refrained from using any page optimization techniques like caching or minification.

However, we didn’t want to assume all users were located in the US. We also ran tests in different locations such as Tokyo, Sydney, and London among others, and here were our results.

As you can see from the results proximity to a Bluehost data center significantly influenced loading speeds. The website performed optimally in London and San Francisco, while Sao Paulo and Sydney experienced the longest loading times.

With that in mind, if you’re using Bluehost make sure to select the data location where most of your target audience is located to provide exceptional performance.

Bluehost load test.

Our previous speed test experiments were just the tip of the iceberg. Although Bluehost performed well, it had virtually no incoming traffic.

In this load test experiment, we wanted to see how Bluehost’s server performed under stress, simulating real-world conditions with traffic spikes.

We used K6 from Grafana Labs to run the experiment where we sent a maximum of 100 virtual users (VUs) for a total duration of 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

Starting with 25 VUs, the number doubled every 30 seconds, allowing us to monitor how Bluehost handled response times and requests.

Here’s what we got:

• The test consistently managed 100 VUs.
• The HTTP failure rate was exceptionally low at 0.33%.
• The highest request rate was 96.33 requests per second.
• The 95th percentile response time was a stable 44 ms.

Maintaining performance with a sustained load of 100 VUs reflects the system’s robustness, even under considerable stress. This positive outcome showcases Bluehost’s reliability in demanding scenarios.

Bluehost’s uptime performance was below the industry standard (99.99%).

We’ve been tracking Bluehost’s uptime performance for the last 9 months and found that it had an average uptime of 99.940%.

That translates to roughly 9.86 minutes of downtime. A 99.99% uptime guarantee is considered the industry standard for reliable web hosting and Bluehost performed below that.

Unlike its competitors (like Kinsta’s 100% guarantee), Bluehost doesn’t offer a formal uptime guarantee. This means you won’t receive financial compensation for downtime.

Bluehost Review: Customer Support

Bluehost is reputable for having excellent customer support. They offer support via live chat and phone.

On their website, they claim to offer 24/7 support to their customers.

Unlike most hosts that hide their live chat widget, Bluehost makes it easy to contact them. Their livechat widget is located on most of their pages at effective positions.

Now the question is, how good is their support team? I wanted to find out and so I hopped into a live chat with their team.

Surprisingly, in less than a minute I had received a response.

As you can see, their team was ready to help.

Pros and cons of Using Bluehost

Bluehost is an excellent hosting company that you can use to get your website online in minutes.

But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect for everyone.

And as any company has its advantages and drawbacks so is Bluehost.

Here are the pros and cons of using Bluehost.

Pros

• You’ll receive a free domain, SSL certificate, and a CDN via Cloudflare.
• Bluehost is a WordPress-recommended hosting provider. That being said, you won’t be using any host to create a website but the largest Content Management System trusts.
• Bluehost’s introduction costs and renewal prices are favorable compared to its competitors.
• Bluehost has a 99.98% uptime guarantee. That minimizes any chance of your website going offline. Also, Bluehost’s speed performance is satisfactory.
• Outstanding customer support
• They have a beginner-friendly dashboard and even automatically install WordPress for you in your primary domain.
• Their hosting is scalable.
• 30-day money-back guarantee in case their hosting was not satisfying.

Cons

• Bluehost does not offer free migrations. You’ll need to migrate the site yourself. Otherwise, if you want their team to help, you have to pay a $149.99 fee.
• Extra hidden add-ons during checkout. If you’re not careful, Bluehost automatically adds some premium add-ons when checking out your order. Which, in most cases, you won’t need.
• Prices shoot during renewals.

Should You Use Bluehost?

It doesn’t matter whether it is your first time launching a website, the Bluehost interface makes creating a website for beginners a breeze. They have a great support team that is ready to help you in case you are stuck.

Furthermore, the company offers hosting at a competitive price. And in case you are not happy with their hosting, you can cancel the contract before 30 days elapse.

Although it is not the most perfect, it’s a great company that offers awesome hosting services for value for your money.