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Bluehost Web Hosting review | TechRadar
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Bluehost, one of the world’s largest and best web hosting providers, has almost two decades of experience in helping users build and host quality WordPress websites.
Bluehost is owned by Newfold Digital the company behind other major hosting names like HostGator, Network Solutions, and SEO tool Yoast too.
Bluehost has a real depth of knowledge in WordPress which goes way beyond most competitors. It has developers working on the platform full-time, and has been directly recommended by WordPress.org since 2005.
For a quick run through what Bluehost is like to use check out my One Hour With Bluehost article.
What types of hosting does Bluehost offer?
Bluehost provides some of the best WordPress hosting in the shape of shared, VPS hosting, cloud, and dedicated hosting plans. These plans are good for everything from blogs to ecommerce sites of all sizes.
The shared plans come in four flavours: Starter, Business, eCommerce Essentials, and eCommerce Essentials Premium. You’ll find yourself directed to these plans if you click through from WordPress Hosting, WooCommerce, and Web Hosting. The only difference is that if you click through from WooCommerce you’ll only be offered eCommerce Essentials, and eCommerce Essentials Premium.
The shared plans are ideal for up to 400K visits but those figures are based on the average site and don’t specify a performance level for the sites. You should consider the number an estimate and safety net. If your site gets a lot of visitors, you’ll likely need to use one of the VPS, cloud, or dedicated plans.
The VPS plans come in three flavours: Standard NVMe 4, Enhanced NVMe 8, and Ultimate NVMe 16. Plus, a bonus custom flavour. The number in the name corresponds to the amount of RAM you get with each plan. You get a 1:2 ratio of CPU cores to gigabytes of RAM. As for site visits, you’re on your own here when it comes to estimated levels but support will help you make the choice on which one is best for you.
The cloud plans also come in three flavours: Cloud 10, Cloud 25, and Cloud 50. Plus, the additional custom plan. The number in this name corresponds to how many sites each plan supports. The cloud plans are ideal for 300K – 23 million site visits a month.
It’s the same pattern with dedicated hosting plans: Standard NVMe 32, Enhanced NVMe 64, and Premium NVMe 128…and the custom plan. These plans have a CPU core to RAM ratio of 1:4.
Bluehost shared & WordPress hosting
Bluehost’s WordPress and shared hosting plans are the same. Opt for one of these plans and your website is stored on a server which also hosts many other accounts. This type of hosting saves money, because the cost of the server is shared between many users. But it runs the risk of unstable performance, because the server’s resources – the processor, the RAM, the network connection – are also shared by all the accounts.
The cheapest plan starts at $3.95/mo for 36 months and then renews at $9.99. It supports 10 websites and up to 40K visits a month. It provides 10 GB NVMe storage, a CDN, managed WordPress updates, SSL, and some security features. Email and back ups are only free for one year.
Spending more on the next plan will set you back $6.45/mo for 36 months and then $14.99/mo after. The only difference is that the plan supports more visitors (200K) but also malware removal and free domain privacy for one year.
Step up again and you’ll be paying 6.99/mo for more resources and more security, development tools, and ecommerce tools. This plan renews at $17.99/mo.
These are capable products, easy to manage, faster than most (more on that later) and powerful enough to handle many personal and small business sites.
Bluehost VPS hosting
VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is where a physical server is divided up into individual server environments. There are far fewer accounts on a server than you’ll see with shared hosting, and your VPS doesn’t have to share its resources with other sites. That’s a real performance plus, and while some shared hosting plans might struggle with large amounts of visitors, a good VPS can usually handle hundreds of thousands.
Bluehost has three VPS plans. The simplest gives you 2 CPU cores, 4 GB DDR5 RAM, 100 GB NVMe storage, unmetered bandwidth and a cPanel/WHM license for $46.99/ month over three years, $65.99 on renewal. At the top of the range, an 8 core, 16 GB DDR5 RAM, 450 GB NVMe storage and unmetered bandwidth setup is priced at $94.99 a month over three years, $140.99 on renewal.
Bluehost dedicated hosting
Selecting a dedicated hosting package gets you the maximum resources and control: an entire web server, for your use only.
The server users the latest hardware including AMD EYPC processers. Speedy NVMe storage which is becoming the new standard SSD. You also get unlimited bandwidth, Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, and a 99.9% SLA.
The servers are fully managed and come with white-glove onboarding.
Does Bluehost have a page builder?
Bluehost offers a WordPress page builder. It’s based on WordPress and has some of the same pain points of the WordPress built-in block editor but has some handy tools to make it easier. You can use this for all types of sites from blogs to eCommerce stores.
First of all, you get a helping hand if you’re stating out with your first WordPress site in the form of an AI built website. There are also suggestions and tutorials to help you make it better. There is also the WordPress Academy to help you better understand WordPress.
Then, there is the WonderBlocks tool that has loads of templates for all sorts of things you want to add to your site. You can read more about the experience of building your first site with Bluehost in my one hour with Bluehost review and the full Bluehost website builder review.
How fast is Bluehost?
Performance matters in web hosting, even for the cheapest of plans. A slow site, regularly down, could be worse than having no website at all.
To test Bluehost we migrated a WordPress site to the most basic plans and then ran some WordPress benchmark tests to see how well the server performed in general. After that we did some gentle stress testing to see how well the site coped with some traffic.
CPU & Memory | Operations with large text data | 8.8 |
| Row 1 – Cell 0 | Random binary data operations | 5.14 |
| Row 2 – Cell 0 | Recursive mathematical calculations | 6.13 |
| Row 3 – Cell 0 | Iterative mathematical calculations | 7.2 |
Filesystem | Filesystem write ability | 8.82 |
| Row 5 – Cell 0 | Local file copy and access speed | 9.36 |
| Row 6 – Cell 0 | Small file IO test | 10 |
Database | Importing large amount of data to database | 8.68 |
| Row 8 – Cell 0 | Simple queries on single table | 10 |
| Row 9 – Cell 0 | Complex database queries on multiple tables | 7.7 |
Object Cache | Persistent object cache enabled | 0 |
Network | Network download speed test | 10 |
Overall | Your server score | 7.9 |
Concurrent users | 5 | 9 | 15 |
Transactions | 1086 | 2110 | 1473 |
availability | 95.6 | 96.7 | 95.71 |
elapsed time | 299.22 | 299.87 | 299.11 |
Data transactions | 13.96 | 25.95 | 19.45 |
response time | 0.41 | 1.17 | 2.61 |
Transaction rate | 3.36 | 7.04 | 4.92 |
throughput | 0.05 | 0.09 | 0.07 |
concurrency | 1.49 | 8.22 | 12.87 |
sucesful transactions | 1086 | 2110 | 1473 |
failed transactions | 50 | 72 | 66 |
longest transaction | 19.77 | 19.93 | 20.21 |
shortest transaction | 0.11 | 0.11 | 0.1 |
For benchmarking, the WordPress Benchmark plugin measures CPU and memory use, object cache, filesystem access, and network speed. It then provides a final benchmark score. Meanwhile, the command line tool Siege can simulate multiple concurrent visits, providing us with an idea of the server’s reliability when demand is high.
Our modest WordPress-based WooCommerce store, with around 20 items and a welcoming landing page scored 7.9 in WordPress Benchmark. This was a particularly good set of scores across the board, only let down by the “Persistent object cache enabled” benchmark unable to measure a score.
Meanwhile, the Siege testing found the hosting able to handle 9 and 15 concurrent visitors comfortably, responding well and with over 95% availability. Considered together, these test results offer some confidence that even with Bluehost’s most affordable hosting plans, you can expect reliable performance.
Note that these tests determine performance on a shared hosting plan. As such, they don’t offer any insights into speeds on dedicated hosting, cloud hosting, or VPS hosting plans.
What is Bluehost’s support like?
There is only chat support for the most basic shared hosting plans. All other plans come with chat and phone support. There is also only a local US or international number for phone support and all support is in the English language. This might not be an issue if you’re in North America but it could be costly and less than ideal compared with having support in your local language.
To be fair, this shouldn’t be a big cross in the cons column because most hosting companies don’t offer phone support at all – let alone in multiple languages. Still, only offering English support across all support is going to be a dealbreaker for some and other hosts do offer multi-lingual support, such as Hostinger.
Final verdict
If you want to make your first WordPress site and you want to invest some time in getting to Know WordPress then Bluehost is the right host for you. Making an actual WordPress site can be difficult and I did find it slightly easier on Bluehost than other hosts thanks to WonderBlocks.
I also found it easier to do some technical things like improve website performance metrics with Bluehost too.
Bluehost doesn’t quite grab a best for beginner accolade because I think nothing can beat DreamHost’s offer of building a site for you and you do feel a bit of the less than ideal WordPress page building interface come through into the UI when editing web pages.
Bluehost FAQs
What payment types does Bluehost support?
Bluehost accepts payment via card only.
Does Bluehost offer refunds?
Buy a Bluehost hosting plan, or some add-on products and you’re protected by a 30-day money-back guarantee. That’s typical for the hosting world, although a few providers offer more: InMotion Hosting gives you 90 days, HostGator 45 days.
We noticed one or two minor issues. Bluehost doesn’t offer refunds on SSL certificates, for instance; Hostinger does. But generally, this is a straightforward, catch-free guarantee which gives you exactly the protection you’d expect.
Does Bluehost have an uptime guarantee?
Bluehost doesn’t quote any target uptime figure, or have any formal method of compensating you if your server is down for a lengthy period.
That’s a little disappointing. Most providers quote uptime figures of at least 99.9%, some 99.99%, and say they’ll give you credits if the service doesn’t hit the mark.
These ‘guarantees’ don’t always mean very much, though. The small print might say downtime doesn’t count if it’s due to ‘unforeseeable circumstances’, for instance, something which could be used to rule out almost anything.
Overall, we’d prefer a host to have an uptime guarantee, but if this doesn’t happen, it’s not a disaster. We’ll look at our own and other measurements of uptime, instead, and in our experience Bluehost scores very well.
Where are Bluehost’s data centers?
Bluehost has local data centers for its various regions – USA, India, China – but your site is automatically assigned to the nearest location when you sign up. Buy at bluehost.com and your website is hosted in Bluehost’s USA data center, for instance; use bluehost.in and it’s hosted in India.
For comparison, GoDaddy has data centers in North America, India, Singapore and Europe, and you’re able to choose which data center to use for each hosting plan. That can be an advantage, as it gives you a better chance of hosting your website close to its main audience, improving download speeds.
What is my Bluehost IP address?
Finding your website server’s IP address can be handy, especially if you need to point a domain hosted elsewhere to your website.
There’s no single way to manage this on Bluehost – it depends on your product and control panel – but if your plan has access to cPanel, it only takes a moment.
Log into your Bluehost account dashboard (my.bluehost.com).
Click Advanced in the left-hand sidebar.
Browse the General Information box on the right. The server IP address is displayed as ‘Shared IP address.’ (If you don’t see a General Information box, look for and click a Server Information link).
What are Bluehost’s nameservers?
Bluehost’s nameservers are:
ns1.bluehost.com 162.88.60.37
ns2.bluehost.com 162.88.61.37
If you need more help, the support site has several useful articles on nameservers and DNS
How do I cancel a Bluehost product?
Log into your Bluehost control panel (my.bluehost.com).
Click the account icon top right (it’ll have your initials in a circle) and select My Products.
Find the plan you’d like to cancel, click the More icon to its right (three dots in a vertical line) and select Renewal Options.
Choose Manual Renew and you won’t be charged again. Your subscription will expire at the end of its term.
If you think there’s a chance you might want to cancel a plan, make the decision as early as you can. Bluehost’s auto-renewal scheme takes your money 15 days before the plan expires, so if you leave this to the last minute, there’s a good chance you’ll be too late.
Check out the latest Bluehost promo codes.
