Bluehost Reviews 2022: Features, Best Bits, What’s New?
If you are running a website and are on the lookout for a reliable web hosting solution, you may be unsure which gives you the best return in terms of speed and price.
Bluehost is one of the more popular hosting platforms and is one that I highly recommend.
In this article, we will look in-depth at Bluehost. We will cover the price, speed, capabilities and the general pros and cons of using the hosting provider for your website in 2022.
What is Bluehost?
- What is Bluehost?
- What are the pros and cons of Bluehost?
- Bluehost reviews: Hosting plans, prices and key features
- Is Bluehost good for beginners?
- Is Bluehost good for eCommerce websites?
- Is Bluehost Customer Support good?
- How well does Bluehost perform?
- Conclusion
Bluehost is a global company that offers web hosting services.
It is one of the largest web-hosting providers, managing well over 2 million domains and has a reputation for being one of the most reliable and well known hosting companies.
If you are looking for managed WordPress hosting, then Bluehost is great as it makes the set-up of a website very simple and makes the process of moving a domain to a live site extremely easy.
What are the pros and cons of Bluehost?
Here we will look at the pros and cons of Bluehost and provide a balanced review of what we believe are the great and not so great features of Bluehost in 2022.
The pros
Let’s take a look at what is great about Bluehost as a web hosting platform…
Great security features
Bluehost offers some of the best security features out there compared to a lot of other hosting platforms on the market.
Security is a crucial factor when it comes to choosing a web hosting company and it will give you peace of mind knowing that the measures Bluehost take to protect your website are very thorough.
Every Bluehost plan comes with resource protection and you can add CodeGuard Backup Basic for an additional $2.99 per month. This will ensure that your hosting is backed up daily and will monitor any changes and update you with any performance-related changes.
Your security features will differ depending on which version you choose from. The most basic plan will provide daily backups and 1GB of storage but depending on the size of your website and the maintenance involved, the more expensive packages may be more suitable which will provide larger storage and more automatic backups.
Ease of use
Bluehost makes it very easy to manage your website, whether that be just a single website or whether it is a shared hosting plan for multiple websites.
A lot of website hosting solutions do not make it easy to move a domain name over to a dedicated hosting and website management plan. It can be confusing if you are having to change DNS records, email providers and Google connections.
Bluehost has a simple onboarding process that allows you to complete a form on signup. It takes a few minutes to fill out but will ask you all of the important questions, including the plan you are after and what exactly it is you need to move over to a dedicated hosting server. Once you have managed to go through the onboarding process, you will then be able to connect your website successfully and easily.
Excellent customer support
Having great customer support and having someone readily available if issues arise with your website is vitally important. You will find a lot of other hosting providers do not provide the same level of customer service that Bluehost do.
Bluehost customer support is excellent and if you have an issue, you will find it very easy to connect to a member of their support team. When you submit a support ticket, their live chat will connect you in a matter of minutes and this is very important when it comes to resolving issues quickly and efficiently.
Their support is available 24/7 so if your site was to go down in the middle of the night or during your busiest times, you can be sure that there will be someone on the other side ready to help you with your site issues. Websites can go down for a number of reasons whether that be plugin updates or high volumes of traffic. Bluehost support is great and offers extensive FAQs, videos, live chat and email support to help you resolve your issues as soon as possible.
Server quality
Bluehost offers excellent server performance and depending on the shared hosting package that you choose to go with, you can be sure that the hosting plans will support your website effectively.
For $14.95 per month, you get access to Dual Quad Processor Performance Servers and if you are running an eCommerce website that gets a lot of traffic and depends on performance, then this is a great way to ensure that your website performance does not reduce.
The cons
Whilst Bluehost is great in terms of its hosting capabilities for websites, there are a couple of downsides to choosing Bluehost.
No free site migration – If you are looking to migrate a website from your current hosting plan and need support, you will need to pay a fee for Bluehost to help aid you with the migration process.
In order to migrate up to five websites and your email accounts, it can cost up to $149 as a one-time fee in order to move everything over for you.
No Guaranteed Uptime – Other web hosting services may offer a guarantee that tells customers that there will be site uptime 100% of the time.
If a site has downtime, it can be a concern as it means that the site may go temporarily down and can lead to a loss in sales and customers. However, whilst this may be a slight concern, their uptime efficiency is 99.99% which means that for a large majority of the time, your site will be running perfectly for customers.
The only time downtime will occur is if there are updates that need to be resolved in the server itself or with your website.
Bluehost reviews: Hosting plans, prices and key features
Depending on what it is you need for your website in terms of hosting and speed, Bluehost offers different pricing plans based on the size of your website(s) and the demand that it needs to be able to meet.
Bluehost Pricing Packages
Bluehost offers 3 main pricing tiers for their hosting services.
Their most basic shared hosting package starts from £3.69 per month. Depending on the size of your website and whether you manage more than one, there are different packages on offer that will give you what you need from your dedicated hosting service.
There are also dedicated hosting packages specifically for your WordPress website and their solution is tailored for this platform specifically.
Shared Hosting | VPS | Dedicated |
Ideal if you are getting started with a brand new website. | Perfect for growing websites that require better speed and more control over your hosting. | Ideal for high traffic websites that require the best levels of speed and performance. |
Starting at £3.69 per month | Starting at £14.16 per month | Starting at £59.64 per month |
Shared Hosting
Bluehost shared hosting packages start from £3.69 and is ideal if you are just looking to get started with a brand new website.
You can get started on either a 12 month or 36-month agreement which will cover the hosting for that period of time.
There are 4 main pricing packages within the shared hosting packages from Bluehost. These include Basic, Plus, Choice Plus and Pro.
With Bluehost Shared Hosting, whether you use the Website Builder or traditional WordPress, you get all the features, tools, and guidance you need to build and launch truly impressive WordPress websites.
Bluehost Shared Hosting Key Features
Basic | Plus | Choice Plus | Pro |
When you require hosting on one site. | Ideal if you are running multiple websites. | For multiple websites and additional security benefits. | Full hosting services and optimised web resources. |
£2.20 per month | £4.06 per month | £4.06 per month | £10.40 per month |
VPS Hosting
VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting uses virtualization technology to provide users with dedicated and private resources on a server with multiple users.
VPS offers a more secure and stable solution than shared hosting where you don’t get a dedicated server space.
This kind of dedicated hosting is ideal for large sites that need the resources in order to manage large sites that are getting high volumes of traffic daily.
Bluehost VPS hosting packages start from £14.16 per month. There are 3 main pricing packages within the shared hosting packages from Bluehost. These include Standard, Enhanced and Ultimate.
With full SSD storage dedicated solely to you, our virtual private server hosting gives you the flexibility and control to build exactly the website you want.
Bluehost VPS Hosting Key Features
Standard | Enhanced | Ultimate |
Ideal for getting started with your own server. | Additional server hosting storage space. | The ultimate hosting and server package for websites that require significant resources. |
Starting at £14.16 per month | Starting at £22.36 per month | Starting at £44.73 per month |
Dedicated Server Hosting
The definition of a dedicated server is “an enterprise-grade physical server used to host the applications and services of a single hosting client“.
Dedicated servers are typically used to host high-traffic websites, web applications, and for other hosting scenarios where performance is paramount.
Bluehost Dedicated Server hosting packages start from £59.64 per month. There are 3 main pricing packages within the shared hosting packages from Bluehost. These include Standard, Enhanced and Premium.
Hosting your website on one of our dedicated servers gives you more power to grow your business. It’s the ultimate in speed, flexibility, and control.
Is Bluehost good for beginners?
If you are a beginner and you are looking for a reputable web hosting service, then I certainly recommend Bluehost if you are just getting started.
The shared hosting packages are ideal for smaller websites and they make perfect sense for start-up WordPress websites. Bluehost enables you to start right from picking a domain name to getting the website live on WordPress. They also come with free SSL certificate registration which will protect your website and make it secure.
Depending on the long term ambition of your business, then you may need to consider a dedicated hosting service but Bluehost allows you to upgrade if you need to at a later stage. You can get started from scratch and then if you need additional hosting resources, then you can later upgrade this.
I would definitely say that Bluehost is good for beginners and whether you are a local business or looking to expand into eCommerce, then there is a hosting option for all kinds of online stores.
Is Bluehost good for eCommerce websites?
Bluehost is certainly a good option for eCommerce websites. Like there are hosting packages for startups, there are also dedicated hosting services for eCommerce websites that require unmetered bandwidth and hosting capabilities for multiple sites.
eCommerce websites that get high volumes of traffic may require a dedicated hosting solution to maintain uptime and ensure that the site performs at an optimal level as often as it can.
For an online store, it is important to provide customers with a good user experience and vital to keep loading times down. Dedicated hosting packages help to achieve this as there are dedicated hosting space for a single or few websites and provides the server resources to help your eCommerce business scale.
Bluehost also offers great customer and live chat support which will ensure that there is always someone there to assist you if issues with your website were to arise. This is especially important for eCommerce websites as a website going down for just a few minutes can be catastrophic in terms of sales. Bluehost has a dedicated support team who are extremely responsive and comes as part of the hosting packages provided.
What’s the difference between Shopify and Bluehost?
Bluehost is a hosting platform whereas Shopify is an eCommerce platform. This means that Bluehost is more focused on the hosting of websites with Shopify being a sales platform that is designed specifically for eCommerce businesses.
Bluehost has a number of hosting packages that are focused more on WordPress websites whilst Shopify uses a large number of servers located worldwide to host websites within their platform. Bluehost can certainly host eCommerce websites but Shopify is a platform that is specifically designed for eCommerce.
WordPress and Shopify are the more relative comparison as both are designed to host and manage content. Bluehost is a dedicated hosting service and is not really geared towards selling products online.
Is Bluehost Customer Support good?
Based on our own experience of using the dedicated hosting services and the support that we have had when we have needed it, I have to say that the customer support is excellent.
Bluehost has an extensive support team that is on hand 24/7 to help with any queries that you may have. Whether you have a question about upgrading your hosting solution or your site has gone down, there is always someone on hand to deal with your support ticket swiftly.
From all of the reviews which I have read online, the general consensus is that the support is very good and is one of the best web hosting services out there in terms of its responsiveness.
Bluehost also offers a range of useful resources including FAQs, videos and other useful guides that can also help provide an even quicker solution for smaller problems.
Overall, the customer support is excellent and this is one of the most important things when it comes to choosing a web hosting provider.
How well does Bluehost perform?
The overall performance of Bluehost is excellent. Bluehost hosts more than 2 million websites and there is a reason for this.
Their uptime is excellent and their server speeds are the same. They have servers located globally which means that they can offer great performance for both small and larger websites.
Uptime is an essential aspect when it comes to choosing a web host. After testing the uptime over a period of time, we worked out that over the last 12 months, the uptime of one of our live sites was 99.97%. The downtime across the entire year worked out less than a couple of hours which is excellent and just shows how reliable Bluehost actually is.
Conclusion
Bluehost is a great hosting service and we certainly recommend using them if you are looking for a hosting provider.
Whether you have a single website or multiple, the server capabilities and the quality of customer support makes it a no brainer to use Bluehost to manage your websites. You can get set up with a Bluehost website right away and there are a number of affordable packages to choose from.
For WordPress site owners that are looking to speed up their website and have a reliable support team on hand, then Bluehost is certainly the route to go. If you are a small business owner, the entry prices are very reasonable and as you grow and require additional levels of support, then there are dedicated and VPS hosting plans that will be able to accommodate your growth.
Whilst there are pros and cons of every hosting service, we believe that Bluehost stands out and with over 2 million domains also on their plans, you can be sure that it is a reliable hosting provider for your business.