DEV Community

Wprefers
Wprefers

Posted on • Originally published at wprefers.com on

Bluehost Review – Best Hosing for WordPress Site

Bluehost is one of the highly popular and, at the same time, most affordable web hosting companies out there on the market for WordPress. It is one of the largest web hosting brands online. They are one of the officially recommended hosting providers by WordPress.org, and they currently powering over 2 million websites worldwide.

Not only this, but it’s also one of the popular domain name registrars. When you sign up for a web hosting plan, Bluehost offers a free domain, free SSL, and an exclusive 70% discount for users, With secure hosting options, domain registration, and other professional services.

bluehost
Bluehost

Due to its remarkable growth, Bluehost has become one of the most popular hosting companies in the world. It offers full integration and the most advanced features for WordPress users, but it also offers security, design freedom, and an easy setup for all users at an affordable rate. It will make sure you don’t need to take a break while building your professional website, making it a more inclusive hosting service for all kinds of web service for everyone including beginners, entrepreneurs, bloggers, and for medium to established e-commerce with 24/7 customer support via live chat or phone.

bluehost hosting
bluehost hosting

Bluehost offers a wide range of hosting plans, including affordable shared, VPS, WordPress, and dedicated hosting, you can choose according to your specific need. Once you outgrow the traffic allowance on shared hosting, you can easily upgrade to their VPS and dedicated server options. They offer one-click installers for WordPress as well as other popular website builders and blogging platforms.

In addition to being inexpensive and easy to use, Bluehost provides marketing training, SEO services, social media marketing, content creation, graphic design services, email, domain names, and local business listings to grow traffic.

Bluehost Hosting Plans

Bluehost offers a variety of hosting plans for all budgets and sizes ranging from shared up to dedicated hosting. This lets you choose the right plan for your needs, and allows you to scale up easily if you start with a lower-end plan. All of these plans come with different features so that customers can choose one according to their needs. Plans include shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server, cloud hosting, WooCommerce hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and more.

Shared Hosting Plans

A shared hosting plan is the cheapest and easiest general service provided by Bluehost. Shared hosting plans are best for most websites. In this plan, your website shares server resources with other websites. This means multiple websites operate using the same server and features. If they experience a traffic surge, your site’s performance will be affected. They’re inexpensive options — sufficient to support your website under most circumstances. If you don’t expect a high traffic volume on your website but want an online presence, shared web hosting is perfect for you. The advantage is that you get a web hosting service at an affordable price. You get the hosting you need, a custom domain name, and email as part of the package.

bluehost-homepage
bluehost-homepage

The shared hosting plan offers the most flexibility and is most popular with Bluehost users. The thing about Bluehost pricing is that it’s much cheaper on a 36-month plan, instead of a 12-month plan, so let’s compare these two. This plan has four pricing options, including:

Unless you are managing a really large project or you need to geek around with your server’s configuration, a shared hosting plan is the one you ought to consider

VPS Hosting

VPS stands for the virtual private server. VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is an upgrade to shared WordPress hosting, VPS hosting allows you to virtual dedicated resources in a shared environment. A Virtual Private Server is something in between a shared hosting and a dedicated one. In the VPS (Virtual Private Servers) hosting service, multiple websites operate using a single server. The former is a very interesting concept that’s built around hosting virtualization. You’ll share a server with other clients, but there’s a (virtual) wall between your projects and theirs. What you’re getting here is access to a web hosting setup that runs as a virtual machine on a bigger, physical server. It’s a setup beneficial when building web apps or other types of web-based products that are not necessarily standard websites.

Bluehost-Home-Landing-Page
Bluehost-Home-Landing-Page

But using a special technology known as virtualization, a single server is divided into multiple virtual servers, which then creates separate space for each site. So, there will be more resources available. VPS offers you more control than shared and is less expensive than dedicated at the same time but still reserved resources for your account. So you’ll never feel over committed in terms of bandwidth usage or processor capacity. They also have 24/7 support teams, so you can always receive an answer to your issues.

Features:

  • Free domain name for 1 year
  • Multi-server management
  • File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to upload, download or modify files.
  • Access control to your account.
  • 30 days money-back guarantee

There are three different plans from which you can choose, and the plans differ primarily in terms of resources: CPU cores, memory, storage, and bandwidth.

Dedicated Hosting

A dedicated hosting server for your website means you will have all the resources of the dedicated server to yourself, you get the highest level of resource, privacy, and control. You will have to manage the server on your own, your server with complete control over performance, security, and everything else, a dedicated server is the best option.

Dedicated hosting is an excellent package for larger-scale businesses that need an increase in storage, power, and control. This package is on the high-end side of web hosting, so it focuses on performance and security. Adequate for those websites that generate tons of traffic and/or need a top-performing server.

Since you’ll have entire control over your website, your site can be faster. While you’re responsible for almost everything relating to your server, you can reach out to the Bluehost team 24/7 for assistance.

Features:

  • Improved cPanel to manage your website domains, emails, resources, etc.
  • Multi-server Management
  • Free domain name for 1st year
  • Free SSL Certificate
  • You get a 30-day money-back guarantee.

This package is best for users that have high-traffic websites, as you will need the full spectrum of RAM and CPU to run your website efficiently—which is exactly what dedicated hosting does.

WordPress Hosting

Bluehost WordPress hosting plan is specifically designed for WordPress-focused websites. This hosting package comes with resources and tools to get the best out of WordPress websites. WordPress officially recommends Bluehost as one the best hosting company for WordPress. Bluehost WordPress hosting is fast, simple, economical, and offers powerful security options like SiteLock.

In addition, it comes with features like intuitive cPanel, 1-click WordPress install, integrated caching & CDN, robust backup with CodeGuard, unlimited email management, easy SSL integration, 24/7 dedicated support, and much more. WordPress optimized hosting service is the most popular and top-selling plan.

Features:

  • Automatic WordPress Installation
  • Automatic WordPress Updates
  • Free domain name for a year
  • You can securely change your login credentials.
  • Microsoft 365 is available to boost your image and recognition.
  • Their WordPress plans are designed specifically for WordPress-powered websites. It is optimized to run WordPress and can even protect your WordPress site against common threats.

It offers three plans:

These plans look the same as their shared hosting plans, and they cost the same.

The price starts at $8.99/month and goes up to $16.99/month. WordPress comes preinstalled. So, you can start creating posts as soon as you log in to WP.

If you’re looking to create your freelance writer website or start a blog or even run an online store/small business — the plus plan is perfect. If you’re a WordPress power user, go for Bluehost’s Managed WordPress hosting instead.

WooCommerce Hosting

WooCommerce is an e-commerce platform for WordPress, and this particular type of hosting is designed with online stores in mind. It’s the most popular eCommerce platform on the market. Bluehost also offers web hosting fully optimized for WooCommerce.

The Bluehost WooCommerce hosting provides access to great features for starting your eCommerce site. It’s specifically designed for your eCommerce store and comes with auto-installed WooCommerce. In particular, you’ll get additional security features that ensure that your site complies with laws protecting consumers from fraud and unauthorized access to personal information, such as credit card numbers and billing addresses.

WooCommerce hosting offers you all the essential features to kick start your eCommerce store, you can build, promote, and start selling through your store.

Features:

  • Free SSL Certificate
  • Free Domain
  • Secure payment gateway
  • Multiple caching layers to optimize site load speed.
  • Site monitoring and statistics
  • Domain privacy and protection

It offers two plans

Standard: $15.95/month on a 12-month term; $12.95/month on a 36-month term

Premium: $32.95/month on a 12-month term; $24.95/month on a 36-month term

Both plans come with unlimited products, WooCommerce installed, 24/7 customer support, payment processing, discount codes, and CodeGuard Backup Basic. WooCommerce is a good choice for e-commerce. And this plan makes getting started easy.

Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting is a service that is provided by Bluehost in partnership with ResellerClub. You can use this hosting plan to host multiple clients and allow them to manage their products independently.

Features:

  • Free site migration: You can easily transfer your current WordPress website to Bluehost.
  • Live Support: Bluehost offers free live chat support to its users.
  • Site Staging: You can test new designs in their staging area before publishing them.
  • Jetpack: Bluehost is integrated with the Jetpack plugin which delivers many benefits like enhanced site search, one-click site monetization, and creation.
  • WP-CLI/SSH access: With Bluehost, you can get advanced access to WordPress.
  • Security: You get access to different security features like SSL, auto backups, malware protection, spam protection, etc.

Ease of Use

Bluehost makes it easy to set up your website and manage it. You can manage your web hosting environment and website from the central location without any difficulty. It has an easy-to-use dashboard that gives a user-friendly experience to the customers. The enhanced cPanel interface is as easy to use as it gets—you just click on the icons and reach where you need to go. You can easily manage your website’s hosting and accounts including domain name management, email address/inbox configuration, and payments/billing for the services within one central location.

The control panel is divided into various sections, you can customize the layout of the control panel as per your needs. That way you can get quick access to your preferred features. Furthermore, you can also use Bluehost’s help features and technical support resources, and easily upgrade and scale your server from the dashboard.

Performance and load times

Bluehost comes with a built-in scalability feature. It lets you welcome a huge range of visitors to your website and fulfill the required traffic demands.

Now, let’s talk about how it manages good site speed. Firstly, it has more than 200 edge servers. It comes with a CDN of over 200 global locations to store and deliver content quickly.

Moreover, the multi-layer caching system optimizes your site so that the content loads faster. It also has SSD storage that is set up for optimal speed.

Bluehost performance and load times

Bluehost PERFORMANCE

LOCATION LOADING TIME TTFB FIRST PAINT INTERACTIVE

  1. Virginia 0.77 s 288 ms 0.81 s 0.87 s

California 0.91 s 354 ms 0.93 s 0.99 s

Canada 0.92 s 385 ms 1.09 s 1.04 s

Frankfurt 1.36 s 576 ms 1.40 s 1.34 s

Paris 1.24 s 547 ms 1.19 s 1.19 s

Mumbai 2.05 s 849 ms 1.62 s 1.68 s

Sydney 2.21 s 911 ms 1.74 s 1.84 s

Pros and Cons of Bluehost

Pros of Bluehost:

  • Wide range of web hosting options
  • Most plans include unlimited disk storage, domain hosting, email addresses, and bandwidth.
  • You get a free domain name for a year included with your purchase.
  • One-click WordPress installation.
  • The enhanced cPanel is easy to use and offers fast access to features.
  • Numerous databases are available, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, CGI-BIN, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, and much more.
  • Hosting plans are well within the reach of most users, particularly those who are just starting.
  • eCommerce features are good with multiple shopping carts available, SSL security, and PayPal integration
  • The load times are really impressive, managing to go below the one-second mark.
  • Scale Managed WordPress plan for selling unlimited products.
  • Transfer your existing WordPress site to Bluehost smoothly.
  • Integrated Cloudflare support
  • Security features such as unique IPs, SSL, and SiteLock protection.
  • The support is quick to respond.

Cons of Bluehost:

  • Higher domain renewal price Their free domain renewal price is higher than average.
  • While there are many useful add-ons available, unfortunately, you need to install many of them to get the full functionality you need.
  • You have to do your daily backups for full security, Lack of good backup solution in entry-level plans.
  • Bluehost loves to try to upsell its customers, which can get to be annoying if you are on a tight budget.
  • The WordPress plans, while very nice regarding features are also very expensive compared to plans offered by many competitors

Customer Support

Bluehost maintains a robust series of self-help, step-by-step guides, and articles that are easily searchable. This is a huge help for beginners and most common issues can be quickly resolved by a simple search.

Their knowledge base is split by topic, so you can find tutorials and answers to the most common questions people have about Bluehost’s platform.

Bluehost offers friendly 24/7 phone and live chat support where you can talk to their support team representatives.

You can access the support chat from the main contact page on Bluehost’s site.

Bluehost asks a couple of questions to identify you as a customer and then gets you through to a support agent.

Conclusion

Bluehost is one of the best web hosting companies for good reason. It is a great hosting company with a variety of hosting plans and features. If you’re a WordPress user, then you can use the Bluehost WordPress hosting plan which is good and also cost-effective. Bluehost is officially recommended host by WordPress.org, so if you’re thinking of using WordPress, then you can’t go wrong with Bluehost.

With all the different hosting options, you can easily find the plan that works for your business. Beginner users can start small to keep the costs low and upgrade as their website grows. If you’re looking for a web host with a rock-solid reputation, then look no further than Bluehost. it has all the basic hosting features you might expect, and the performance isn’t lacking in any way either. With cheap and scalable plans you can customize your solution, and in just a couple of moments, you’ll be up and running.

On top of that, you can get support from their experts if you need help. Also, there are plenty of free resources online on using Bluehost with WordPress.

The post Bluehost Review – Best Hosing for WordPress Site appeared first on WP Refers.

Top comments (0)