#1 BlueHost Reviews – Discover The Crazy Hidden Charges.

The Ultimate BlueHost Reviews And The Alternatives.

When starting your website, domain and hosting are the two basic requirements to get your website live on the internet. Bluehost reviews give you the details you need to get started.

The domain gives your website a unique address that no other website is using in the world, and the hosting gives you the space to store all your website’s data, content, pages, and videos. Here’s a comprehensive Bluehost Review.

Today, setting up a website on the internet is very easy. You don’t need to be an expert web expert. It’s easy for everyone. All you’ve to do is purchase the domain and hosting, set up your WordPress site, and you’re ready to go.

Domain and Hosting

Talking about hosting and domains, there are thousands of companies that are offering domain and hosting packages for beginners to the corporate level, and BlueHost is one of them.

If you’re also looking for domain and hosting on the internet, it’s not possible that you didn’t land on the BlueHost, It’s the most prominent and the first name that people use when talking about hosting and domain, especially for WordPress.

But, why is it so popular? Is it worth its hype? In this article, we’ve written an ultimate detailed review article on BlueHost. We’ll explain everything about BH, such as their pricing, customer support, packages, quality, features, and overall review as compared to other competitors in the market Continue reading the article:

What is BlueHost and Why is it so Popular?

BlueHost was started in 2003 by Danny and Matt in the USA. Later this company was purchased by EIG company in about 2008. The EIG company already owns some other small-scale hosting companies like FatCow, HostGator, and iPage.

For the past few years, BlueHost has increased its prices massively, but this price increase hasn’t affected its sales, and BlueHost is still the biggest hosting provider on the internet. The company offers a massive range of hosting packages like VPS, shared servers, WP, and other dedicated servers for multinational websites.

However, their shareable servers are relatively affordable as compared to other branded hosting providers. Moreover, this company provides one of the best integrations with WordPress, and WordPress itself recommends this hosting company for better speed and quality.

When it comes to customer support, their customer support department consists of more than 750 agents that are available 24/7 to resolve any problem, anytime and anywhere.

Popularity

The reason behind the popularity of BlueHost is because of the recommendation of WordPress. The platform has been recommended by WordPress since 2005, and since 2012, everyone is like

“Yeah, so if WordPress is asking me to buy this, I’m gonna buy this, that’s it!”

And that’s the biggest reason why it’s so popular among web owners, especially WordPress website owners. Additionally, the BlueHost deserved to be the recommendation for WordPress. When talking about its speed, customer care (most critical), packages, features, and other factors, it deserves to stand where it is.

Services that BlueHost offers:

BlueHost is currently offering more than 5 overall services. Below we’ve mentioned them in bullets for your ease:

• WordPress features
• Hosting plans
• Domains
• Website and E-commerce building tools
• Marketing services
• Business Email

WordPress:

BlueHost is offering about 4 services regarding WordPress. It includes:

• WordPress builder
• Managed WordPress
• WordPress Hosting
• Woocommerce

Continue reading:

WordPress Builder:

The WordPress builder is a dedicated builder used in WordPress websites and is a subsidiary of BlueHost. It lets you create an awesome WordPress website in a matter of minutes without any high-level coding skills.

Yes, the builder works on a simple drag-and-drop basis. It doesn’t require you to code, just drag and drop whatever you like. And the program will compile the PHP code for you in WordPress.

Unfortunately, you can’t purchase the builder separately. It comes free in the hosting and domain packages and BH doesn’t sell it separately. To use this, you’ve to buy a package of BH.

WordPress Hosting:

On BlueHost, there’s a special hosting package that is dedicated to websites that are running on WordPress. You can call it WordPress-exclusive hosting. The servers used for this hosting are specifically optimized for WordPress.

Additionally, the package comes with a pre-install WordPress. It means, upon buying the package, it’ll automatically install the WordPress and C-panel for you. All the variants come with an SSL certificate, domain, CDN, custom themes, and of course, WordPress builder as well.

Note that these hostings are shared and not dedicated. There’ll be one server that is being used to serve multiple websites including yours as well. That’s the reason why this package is so less expensive because it’s being shared with other websites as well.

Managed WordPress Hosting:

The managed WordPress package gives you an estimated figure under which the server will not slow down. This traffic ranges from 50,000 – 500,000 users. Moreover, the servers of managed ones are optimized for high availability which the server will know that it has to give the best in your website.

Additional features such as malware removal, Jackpot, domain protection, backup protection, PayPal integration, and all the features of shared WordPress hosting are included in managed one.

WooCommerce:

If you need WordPress for your eCommerce online store, then WooCommerce should be your choice. WooCommerce is an e-commerce website-building solution based on WordPress. You can say, it’s skin built on WordPress designed to create e-commerce stores.

Hosting:

In hosting packages, BlueHost is currently offering about 3 packages: shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and VPS hosting. Below, we’ve explained it to you:

Shared Hosting:

The shared hosting is a perfect choice for beginner blogs and websites that receive a very low amount of traffic on their website. It means one server will be serving different websites, which eventually helps to reduce the cost.

However, one thing we like about BluHost’s shared hosting is the underload use of servers. They don’t let their servers overload for cost-cutting. Therefore, you get optimal performance every time and no server-down issues like other small-scale hostings do.

The storage of the shared one ranges from 50 GB SSD to unlimited SSD based on your package and 1 website to unlimited websites. It also comes with a free domain, free SSL certificate, and CDN-enabled servers as well for optimized performance.

Dedicated Hosting:

Unlike shared hosting, dedicated hosting is dedicated to one website only. It’s just like setting up your dedicated personal server to host your website. In dedicated servers, the whole server will be dedicated to hosting your website only and no other website will work on it.

Being dedicated to your website, the performance will be top-notched. It allows you to utilize 100% speed and performance of the server. This package is highly expensive, therefore it’s only good for those websites that receive a lot of traffic, e.g. millions of visitors in a month.

The prices are higher because of the cost required to run and maintain the servers, of course, it’s dedicated to your website, so the company will charge you for that cost.

VPS:

Just like shared hosting, VPS servers are the same. But, unlike shared hosting where you don’t have any control over the servers, performance, OS, and hardware, VPS gives you the access to control the hardware, RAM, bandwidth, and OS of your needs.

You can say it’s a hostel room where everyone has their separate bed and privacy in which they can customize their premises as they want. The VPS is good if your need is more than a website and your budget is low or you don’t need to rent out a complete dedicated server.

The VPS hosting of BlueHost offers you a dedicated set of cores, RAM, OS, bandwidth, and a dedicated IP address for the server. The figures depend on the package you’ve selected, which we’ll explain later in the article.

We don’t know if the servers are shared or dedicated, because BlueHost has only mentioned the features and didn’t mention if the VPS is dedicated or shared.

Domain:

BlueHost also works on a domain side. It’s not only a hosting platform, but a domain. On BlueHost, you’ve two options to buy the domain:

1. You can purchase the domain separately without any package (only the domain).
2. You can get the domain for 100% free of cost in the hosting package.

Personally and technically, buying a domain from a hosting company is a great idea. It earns you a free-of-cost domain for the 1st year. Of course, when buying a domain, hosting is also a compulsory thing for getting your website live on the internet. In that case, buying the hosting package is perfect + value for money!

Still, if you want, you can buy the domain separately. But, if you only need BlueHost to buy the domain, we recommend going with other platforms that are likely to give you great value like Rocket.Net, GlowHost.com GoDaddy, and NameCheap as they offer better domain prices and no ICANN fee.

Services:

The services feature is the menu form where you can hire BlueHost for website services. The web services cover:

• Complete website development: In this, the experts of BlueHost will build you a complete website + keywords optimization and will do the basic on-page SEO of your website (content not included, only website).
• SEO Services: The SEO services cover one-to-all SEO of your website. It includes the full on-page and off-page SEO. Keyword optimization, image SEO, SEO auditing and weekly reports, website loading speed, etc.
• PPC: PPC refers to the creation of paid ads on digital platforms like Google, Facebook, and YouTube. The experts of BlueHost will create campaigns for your business in your budget and will give you the best conversion rates possible.
• Website Migration: Website migration, as the name suggests, this service will allow you to migrate your website (up to 5).

Email:

Just like a domain, you can also purchase a dedicated email for your company with your company’s name after the @. The pricing that we see in the email hosting isn’t good. Many other platforms offer better and lower pricing than BlueHost for the same features. HostGator is also an amazing alternative.

However, the email is free if you purchase the hosting package. Therefore, if you’re going with a package, it’s good, you’ll get the email for free for the first year. If your only need is to use BlueHost for email, then it’s better to go with other companies.

Detailed Review:

Here’s a more in-depth review of the Bluehost platform:

Customer Support:

Of course, when using the services of a company or platform, customer support plays a very important essential role in the overall quality. Yes, we marked essential because it is, and “important” was not giving that dominance as “essential”. We would never recommend going with a platform or company that doesn’t offer superb customer support. Yes, superb customer support is necessary, good or average isn’t good.

In terms of BlueHost, their customer support is outstanding! Their customer service is available 24/7 and professionally answers your queries, they are available even during Christmas ��� as well. Additionally, you can call them if you want at their UAN number (+1 USA). Or you can write an email and they’ll resolve it within 12 hours.

Overview:

• 24/7 support, even during the holidays such as Christmas.
• Phone support: +1 888-401-4678.
• Live chat is available 24/7, even during the holidays.
• Social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are also available for support.

Our score:

10/10, Outstanding!

Performance Test:

For good SEO, good customer satisfaction % and the best loading speed, you need the best hosting server. BlueHost is one of those few multinational hosting companies that claim to provide the fastest loading speed and 99.999% uptime in one year and no overloading of the server in shared hosting.

But that’s what the company says, not what the test says. For your ease, we collected some information (100% authentic) from the internet regarding BlueHost’s performance. Here are the results:

Loading Speed:

Loading speed plays a crucial role in the overall bounce rate and quality of your website. Loading speed is categorized into different terms: FTP, TTI, LCP, and OLT-FLT.

To test the performance of BlueHost servers, we created a sample website on WordPress which was being hosted on our BlueHost’s shared hosting. We copy-pasted a sample post, added one image, and uploaded a sample theme to simulate a blog website.

Then we put that site on GTmetrix and here are the results:

TTFB:

As you can see, the TTFB of the page is about 289 ms. TTFB is the time taken by the browser from the server to load the first byte of the website on the browser window (not visually noticeable).

FCP:

The FCP was about 478 ms. According to Backlinko, a good and responsive hosting’s FCP should not exceed more than 1.4 seconds under the load and web page size. That tested website had no posts, and no traffic, but still 0.4 seconds FCP is outstanding!

TTI:

The TTI was about 820 ms, it’s the time taken by the website to be intractable. The average TTI of a website is about 1.7-2.2 seconds under regular load and content. But for this empty website, it’s still perfect!

FLT:

The FLT of the website was 1.3 seconds which is superb! Under the load and content, we don’t think it’ll exceed more than 3 seconds. According to Backlinko, 3 seconds FLT is good and will not increase the bounce rate %.

Overview:

Particularly for small websites that don’t receive a lot of traffic on their website, BlueHost’s shared hosting might be a perfect choice for them. Under low traffic, the BlueHost works flawlessly with 100% optimal performance.

Our Score:

10/10 for loading speed.

Performance Under Load:

The above test was good for ideal conditions and on paper, but of course, it was not a practical test. Therefore, we needed something practical that will show how BlueHost will work under the load. That’s why we decided to send fake bot traffic on our sample website which was being hated by BlueHost’s shared hosting.

So that we can test the real practical performance of Bluehost: For better understanding, we’ve converted the data into a graph, so you can understand the results easily:

The right side data is the loading time in “Seconds”, and the bottom data is the number of bot traffic to simulate the real-life traffic:

From here, you can see that even on the 1000+ clients, the loading didn’t increase as expected. The graph and the results that you’re seeing prove that Bluehost is the best option if you’re looking for great hosting that doesn’t slow down under a considerable load.

Our test website is not optimized for faster loading. We did it potentially to simulate large websites which were large enough that couldn’t be optimized. Still, the performance is amazing and BlueHost does what it says!

Our score:

10/10 in the load test, you can see yourself above in the image!

Uptime:

Another important factor to consider in the hosting servers is the uptime or you can say availability % of the server in a certain period. It refers to the % of availability of the hosting server of the website.

The uptime % reduces when the server is not live on the internet and is shut down from the back. This can be due to any reason, such as maintenance, power outage, emergency shutdown, natural crises, EMF waves, and many more.

However, BlueHost claims to provide 99.99% of uptime in a year. But that’s what the company says. To test this, we set up a website monitoring tool on our test website. It’ll calculate and monitor when the website isn’t available on the internet, known as downtime. Here are the results:

Our Score:

10/10, the website was available on the internet for 30 days 24/7 without any downtime.

Response Time of the Server:

Server response time refers to the time it takes to fetch the information from the server to the user’s request.  In simple language, it’s a time interval between the client’s request and the server’s response.

To check the response time of the Bluehost, we used Bitcacha to measure it. Because it was the only free tool we could find that offered server response time from more than 5 different regions around the world.

Here are the results:

The overall speed of the server isn’t the fastest, but not poor. The lowest response time was from the USA, Canada, Germany, and London. The BlueHost’s servers may be located on the western side near or inside North America.

Our score: 8/10. The speed wasn’t fast in Asian regions. It was only good on the Western side.

Bluehost vs Other Companies:

If BlueHost is good and recommended by WordPress, it doesn’t mean that other hosting companies aren’t good. In certain cases, another hosting might beat BlueHost. Below we’ve compared BlueHost with some other leading hosting companies such as:

• GoDaddy
• NameCheap
• HostGator
• Rocket.Net
• InterServer
• GlowHost

Bluehost vs GoDaddy

When comparing BlueHost with GoDaddy, both are good at their places.

Hosting Prices.

BlueHost charges 2.79$ for the basic account and GoDaddy charges 2.8$ for the basic account.

BlueHost offers a free WordPress builder + free SSL certificate.

GoDaddy offers a free domain + 50 GB additional SSD storage + unmetered bandwidth and free WordPress builder for 1st month.

Verdict

Both services are good. If your budget is tight and you want more features, then go with GoDaddy. However, if you want premium quality service and the best server performance, then BlueHost should be your choice.

Bluehost vs NameCheap

From our perspective, NameCheap might not be a value-for-money deal as compared with BlueHost. First of all, NameCheap’s hosting is more expensive than Bluehost and no features like BlueHost offers at the same price as NameCheap:

Pricing

NameCheap costs 4.8$ with no WordPress, no WordPress builder, no SSL, no 24/7 support, and no WordPress optimization. BlueHost offers all these features but for 2.98$ only.

Verdict

NameCheap might be the wrong choice for you if you’re looking for low-cost + features-rich and dedicated WordPress-optimized hosting.

However, if you’re not looking for WordPress websites, you can go with NameCheap. But we didn’t use NameCheap, so we couldn’t tell the quality of these servers.

Bluehost vs HostGator

Here comes the most competitive comparison. When comparing HostGator with BlueHost, it’s a tie. We can’t recommend one over the other, because both offer perfect and value-for-money services at their pricing.

Verdict

HostGator charges 2.75$ and offers free CDN + domain + 99.99% guaranteed uptime and free SSL certificate. But it lacks a WordPress builder, free domain, free paid themes, and SSD drives.

BlueHost charges 2.95$ and offers all the CDN + SSL + 99.98% uptime + SSD drives + WordPress builder and free email hosting. But, it lacks SLE + SEO services and Site backup which HostGator is offering at the same price.

Pros of Bluehost

For your ease, below we’ve mentioned some highlights pros and cons of Bluehost:

SSL Certificates

No matter if you purchase a basic or premium package, one thing on which BlueHost doesn’t compromise is the SSL certificate.

All the BlueHost packages come with SSL certificates that you can’t remove. Even in their 2.98$ package, SSL certificates are free. If compared with other companies such as GoDaddy and HostGator they charge an additional 20$ for the SSL certificate.

Unmetered Bandwidth

Without any wonder, unmetered bandwidth is the best source of income for hosting companies. Hosting companies limit the speed of your server, so you get a limited amount of speed when accessing the hosting server.

In this way, if a sudden spike of users accesses your website, the server slows down. And companies then charge additional money to increase the speed.

However, BlueHost doesn’t work like that. All basic to premium packages come with unlimited bandwidth.  So, your website will not slow down when a lot of users access the website.

Dedicated WordPress Optimization

WordPress is offering a dedicated hosting package that is particularly designed for websites that are based on WordPress. On the other hand, other hosting companies also offer the same package, but their optimization is limited to the software side only. BlueHost is the only hosting company that offers WordPress optimization on the hardware level e.g. servers.

Value for Money deal

There’s no wonder that BlueHost offers the best value-for-money deal in comparison to other hosting company giants. Whether it’s NameCheap, GoDaddy, HostGator, or Hostinger, BlueHost offers the best value-for-money services. Other companies might cost less than BlueHost, but BlueHost offers things that are worth the money that you’ve paid.

Large Network of CDN

This point isn’t authentic, nor is it mentioned by BlueHost officially. It’s just our perspective that BlueHost has a large CDN network as compared to other CDN networks.

We tested GoDaddy’s CDN, and their CDN network isn’t good on the Asian side, especially in Southeast Asia. The response time from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka was between 180-340 Ms.

While BlueHost gave us 30-90 Ms of response time from the same regions mentioned above. Therefore, it’s clear that BlueHost has a wide network of CDN in highly populated regions such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.

Cons of Bluehost

Not everything in this world is perfect or 100% best. The same goes for BlueHost. If we weren’t talking about the negative part of BlueHost, it doesn’t mean that the company is perfect. Therefore, we’ve mentioned some drawbacks of BlueHost for you:

A lot of Hidden Charges

BlueHost offers: 2.95$, 5.45$, 5.45 and 13.95$ packages.

However, when you sign up and proceed to the pay option, you’ll notice that your invoice will be credited 40$-50$ extra. This extra amount is the hidden charge that Bluehost charges and adds to the invoice when checking out.

And we don’t like how they secretly add 40$-50$ to your invoice when checking out. However, you can remove these extra features, but it doesn’t sound professional that the company automatically adds 40-50$ to your invoice.

High Charges in Some Cases

In certain cases, BlueHost might charge extra money than its competitors such as HostGator. Therefore, if your budget is very tight and you don’t want value-for-money services, it’s better to look for other companies

US Focused Business

One of the biggest drawbacks and might be the terrible thing about BlueHost is, they are only based in the USA region. Their whole business and even their servers, customer care, and all the business is only operated in the USA.

Therefore, if your main visitors and traffic come from the Asian or African side, then your website might get slower. Of course, there’s a lot of physical distance between the USA and Asian and African regions. If your main business is in your local area, particularly in the Asian and African regions, you might face slow server response time in the long term.

Bluehost Packages Pricing and Features

After reviewing the Bluehost in a detailed manner, let’s have a look at packages, the features included in their packages, and the prices of their packages:

WordPress

Basic Package:

• 50 GB SSD
• WordPress installed
• WordPress-optimized servers
• WordPress builder
• Free Domain
• Free email hosting
• Free SSL certificate
• Free CDN
• 1 website
• AI templates for WordPress

Price: 35.4 USD/- for a year excluding all the add-ons + 2% credit card TAX.

Plus Package:

• Unlimited websites
• Infinite SSD storage
• Free Office 365 for a year.
• All the features included in the basic package

Price: 65.45$ USD/- for a year excluding all the add-ons + 2% credit card TAX.

Choice Plus package:

• Free domain privacy
• Free automated backups for a year
• All the features of the Plus package

Price: Price: 65.45$ USD/- for a year excluding all the add-ons + 2% credit card TAX.

Pro package:

• Optimized CPU resources
• Free automated backups
• Free dedicated IP
• All the features of choice plus the package

Price: Price: 1167.4$ USD/- for a year excluding all the add-ons + 2% credit card TAX.

Hosting:

The hosting packages are completely the same as WordPress packages. They have the same pricing, same package names, same SSD spaces, and same number of websites, but exclude WordPress optimization and can be used for any type of hosting needs on the internet.

Domains:

The basic TLD domain pricing is based on the type of TLD domain and the uniqueness of the name. However, the lowest .com domain on Bluehost would cost you about 13$ without any type of add-on, protection, and security.

Other low-scale TLDs such as .Net, .org, and .xyz are cheaper than .com domains. However, it’s recommended to buy the domain with the hosting, as it comes free with the hosting package.

Professional Services:

The professional services pricing is dynamic. Bluehost hasn’t revealed how much they charge for their professional services. To quote the pricing, you need to write them a proposal by visiting their professional services page. They’ll analyze your demands, and website and then give you the quotation.

Email

Email Essentials

• 1 mailbox and calendar
• 1 license
• 15 GB of space
• Outlook supported
• 24/7 technical support
• World-class superior protection and disaster recovery option.

Price: Price: 4.99 USD/- for a month excluding all the add-ons + 2% credit card TAX.

Business Plus:

• 50GB of space
• Microsoft 365 online version
• Microsoft Teams
• Sharepoint
• All the features of the email Essentials package

Price: 9..99 USD/- for a month excluding all the add-ons + 2% credit card TAX.

Business Pro:

• Access and Publisher online version
• Multiple devices per user
• Appointment booking
• Microsoft lists and Forms and Mile IQ.
• All the features of business plus

Price: 14..99 USD/- for a month excluding all the add-ons + 2% credit card TAX.

Reasons to Choose Bluehost

After reading the whole review, you might think why should I choose BlueHost when there are already companies offering the same services even at the lower pricing? Below are the reasons to go with Bluehost:

Dedicated WordPress Optimization:

You can say that BlueHost and WordPress are two business partners that understand each other. BlueHost is one of the best hosting companies that is being recommended by WordPress officially. It’s because BlueHost is offering WordPress optimization on a hardware basis.

Low Pricing:

The process may seem higher when compared the BlueHost with other companies. However, when comparing the value of the packages to the cost, Bluehost takes the edge.

SSD Storages:

BlueHost’s infrastructure is entirely based on the SSD’s storage system. So there’s no way that you’ll receive HDD storage in low-cost packages. In that case, the 2.98$ package also comes with SSD storage. If compared with HostGator and NameCheap, they offer HDD storage in the basic package. And we all know that SSDs are at least 10x faster than the HDD

Our Final Verdict | Do We Recommend BlueHost?

In one word, YES! BlueHost is perfect if you want to host your WordPress website, especially if your website is a small or medium-scale website. Read more on our Compilation Web Hosting Reviews.

According to the pricing, quality, customer care, features, and speed that BlueHost offers, no other hosting company offers at the same rate as BlueHost.

However, if you’re an enterprise, have a large-scale website, particularly not on WordPress, and don’t have a budget issue, then probably BlueHost isn’t a good option. BlueHost’s main and focused business and customers are those websites that are working on a small to medium scale level, particularly on WordPress.

I’m very certain, after coming this far with this ultimate review, you wouldn’t think twice to try BlueHost.

Get started with our huge 65% off discount on your first year of purchase + a free Domain and get your site live on the internet instantly.