Bluehost is one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress-recommended hosting provider. Bluehost offers a wide variety of hosting plans for beginners and medium to large businesses with 24/7 customer support. See the complete Bluehost review by our experts to find out if Bluehost is the right choice for you.
In this comprehensive Bluehost review, we’ll test their promises with a rigorous and thorough analysis using industry-standard benchmarking tools.
The following are the areas we’ll look into:
- Speed: How fast will your website load with Bluehost? We will test their speed and server response time to assess that.
- Performance: How does Bluehost perform under traffic spikes? We’ll test that by performing the stress test and see how well it performs with high traffic.
- Reliability: Will your website be available 24/7/365 without any downtime?
- Customer Support: Can you count on Bluehost’s customer support when you immediately need help with your website?
- Features: Do they offer all the features you’ll need to build your website?
- Pricing: Do they have the best pricing in the industry? Are there any Bluehost deals that can save you money?
This is our complete Bluehost review, and we’ll analyze the pros and cons of using Bluehost in depth. If you don’t want to read the full review, here is the quick scorecard of Bluehost with our verdict right below it.
Bluehost Review Summary | |
---|---|
Performance grade | A+ |
Average load time | 1.1 s |
Average response time | 140 ms |
Free domain | Yes |
Free SSL | Yes |
1-click WordPress | Yes |
Support | Phone / Live Chat / Knowledge base |
Start with Bluehost |
Bottom line: In our Bluehost review, we found them to be reliable, fast, affordable, and with friendly 24/7 hosting support.
That’s why we’ve chosen to recommend Bluehost as one of the best WordPress hosting companies.
Now, let’s dive into our detailed review so that you can make your own decision.
About Bluehost
First, let’s take a look at the company itself.
Bluehost started in 1996 and steadily grew to become one of the largest web hosting companies in the world. It now powers more than 2 million websites from all over the world.
![Bluehost website Bluehost website](https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/bluehost-website-680.png)
Bluehost has a long-standing relationship with the WordPress community. They are an official WordPress.org recommended web host since 2006.
They pride themselves in their 24/7 support, great hosting infrastructure, and support for free and open-source software like WordPress.
Pros and Cons of Bluehost
All the best web hosting services have their pros and cons. Some you can live with, and some you cannot ignore.
After testing Bluehost, we learned the following pros and cons that users should consider.
Pros
First, let’s take a look at the advantages that make Bluehost the top choice.
- Pricing: Their hosting plans are well within the reach of most users, particularly those just starting.
- Reliability: They power a large number of websites with minimum downtime.
- No hidden charges: There are no hidden fees when signing up for your account.
- Free domain: You get a free domain name for the first year when you sign up.
- Free CDN + SSL: For each website, you get a free SSL certificate and free Cloudflare CDN to block malware and improve security.
- Money Back Guarantee: They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee on all plans.
Cons
As we mentioned earlier, every hosting company has downsides. The following are some disadvantages of choosing Bluehost as your host.
- Higher domain renewal price: Their free domain renewal price is higher than average.
- Upselling Addons: They have an aggressive upsell process during signup. But you can easily uncheck SiteLock and all other add-ons if you don’t need them.
Bluehost Performance Tests
The most important performance metric to look for is speed. It affects user experience on your site and your WordPress SEO rankings.
Studies show that a 1-second drop in website speed can decrease conversion rate by 7%, and a 3-second delay can cost you 50% of your traffic.
![Strangeloop performance case study Strangeloop performance case study](https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/strangeloops-speed-study.jpg)
Let’s see how fast your website will load on Bluehost.
Bluehost Speed Test Results
For a faster website, you will need to choose a fast website hosting company. Keeping this in mind, we created a test site to see how fast Bluehost really is.
Our test site was created using WordPress with the default Twenty Twenty-Three theme. We imported dummy content for theme development, which also includes images. Then, we used Pingdom to test the website speed.
Here are our test results:
![Bluehost speed test results Bluehost speed test results](https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/bluehost-speed-test-mar2024-1.png)
As you can see, our test site loads in less than two seconds. This result is remarkable because our website wasn’t using any caching plugins or speed optimization tips.
However, the speed test alone isn’t enough because this test site didn’t have a large amount of traffic.
To test how Bluehost servers would respond to increased traffic, we sent virtual users (VU) to our test site using K6 by Grafana Labs.
We used it to gradually increase the number of visitors to 50 to see how the server would handle increased requests from multiple connections at once.
Here is a screenshot of our results.
![Bluehost stress test results Bluehost stress test results](https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/bluehost-stress-test-mar2024.png)
The gray line is the number of active virtual users on the site, and the green line is the server response time.
As you can see, the server load remained stable throughout the test, even at peak traffic.
This test indicates that if you are looking for a really fast website, Bluehost may be a perfect fit.
It is also important to note that we didn’t record any failures or downtime during our testing.
Many hosting companies promise a 99.99% uptime guarantee. We set up an uptime monitoring alert for our test account. See the screenshot below for a detailed look at Bluehost server uptime.
![Bluehost uptime test results Bluehost uptime test results](https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/bluehost-uptime-testresult-mar2024.png)
Bluehost Server Response Time
When you test a live website using tools like Pingdom, you see how everything on your website loads. This includes images, too, which take much longer to load than plain text.
To get a more accurate server response time, we used another tool called Bitcatcha. It allows you to test server response time without loading any data.
![Bluehost response time test result Bluehost response time test result](https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/bluehost-responsetime-test-mar2024.png)
As you can see, the Bluehost server in the US performed under a fraction of a second. The response was a bit higher in other locations but still under less than a second.
If your website’s target audience is in the United States, this would benefit it. However, if more of your users come from other parts of the world, you can change your server location.
Bluehost Hosting Plans and Features
Bluehost offers a variety of hosting plans for all budgets and sizes. This includes shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server, cloud hosting, WooCommerce hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and more.
Let’s take a look at Bluehost plans and their features.
- WordPress / Shared Web Hosting: Shared hosting is the perfect way to start a new website with low traffic volume. In a shared hosting environment, your website shares server resources with other websites.
- WooCommerce Hosting: WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily start an online store with WordPress. WooCommerce hosting offers you all the essential features to kickstart your e-commerce store.
- VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting: An upgrade to shared WordPress hosting, VPS hosting allows you to virtual dedicated resources in a shared environment.
- Dedicated hosting server: A Bluehost dedicated hosting server for your website means you will have all the resources of the dedicated server to yourself. The downside is that you will have to manage the server on your own.
All Bluehost plans allow you to install WordPress with 1-click.
All plans come with an easy-to-use hosting control panel, where you can manage your hosting, create databases, and more.
Bluehost has a custom control panel that is easier for beginners to use. It also uses a customized version of the cPanel hosting dashboard for more advanced options.
![Bluehost control panel Bluehost control panel](https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/bluehost-control-panel.png)
Breakdown of Bluehost’s Shared WordPress Hosting Plans
Bluehost offers a shared hosting package suitable for starter websites.
Their shared plan is available at four different levels with varying introductory prices.
![Bluehost pricing Bluehost pricing](https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/bluehost-pricing-2.png)
Let’s take a look at Bluehost pricing and what’s included in each plan.
- Basic: The basic plan only allows you to host one website. It hosts one domain, 10GB SSD storage, and five email accounts with 100 MB of disk space for each account. For the first term, you’ll pay $1.99 per month. When you renew the account, you’ll have to pay $7.99 per month.
- Choice Plus: The Choice Plus plan includes 3 websites with 50 GB of storage space. You’ll also get free email accounts. The price for the first term starts from $3.99 per month. When you renew the account, you’ll have to pay $13.99 per month.
- Online Store: This plan is suitable for eCommerce stores and includes premium WooCommerce add-ons, which save users hundreds of dollars. It starts from $7.45 per month and renews at $18.99 per month after the introductory offer ends.
- Pro The Pro plan starts at $9.99 per month for the first term and $20.99 per month after that. It includes all the features of the above plans, 100 GB storage, up to 100 websites, and is optimized for high traffic.
All plans include a free domain name for the first year, free SSL, and 24/7 live chat support.
All plans also include malware scanning, 1-click staging, free CDN (Cloudflare with Argo routing), DDoS protection, and more.
All plans (except Basic) also include free domain privacy for the first year.
If you are just starting your website, then you can select any of these plans. Upgrading to a higher plan is easy, so you can start small and scale up when needed.
Bluehost Customer Support and Service
We all need help occasionally. It is really important that you choose a web hosting company that offers help and support when you need it.
Bluehost maintains a huge library of articles, step-by-step guides, and video tutorials as part of its extensive knowledge base. This is a huge help for beginners, and a simple search can quickly resolve the most common issues.
However, sometimes, you may need to talk to an individual to get more help.
Bluehost provides a 24/7 support system where you can talk to their support team representatives using live chat or phone support. This is helpful when you need quick assistance from technical support staff, and you know they are just one click away.
![Bluehost support website Bluehost support website](https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/bluehost-support-website.jpg)
One thing that is missing is the ticket-based support system. Bluehost recently decided to eliminate ticket-based support and focus on the personal approach of live chat support and phone-based support.
However, some users may still miss the ticket-based support system, which is particularly good if your issue cannot be resolved in one live chat or phone session.
Conclusion: Is Bluehost the Right Choice for You?
After reading this review, you might be wondering if Bluehost is the right choice for your website.
Bluehost is often ranked the #1 web hosting provider by many websites. They offer a wide range of hosting options with tons of features that help you easily build your website.
All their plans include expert 24/7 support from knowledgeable staff.
Most importantly, they offer affordable starter plans that fit any budget.
If you are starting, then you cannot go wrong signing up for a Bluehost shared hosting plan. It’s easy on your pocket and comes with all the right tools. As your site grows, you can easily upgrade your hosting plan accordingly.
Ready to start your website with Bluehost? Click here to select your Bluehost plan.
Bluehost Coupon
WPBeginner users get an exclusive 75% discount and a free domain with our Bluehost coupon code.
All you have to do is click on this link to make a purchase. The discount will be applied automatically.
Remember, you must use the link above to get the exclusive discount. If you visit the Bluehost website directly or use another link, then you won’t get the special offer.
FAQs About Bluehost hosting
In this detailed Bluehost review, we have tried to cover all the aspects of their hosting services. The following are some of the most frequently asked questions about Bluehost that we hear from our users.
1. Can I make an online store using WooCommerce on Bluehost?
Yes, you can. In fact, Bluehost is one of the best WooCommerce hosting service providers. Their starter plan is perfect for starting an online store.
However, keep in mind that you’ll need to upgrade as your store starts getting more traffic. Hopefully, by that time, you’ll be making enough money to justify the upgrade costs.
2. Is Bluehost good for beginners?
Yes. Bluehost is good for beginners, bloggers, and small businesses. They are often ranked as the most beginner-friendly by industry experts. They automatically install WordPress for you when you sign up. They also have an easy-to-use control panel that allows you to manage your hosting account by yourself.
There is plenty of help available with detailed guides, video tutorials, and articles. You also have 24/7 access to their expert, user-friendly support via live chat and phone.
3. Can Bluehost handle high traffic?
Their shared plans are suitable for starter websites and small businesses. In our stress test, it was able to handle 50 virtual users without any slowdown.
These plans can handle reasonable and sudden traffic spikes. However, they are still quite limited in terms of server resources. If you are expecting high traffic, then you’ll need to upgrade your hosting plan.
4. Why use Bluehost for WordPress?
Bluehost is one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider. They have been supporting the WordPress community for a very long time and know WordPress very well.
Their platform is highly optimized for WordPress websites and engineered to run WordPress at peak performance. They also have WordPress engineers on their team, so you know your website is in safe hands.
5. Do I need a credit card to sign up with Bluehost?
Bluehost accepts credit cards, but you can choose to show more payment options during checkout and select PayPal as your payment method if you wish.
6. Is Bluehost better than GoDaddy?
Bluehost is better than GoDaddy because we believe Bluehost support is better. The Bluehost My Sites dashboard and overall onboarding experience are a lot more beginner-friendly. Not to mention, Bluehost web hosting offers better pricing for small businesses.
7. How does Bluehost compare with SiteGround and HostGator?
When comparing Bluehost alternatives, such as SiteGround and HostGator, there are several pros and cons you should be aware of.
Bluehost offers more value for the price when compared to SiteGround. Their plans start at $1.99 per month and include a free domain, whereas SiteGround plans start at $4.99 and do not include any free domain.
On the other hand, the SiteGround platform comes with better speed and security features. For more details, see our comparison of Bluehost vs SiteGround vs WP Engine.
Bluehost and HostGator are pretty similar in terms of hosting CPU resources, functionality, site migration tools, pricing, and more. Bluehost alternatives like Hostinger, InMotion hosting, or DreamHost offer comparable services. We find Bluehost’s user experience to be slightly better, as they’ve invested heavily in their WordPress website builder platform.
8. Where are Bluehost servers located?
Bluehost operates its own in-house data center in Utah, in the western United States. It is a massive 50,000-square-foot facility that serves as its primary data center.
9. What Bluehost plan should I get?
If you are starting out a brand new website, blog, or online store, then we recommend starting with their basic plan. It is good enough for a starter website, and you can always upgrade later.
Ready to start your website with Bluehost? Click here to select your Bluehost plan.
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Larry Lannan says
I started a local news blog 4 1/2 years ago. After a bad experience with another hosting company, I asked around and found lots of satisfied customers using Bluehost. I had never used WordPress before. Bluehost had outstanding support and helped me get started on WordPress and everything has run smoothly the last year. Choosing Bluehost has been a good decision for me.
Rick Sampson says
I am well pleased with Bluehost but have had an ongoing problem with WordPress … the inability to easily post email addresses. I’m not a “coder,” so I need a shortcut to do it … and I haven’t been able (in over a year) to find one or even how to find one!
Daniel Bader says
Bluehost is an awesome hosting company, and I’ve tried several others in the past. Any issues I’ve had have been resolved quickly and professionally. Keep up the superb service! I applaud the CEO for running such a great company.
Thank you!
Donna Stephan says
Hosting is very good. The pricing can get out of control.
Victor Bennison says
After unhappy experiences with some other providers I became happily acquainted with Bluehost. I’m particularly happy with their customer service. I’ve been a happy customer for many years.
Jeff Brown says
I have had no negative experiences wit BlueHost, and am very satisfied so far! Thanks for keeping the prices reasonable! Jeff
Varun says
Hi,
I am using BlueHost from last 2 year, really great hosting provides and nowdays its was fabulous. Thanks for the review excellent article and written off. Please keep sharing.
Thanks,
Regards,
Varun
aurora says
Honestly, I’ve been happy with blue host either. Support is a hit or miss; some of their staff are willing to help you out even more because they are bored, but some won’t because they’re talking to a whole bunch of clients at the same time.
Mansoor Bhanpurawala says
I am researching on Bluehost and the opinion of people here are all very valuable, thanks for sharing and thanks to the site!
Richard Covert says
Mixed review for BlueHost.
*I have had good service and customer support
* I have waited an hour to get to the first level of support- horrible music
* I’ve had white screens of death that we not fixed form restoration from back-up
*I’ve gone through long periods of 99.9% uptime
*I’ve had a couple month of less than 90% uptime according to Pingdom
*Bluehost tried upgrade my service even after I restored my renewal setting to my normal settings.
*Bluehost decided I should renew for 3 years instead of 1 Year
If you have great service from BlueHost great. Not everyone does.
BlueHost cpanel is great
I am giving DreamHost a try for my newest site and podcast home base..
Debra says
Terrible phone support. I have been on hold for 47 minutes now, waiting for billing to answer.
Steve Q says
Like many here, I’ve been using BH for years. In that time I have set up many client sites there. But no more. Their support has fallen off markedly over the past year or two with extremely long queues and inconsistent quality in the support reps – some are well-trained and other not at all.
It seems to be the nature of hosting. You find a great host and within a couple years you watch them slowly dwindle until they become just another go-daddy.
Noel Leonard says
BlueHost is sending emails presenting themselves as GoDaddy; claiming that peoples accounts are suspended for non-payment. Everything in the email seems completely legit for GoDaddy; but if you click the link to resolve the issue, it takes you to BlueHost.com.
Shah Faisal says
Its not from BlueHost , Someone is referring u to bluehost.
Affiliate Links
Ryan J says
Blue Host is generally okay. The server my site is on is down today for a DDOS attack. Has been going on for more than 12 hours. If you think 12+ hours of downtime is good, so long as the hosting is cheap, this is the company for you.
J. Prendergast says
I was with Bluehost shared hosting for years until they started outbound filtering of email which causes the mail forwarding set in cpanel to break. The effect of the change was that you would get some mail forwarded, but other mail would drop and you would never know. I had to move my hosting to another company since not receiving some emails is not something I could tolerate.
Laura says
Where’d you move to? I’m looking for one who’s CS I can reach on the phone without holding for half a day.
David says
Help Me to Choice…. OPTIMIZED HOSTING for WordPress (blogger) or VPS HOSTING (Standard) on Bluehost which are the great package for my growing website? is there any suggestion Please….
Thank you so much in advance
David
Sacha says
I’ve used Bluehost for a while for several websites and I haven’t had any major problems.
I’ve had a few minor issues, but the staff have also helped me put things right in a matter of minutes.
I also like the WordPress installer.
My only dislike is the pricing of the domain names. Not a big problem, I can just register my domain names through GoDaddy.
Alastair Bell says
In the main I’ve been quite happy with BlueHost (though my usage has been very very light so I haven’t had any issues with traffic).
I wasn’t particularly impressed in my last invoice to find I had an increase in costs and an associated entry “Upgrade Plus Web Hosting” – I had no knowledge of any ‘upgrade’ nor any need for it and in my view should have had some correspondence to say what it was at the very least.
I had been thinking about cancelling the hosting anyway (I’ve not used it at all the past 18 months) and the price increase was the push required.
Marcelo says
Bluehost used to be a decent host.
These days went from bad to worse. Support takes at least more than 10 minutes to respond to your question.
I purchased a SSL certificate more than 10 days ago and it was not implemented. I’ve contacted Support 4 times already for this issue and nothing.
Very frustrating!
Sacha H says
I wanted to create a small WordPress website and I decided to host it on BlueHost shared hosting because they are reccomended by WordPress themselves.
I must say that they are really good.
They actully have a big blue button in the control panel that says Install WordPress which is really helpful.
I just installed WordPress with MOJO Marketplace and focused on my website.
Overall, BlueHost are great if you just want hassle-free WordPress hosting.
Sacha says
BlueHost seem pretty good.
I have a WordPress website hosted with them and I haven’t had any issues.
I especially like the 1-click installation with MOJO Marketplace.
I would highly recommend them if you just want to host a basic WordPress website.
Irene says
Beware! Awful hosting. Crooks and tricksters. They promise full refund you get part of it. They tried to cheat me many times during only 2 weeks. They tried to charge $50 for a wordpress theme each month instead of one time fee. Beware of these crooks.
darius miller says
We have used bluehost for three years. Service interruptions are common. Hold times are awful. I was just on hold for 40 minutes with tech support trying to resolve yet another service interruption. Called the sales number and it was answered by a person in three seconds.
Bruce Wilson says
If you like a confusing control panel and waiting on hold for 30 minutes for technical support, Bluehost is for you!
Brook says
I was a Bluehost customer for many years, and back in the days when Matt Heaton ran the company things were great. Over the past two years their service has deteriorated badly; lots of down-time, auto-renewed accounts when set to “manual”, renewed an account which was not mine on my credit card!
Starting mid-2014 I gradually closed / shifted all my sites from BH to other hosts. Sorry BH – you were excellent under Matt Heaton, but these days… forget it.
Anonymous says
I’ve not been a customer of Bluehost, but one of my friends has an account with them for several years. In the past year, my friend’s server kept getting hacked. Upon contacting Bluehost, my friend couldn’t get his site back up despite that Bluehost said they would help. Mind you that my friend is a small business owner who has little knowledge about web stuff, and I believe the majority of hosting account owners are just like him. Therefore, they would naturally turn to their hosting companies for help when things go down. Unfortunately, Bluehost has failed twice in helping him out in the past year, big time.
My friend’s website got hacked sometime in May or June of 2014. Bluehost managed to upsell him and make him purchase their sitelock service. My friend paid for the service, but Bluehost didn’t get his websites back up. In the end I had to jump in and troubleshoot the code for him and remove/replace the hacked files. Months later, his server got hacked again. This type, with a different type of attack that result in a similar end result. The code were inserted into many locations in his server, and seemed to have been spreading by day. My friend turned to me for help again, and in the end I went through each of the contaminated file to fix the problems and got the websites up again.
We don’t know what has allowed the hack to take place, especially given that my friend had purchased the sitelock function with Bluehost. I was concerned that it would happen again, so I wanted to zip up his current root folder to create a backup on the server. You know, I just don’t want to download potentially contaminated files onto my computer plus he’s got a huge root folder. I tried zipping up his files in the file manager inside cPanel, it takes forever and I never ended up seeing the finished compressed file in the server. I then tried to create a backup via ManageWP. ManageWP generated an error that had to do with the server killing compression processes due to timeout issues. So I got on live chat with Bluehost on my friend’s behalf. I began the chat with them at 11am and now it’s 1:04pm. The guy I chatted with wasn’t able to fix it, and he just transferred me to another person when I hadn’t had a chance to see what he’s typed yet. Now I’m with another person and may have to waste even more time for him to say the same thing the last rep did. The last rep basically asked me to use FTP clients like filezilla. I told him that filezilla doesn’t have the function to compress files in remote servers. He then asked if I knew about SSH… However, zipping up a folder in your server shouldn’t be this huge hassle at all. I have hosting accounts with 2 other companies, and their file managers can compress my root folders under 20 minutes even if they’re large files.
I especially find it unacceptable when my friend didn’t get the support from Bluehost to fix anything. He has been paying almost double the price of what other hosting companies would charge for a similar package, and he’s not getting what he deserves to have out of this deal at all. Bottom line is, there’re better service providers out there who are more responsible and would cost less.
Tilak says
I am also using bluehost for last five years, services offered by them is good but their terms and conditions changes time to time. I faced lot of problem with this hosting and planning to switch over to other. The reasons:
1. They automatically upgraded my hosting account during the renew process. when asked to customer people they can’t downgrade my account.
2. Customer support is really pathetic. They can’t solve problems efficiently.
john says
Bluehost has been far better over the last year than 1&1 internet, my first hosting provider for a few months after starting my website.
But there are MAJOR problems with Bluehost — which is something I am realizing only after month 10 and trying — with serious hiccups — to upgrade from Bluehost VPS to Bluehost Dedicated Servers.
What Bluehost does well is help get a site up ASAP. a simple site, like for a small business, will be fine with bluehost. their people actually will assist with wordpress-related problems and issues, which 1&1 would not even touch.
What Bluehost is AWFUL at is far worse, however.
Once your site actually starts to get traffic and scale, Bluehost falls apart. The service seems set up for sites with zero – 50 daily visitors. My site on a dedicated Premium Bluehost account struggles to cope with 3000 unique visitors daily.
To top it off, when something is REALLY WRONG — they have no clue how to fix it. you will spend hours if not days calling back, explaining the entire issue again, and then getting the same crappy story.
their CSR people are nice, but generally spotty in being able to identify any causes beyond the absolute basics. once a problem goes to an “admin” — you need to walk away.
Either it will be fixed in 15 minutes, or prepare to wait up to three weeks for zero reply or help or updates.
Once an “admin” is working on an issue, the regular CSR people cannot touch it, nor provide updates.
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM
is the price. prepare to spend up to $350 monthly for service and servers that are SLOW AND FAILURE_PRONE.
prepare to receive zero actual expertise when you call, and BEWARE that many of the customer-service people will recommend solutions that actually make a site far, far worse in the long run.
Finally, when you do upgrade to the DEDICATED SERVER, expect very little/no improvement in performance versus the VPS accounts.
Overall, I am thinking of leaving Bluehost and am spending time investigating web servers FOR SCALE and ACTUAL EXPERTISE.
For what Bluehost bills, they are a D+ solution overall.
And the servers crash ***FREQUENTLY***
Laura says
Got my annual Bluehost hosting renewal notice and just before clicking “okay” was told that my new 1-year “upgrade plus web hosting” would be $143.88 vs. the ~$80 I used to pay! I’m now on Chat with a customer service rep saying that I don’t need “upgrade plus” shared hosting but am not being given an alternative in the checkout cart. The chat is taking forever (with a robot?)
Meanwhile their site shows these rates: http://www.bluehost.com/shared
Addendum–the robot just quoted me a price of $81.49 and says they’ll put through the order for me. Hope this works…
Joshua says
Too expensive for what I’m doing, there are a lot of there webhosting companies now that can do pretty much the same job the A LOT cheaper. I tried to renew and they pretty much doubled the original price trig to charging almost 150 a year. I didn’t have any problems, but they need some better prices
Charlie says
Used BluHost when I was thinking about starting a website. When I signed up I saw that it was like $4 a mont and thought that was great. Well I get an alert on my phone that I was charged $150. Turns out they charge you for 36 months worth of everything up front as well as the domain name. They game me absolutely NO warning about this. BUT, when I live chatted with one of their reps he sent me an email with the cancellation form and within 10 minutes I had every penny that they charged me back in my account so I have to give them credit for that.
Altaf Hussain says
Well I vouch for their shared hosting, been with them for a decade, given them several referral business, most of my clients were with bluehost shared. But dedicated hosting sucks. I had a very very bitter experience with bluehost dedicated hosting. I will never ever suggest anyone here, nor will I renew the contract with them. Yeah I know I can cancel the account and get refund, just being there as we are in the middle of something.
Think 100 times before signing up with bluehost for dedicated hosting. If there was rating of below -100 I would give them one. The biggest mistake of my hosting career is a dedicated hosting with bluehost. For shared hosting i’m still with them, The worst ever downtime, and its happening everyday, thanks to the loads of monitoring softwares and websites who are sending in all those reports.
Hal Gilley says
I had several sites hosted by Blue Host and was somewhat satisfied until attempting to close my accounts. I was moving and unable to keep my domain up to date so I closed all but unfortunately forgot one. This was very unfortunate for me due to the fact that auto renewal was operational and my email address had changed due to the COX network.
Alex from Blue Host refused to work with me concerning my issue and even said Blue Host would fight any attempts by me to dispute the $25 charge with discover. WOW, this is certainly NOT customer service. Quite the opposite. I had no access to email to receive the reminder of 3 day renewal.
The only thing remaining is to post my TRUTHFUL as well as regretful experience on all Web hosting review sites. Discover will also be disputing the charge on my behalf.
Jan Gibson says
Have used Bluehost for 2 years now and they have been very reliable. HOWEVER, when your current contract expires, be prepared for a large price increase and I’m talking over 60%. This is ridiculous. Looking for another good provider if anyone has any suggestions?
Christine says
Justhost – so far haven’t increased their promo price upon renewal.
Geraldine Forster says
Well I have to say that I am NOT at all happy with Bluehost.. I signed up with them yesterday after giving them all my credit card details and address in the UK.. As I am a traveler just in case they needed to contact me I listed my Thailand mobile telephone number… All was accepted and even receive the confirmation email that I could get started on my (Very Urgent0 website.. When hey ho after a few hours I receive another email saying that my account had been deactivated!!! After much ado on chat .. I was told that as my phone number didn’t coincide with the country of my address my account had been frozen! They then said I should phone them from my mobile in Thailand to the USA!! I did ask them if they were going to pay for the call! Now they say I have to send a photocopy of my Passport or Driving license plus a photo copy of my credit card ..
I personally think this is disgusting.. they have all my details and my credit card details.. Plus whatever way, if I wish to cancel I still have to send them more info and to top it all I cant recover my domain name… I leave you all to form your own opinions
Rajat says
I am thinking of hosting my site on bluehost. Should i register my domain with them too or register is from somewhere else?
Editorial Staff says
Bluehost gives you a free domain, so why not take advantage of that offer.
Admin
Sib says
Speaking from experience, I wouldn’t recommend registering the domain name and hosting with the same company. What happened in our case was that we moved to another hosting company for better service, and the previous company didn’t “push through the DNS for nearly a week. We were not in control of our own domain name. Even though we created a cname and pointed to the new server, the former (unreliable) service had to “push it through” – and they took their time in doing so. Nearly a week of down time. An obvious act of retaliation for moving hosting to another company. I would keep those two separate. Sib
Chris says
I have been very happy with Bluehost hosting, but I see no advantage to having them also be the registrar other than convenience of having just one bill. I usually see what sales or deals are going on through several registrars. I say just find whoever seems to be cheap on domains and fills your needs. Google Domains for example gives you dynamic dns and domain privacy for free, which you won’t find most places.
Eliza says
I believe bluehost is the best of all.
Editorial Staff says
Eliza, yes they are pretty good
In the past, they didn’t have options for large sites, but now they even added dedicated servers. It’s nice to see how they are evolving.
Admin
Max Iceman says
I am really glad that i choose BH. Never had any problems with them.They have live support and money back guarantee. I signed up for 3 years( the best price option), and will do it again.
Luis says
I am researching on Bluehost and the opinion of people here are all very valuable, thanks for sharing and thanks to the site!
Editorial Staff says
You are very welcome Luis. That’s why we created this page, so others can make an educated decision.
Admin
Josephine Nolan says
I haven’t had the issues noted here, and I’m a ten out of ten reviewer for Bluehost for customer service. Since I don’t want to maintain expensive servers, Bluehost’s level of service is critical. They’ve never failed to fix an issue — mostly my issues, not theirs — and they won’t hang up the phone until you’re satisified it’s fixed. I have Network Solutions, GoDaddy and two others for other sites, but NetSol charges $65 an hour to troubleshoot WP sites. None really can match the support at Bluehost. If I did have speed issues… as I did on one site… I’d call. They found I was right and within thirty minutes had improved the situation (they said the logs noted high load and they’d fix it, which they did.) Anyway, I won’t be moving any time soon. I count on them at 2 in the morning when I have a WP problem on a deadline.
Nate Silva says
I’m considering moving to BH.
Speed is one of my primary concerns. I’m curious though … do you get good speed with the standard plans? Or do you need to purchase one of the “higher performance” options?
Thanks much for any and all help.
Editorial Staff says
Speed depends on the size of your site. If your site is really big, then it will be slow and chances are that they will ask you to upgrade. But for smaller sites, the speed is just fine.
Also speed has other factors as well (such as site design, plugins you are using, etc).
Admin
Nate Silva says
Right on, thanks for the help.
Drew says
We were quite happy with Bluehost except for the past 3 months. Page load time is on average 9 seconds where it use to be 1.5 seconds. Am truly considering an alternate service.
my rating: 3 stars
Marc Whelan says
I concur with this writer. I went from Godaddy to Bluehost about a couple years ago, based on top notch reviews of the time. Then a few months ago the power outage, and just last night my site was down for an hour or so. Granted, when I called tech support they stated they were already onto the issue because they had identified the issue, but, my chief complaint is server performance. It is not impressive at all. Yes I know I am on a shared host, but, the reviews I read at the time were singing the praises for this hosting company. I believe the lack of server performance for my site is impacting the number of return visitors. I too am looking for alternatives (hence coming here). I believe the author of this article/website should frequently re-evaluate the hosting companies listed. I am searching for an up to date listing of QUALITY hosting companies, that have servers built SPECIFICALLY for WordPress sites.
Editorial Staff says
Hey Marc,
Power outages can happen with other hosts as well. We do try to keep our list updated. In our opinion, Bluehost still is by far one of the best ways for users to get started. We are still using them for our smaller sites. They host over 850,000 WP sites more than most other hosts.
Yes, there are other hosts that cater specific to WordPress users for ex: WPEngine.
https://www.wpbeginner.com/hosting/wpengine/ << You can read user reviews here. However, their pricing is a bit on the high end. You can also try InMotion or HostGator. Their services are fairly comparable. WPBeginner is located on HostGator Dedicated Server plans.
Admin
Cagri Oner says
Stay away from Bluehost. I’ve been using them nearly two years now. They have this policy of increasing their prices after one year. Also they are so slow, it takes minutes to load a simple page (that particular page, by the way, is a page from a website which has Grade A in terms of page speed grade)
Editorial Staff says
Rather interesting complaint. Did you have caching on your WordPress site? How much traffic were you receiving? Sometimes, a bad plugin can cause the site to load super slow. Page speed only grades the output of the code not load time. It assumes that if the output is good, then the load time will too. Try using a tool like Pingdom to determine what is causing the speed issue.
Admin
david off says
Bluehost puts an asterisk on all their prices, but they don’t explain anywhere what the catch is.
Allan_Vancouver says
I’m using Bluehost at the moment, and not as happy with them as I had hoped. Support helpline answers quickly but their migration process, tools or procedures from a competitor, Godaddy, had problems requiring my calling many, many times.
I’m also finding performance to be an issue from time to time using wp-admin while creating and maintaining my new site that has only my traffic. 20 seconds to update a page is unacceptable.
Richard Miles says
I’ve been on Bluehost for over 3 years, but it’s time to move. I’ve upgraded my package from them but still have speed issues. They say you get unlimited web hosting, but there’s a file limit. If you have a site that starts to get a lot of traffic, you get throttled, but they don’t tell you. I’ve liked them, I’ve liked the cPanel, I’ve liked the customer service, but the speed issue is killing me.
Editorial Staff says
Ofcourse there is no such thing as unlimited. If you read our description of shared hosting here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-hosting/ it clearly tells you that. Imagine if $3.95 per month offered real unlimited hosting, then facebook and google will just use Bluehost rather than spending hundreds of million on server cost. To further elaborate on the wordpress hosting page, we wrote an entire page just about this:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/the-truth-about-shared-wordpress-web-hosting/
Shared web hosting option is created for smaller websites which includes new bloggers, small businesses, etc. If every site used their quota, then shared hosting would not work. But since only very few do, it works out very nicely for everyone. Users get a very affordable deal, and hosting companies make a good profit. As your site grow, you will HAVE to get better hosting (i.e move to VPS, or even a dedicated server).
Admin
Brenda Bourne says
I have only just started building WordPress websites and immediately ran into problems with the hosting company which I had been using for html sites, without incident, for several years. I checked around, found Bluehost, and moved one of the hacked domains there. I was blown away by the tech support – which had been non-existent with the old service. If this keeps up, I’ll never go anywhere else. Bluehost gets 10 out of 10 from me!
saif ullah butt says
I have been using blue host from many years and it seems that they are good. I have had never any problem with their hosting and for me the are 100% up always.![;)](https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-content/plugins/classic-smilies/img/icon_wink.gif)
Thanks
Paul Pehrson says
I’ve been using WP for about seven years and Bluehost for just under one year. WordPress and Bluehost are a great combination, because they both give you powerful flex ability at an unbeatable price. I’m very pleased with Bluehost, and look forward to keeping my WordPress site here for a LONG time to come.
AbuBakar says
I have been using bluehost for more than 2 years now, I have never had problem with them. Cant say about support coz I never ran into serious trouble where I contact support.
Mark Christianson says
I switched over to BlueHost a few months ago after having some issues in performance on another host and have been very pleased. Fast setup, standard cpanel offerings, easy to work with customer support all created a solid platform I could count on and then focus on building my business. As a web developer I have since put a few other clients on bluehost and would recommend them for anyone looking for a service that does their job so you can do yours.
Steve Steiner says
I’ve been using BluHost for several years and have had no problems whatsoever. The couple of times I’ve needed support (usually my mistake), they were easy to reach and resolved my issue quickly and correctly. I’d recommend them to anyone!