Bluehost Review 2021: 100% Genuine, Analyzed Speed Uptime - Shubhamoy Majumder

Bluehost Review 2021: 100% Genuine, Analyzed Speed Uptime - Shubhamoy Majumder

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Bluehost Reviews

Bluehost is one of the oldest web host platforms started in 1996, by public choice Bluehost has become the largest brand name when it comes to WordPress hosting. They are listed in the official Wordpress website as ‘WordPress’ recommended hosting provider. With Bluehost, the chance is that you never have to worry about your website being slow even when there is a lot of traffic. Their 24/7 customer expert support is always there to solve your problem when you need it by phone, email, or live chat. They are rated now #1 in web hosting service for small businesses. On top of that, they are offering WPBeginner users an exclusive 63% off discount, a Free Domain, Free SSL, and a free Site Builder with templates.

Last seen 8 hours ago Reviewed by: Shubhamoy Majumder Rating:

Bluehost Review from Our Experts

Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting companies in the world and they are listed in the official recommended list on the Wordpress website . Bluehost offers various kinds of hosting plans for beginners and for medium to large businesses with 24/7 expert support. Here I make a complete review of Bluehost by our experts to find out if Bluehost is the right choice for you.

In this detailed Bluehost review, we’ll put their promises to test with an end to end and thorough analysis using popular standard benchmarking tools.

Following are the fields we’ll look into:

  • Speed: How fast is the bluehost website? We will test their speed and server response time to assess that.
  • Performance: How does Bluehost perform under huge traffic ? We’ll test that by performing the stress test and see how well it performs under huge traffic.
  • Reliability: Will your website be available 24/7/365 without any error and downtime?
  • Support: Can you count on Bluehost’s customer care when you immediately need help with your website?how fast their response time and how accurate their solving ability is?
  • Features: Do they offer all the features that you’ll need to build your website?
  • Pricing: Do they have affordable pricing in the industry? Are there any Bluehost ongoing deals that can save you money?

This is our complete Bluehost web hosting review and we’ll be doing an in-depth analysis of Bluehost pros and cons with our experts. If you don’t want to read the full review, here is the quick scorecard anlysis of Bluehost with our verdict right below it.

Bluehost Review Summaryresults
Performance gradeA+
Average load time1.48 ms
Average response time1.26 ms
Free domainYes
Free SSLYes
1-click WordPressYes
SupportPhone / Live Chat / Knowledge base

Start with Bluehost

Bottom line: In our Bluehost review, we found them to be heavily reliable, fast, and affordable with user friendly 24/7 customer support.

That’s why we’ve chosen to recommend Bluehost as one of the best WordPress hosting companies.**See our top 10 web hosting article here****

Now let’s dive into our detailed Bluehost hosting review so that you can decide for yourself.

About Bluehost

First, let’s take a look at the company's brief introduction .

Bluehost started in 1996 and steadily day by day grew to become one of the largest web hosting companies in the world. It now has more than 2.2 million websites from all over the world.

Bluehost Homepage

Bluehost has a long-standing and deep relationship with the WordPress community platform. They have been officially listed by WordPress.org recommended hosting company since 2006.

Their best feature is that they have their 24/7 customer support,which is great hosting infrastructure, and support for the free open source software like WordPress.

Pros and Cons of Bluehost

Every web hosting service has their pros and cons. Some you can live with, and some you cannot ignore.

Here are the pros and cons of Bluehost that we analyzed.

Pros

First, let’s take a look at the core advantages that make Bluehost the top choice in the industry.

  • Pricing: Their hosting plans are all cheap that can easily reach most users, particularly those who are just starting out.
  • Reliability: They power a big 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: You will get a free SSL certificate encryption and free Cloudflare CDN with each website.
  • Money Back Guarantee: bluehost offers you a 30 day money back guarantee on all their plans.

Cons

As we mentioned earlier, With the pros there are always cons with every hosting company. The following are some disadvantages of choosing Bluehost as your host.

  • Higher domain renewal price Their free domain renewal price is higher than average price of other web hosting services.
  • Upselling Addons: They have an aggressive upsell process during their signup process. But you can easily uncheck all the addons if you don’t need them Beware of that

Bluehost Performance Tests

The most important performance score that you should look for is the loading speed. It not only affects user experience on your site, but it also affects your WordPress SEO rankings.

Analysis and studies show that a 1-second drop in website speed can decrease your conversion rate by 8%. A 3-second delay can cost you 50% of your traffic.

Strangeloop website speed study

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 one theme. We imported dummy content for theme development including images. After that, we used Pingdom to test the website speed.

Here are our test results:

Bluehost speed test results

As you can see, our test site loads in less than 1.5 seconds. Considering that the fact our website wasn’t using any caching plugins or speed optimization tips or plugins, this result is exceptionally remarkable.

However, the speed test alone isn’t enough because this test site didn’t have huge amount of traffic.

To test how Bluehost servers would respond and performs with increased traffic, we used a testing tool called K6 (formerly LoadImpact) to send virtual users (VU) to our test site.

We used it to gradually built up to 100 visitors 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

The green line shows the number of active virtual users on the site, and the blue line is the server loading time. As you can see the server loading remained stable throughout the test even at peak traffic.

This test indicates that if you are looking for a really fast website, then Bluehost can be a perfect fit for you.

Another key aspect is that It is also important to note that we didn’t record any downtime during our testing. See the screenshot below for a detailed picture at Bluehost server uptime.

Bluehost uptime monitoring test result

Bluehost Server Response Time

When you are testing a live website using tools like Pingdom, you are basically seeing how everything on your website loads. This includes images too, which take much longer to load than plain text.

In order to get a more accurate and perfect server response time calculation, we used another tool called Bitcatcha. It allows you to test server response time without loading any data.

Bluehost response time test result

As you can see, the Bluehost server in the US country performed under the fraction of a second. In other locations, the response was a bit higher but still under less than a second.

If your main audience is in India or Usa then bluetooth is the right choice, then this would surely benefit your website. However, if more of your users come from other parts of the regions , then you can change your server location.

Bluehost Hosting Plans and Features

Bluehost offers various kinds 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 hosting plans and their features.

  • Shared hosting: Shared hosting is the perfect way to start a new website for new blogger or new small business provider with low traffic volume. In a shared hosting environment, your website shares server resources with other websites.
  • Cloud hosting: A more reliable, secure and much faster , upgrade to the shared hosting plan. It allows you to utilize multiple cloud servers, allowing your website to automatically switch to a different server in case of a hardware failure or high traffic.
  • WordPress hosting: A hosting package designed specifically for WordPress powered websites. It is optimized to run WordPress and can even protect your WordPress site against common threats.
  • WooCommerce hosting: WooCommerce is the one of 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 kick start your eCommerce 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 server hosting: A dedicated server for your website, means you will have all power and the resources of the server to yourself. The downside is that you will have to manage the server on your own.that means you need employee to hire to takte care of your server. It is recommended for big business companies.

All Bluehost hosting one click install WordPress solution.

All plans come with an easy to use hosting control panel where you can manage your hosting, create databases, etc.

Bluehost Control Panel

Breakdown of Bluehost’s Shared Hosting Plans

Bluehost offers a shared hosting package suitable for starter websites. Their shared plan is available at four different levels.

Bluehost shared hosting plans

Let’s take a look at what’s included in each plan.

  • **Basic:**The basic plan only allows one website to host. It hosts one domain and 25 subdomains, a total of 50GB SSD storage, for email marketing it gives you 5 email accounts of 100 MB storage for each account. For the first term you’ll pay $3.95 per month. When you renew the account, you’ll have to pay $8.99 per month.
  • Plus: The Plus plan includes unlimited websites with unlimited web space and bandwidth. You’ll also get unlimited email accounts. The price for the first term starts from $4.95 per month. When you renew the account, you’ll have to pay $11.99 per month.
  • Choice Plus: The Choice Plus plan includes all features of plus plan. You will also get free domain privacy, and automated daily backups powered by CodeGuard as extras worth over $80/year. The price for the first term is $5.45 per month. When renewing, you’ll have to pay $16.99 per month.
  • Pro The Pro plan starts from $13.95 per month for the first term after that you’ll pay $23.99 per month. It includes all features of above plans + dedicated IP address.

If you are just starting your website, then you can select any of these plans. You can easily upgrade your hosting plan as your website grows.

Bluehost Support and Customer Service

We all need help every now and then. 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 and documentation, step by step guides, and video tutorials as part of their extensive knowledge base. This is a huge help for beginners and most common issues can be quickly resolved by a simple search.

However, sometimes you may need to talk to an individual to get more help.

Bluehost offers a 24/7 customer support system where you can talk to their support team representatives using live chat or phone support. This is really helpful when you need quick help from technical support staff.

Bluehost live chat and phone support

One thing that is missing in their features is the ticket based support system. Couple of months ago Bluehost decided to eliminate ticket-based support to focus on a personal approach of live chat 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 or not?

Bluehost is often ranked the #1 web hosting provider company compared to many websites. They offer a wide range of hosting options with tons of features that help you easily build your website.

All their hosting plans include expert 24/7 customer support from knowledgeable staff.

Most importantly, they offer cheapest starter plans that fit any budget requirement.

If you are new in online business and just starting out, then you cannot go wrong signing up with Bluehost shared hosting plan. It’s easy on your pocket and comes with all the right tools and features. As your site grows and gives you your required income then 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 60% off discount and a free domain with our Bluehost coupon code.

All you have to do is click on this link to purchase. The discount will be applied automatically.

Frequently Asked Questions About Bluehost hosting

In this detailed Bluehost review we have tried to cover all the key aspects of their hosting services. In the following section we mentioned the most frequently asked questions about Bluehost that we hear from our users.

1. Can we make an e-commerce store using WooCommerce on Bluehost?

Yes, you can. In fact, Bluehost is one of the best WooCommerce hosting service providers in the world. Their starter plan is affordable, which makes perfect to start 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 beginner friendly?

The answer is a big Yes. Bluehost is the most beginner-friendly WordPress hosting company on the market. Their one-click install WordPress for you when you sign up. They also have an easy to use control panel which allows you to manage your hosting account by yourself.

There is plenty of help available with detailed guidance, video tutorials, and articles. You also have 24/7 access to their expert support via live chat and phone.

3. Can Bluehost handle high traffic?

Their shared hosting plans are suitable for starter websites and small businesses. In our stress test, their shared hosting plan was able to handle 100 virtual users without any slowdown.

These plans can handle reasonable and sudden traffic spikes. However, they are still quite limited in 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 in their team so you know your website is in safe hands.

5. Where are Bluehost servers located?

Bluehost operates its own main data center located in Utah, US. It is a massive 50,000 square feet facility that serves as their primary data center.

6. What Bluehost plan should I get?

If you are new in online business and just 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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