INTRODUCTION
Bluehost is part of a massive corporation, Endurance International Group (EiG), which owns various hosting providers (e.g. HostGator or iPage) and has a colossal market share.
One of the oldest web hosts started in 1996, Bluehost has become the largest brand name when it comes to WordPress hosting. They are an official ‘WordPress’ recommended hosting provider. With Bluehost, you never have to worry about your website being slow even when there is a lot of traffic. Their 24/7 expert support is always there to help when you need it by phone, email, or live chat. They are rated #1 in web hosting 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.
SERVICES OFFERED
1.DOMAIN REGISTRATION
Although they are not the cheapest domain name registrar, you can buy domain names directly from Bluehost. They start at $17.99 a year. A personal all-time favorite of mine for domain names is Namecheap with a deal of as low as $8.88 per domain it’s cheaper and easier to manage.
The good news is that you can skip buying this expensive domain from Bluehost and buy it from Namecheap then change the nameservers to point to your Bluehost hosting package
2.HOSTING PACKAGES
Bluehost offered world class hosting solutions in the planet right now, much better than Namecheap hosting packages. Below is a detailed breakdown of the packages they offer.
i: Shared web hosting
Shared hosting is the perfect way to start a new website with low traffic volume. In a shared hosting environment, your website shares server resources with other websites.
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. Think of this as sharing a flat; you’ll share a server (flat), but you’ll have your own hosting space (room) – cheaper but noisier. At Bluehost their shared prices go from $8.99 to $25.99 per month.
Let take a deeper look into the specs and pricing of this plan.
We i know what you are thinking already, they are dang expensive right? But wait there is a reason as to why and i will cover it after this just keep reading. Let us breakdown these prices further shall we
- Basic: The basic plan only allows you to host one website. It hosts one domain and 25 subdomains, 50GB storage, 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 $7.99 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 $5.45 per month. When you renew the account, you’ll have to pay $14.99 per month.
- Choice Plus: The Prime plan includes all features of plus plan. You will also get domain privacy and SiteBackup Pro as extras worth over $80/year. Prime also has the same first term price of Plus, $5.45 per month. When renewing, you’ll have to pay $14.99 per month.
- Pro: This plan comes with all the Choice plan features including Dedicated IP and 2 Spam Experts.
ii: 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.
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.
Prices are as below.
iii: VPS Hosting
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 (read below). You’ll share a server with other clients, but there’s a (virtual) wall between your projects and theirs. This type of hosting is recommended for those needing special server configurations (e.g. using a particular programming language). VPS hosting plans go from $29.99 to $59.99 a month at Bluehost.
iV: WooCommerce Hosting
WooCommerce is 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.
v: Email Hosting
This plan comes in only of you already have bought a hosting packaging plan from Bluehost.
Below are the prices and specs.
WHY IS BLUEHOST COSTLY AND WHY SHOULD YOU TAKE IT?
Bluehost Performance
The most important performance metric that you should look for is the speed. It not only affects user experience on your site, but it also affects your WordPress SEO rankings.
Studies show that a 1 second drop in website speed can decrease your conversion rate by 7%. A 3 second delay can cost you 50% of your traffic.
Bluehost Speed Test Results
For a faster website, you will need to choose a fast web 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 default Twenty Seventeen theme. We imported dummy content for theme development including images. After that we used Pingdom to test the website speed.
As should be obvious, our test site loads in under two seconds. That is quicker than 85% of every single tried site. Considering the way that our site wasn’t utilizing any storing modules or speed advancement tips, this outcome is astounding.
In any case, this test site didn’t have a lot of traffic. So the Pingdom test alone isn’t adequate.
To test how Bluehost workers would react with expanded traffic, we utilized a testing apparatus called Load Impact to send virtual clients (VU) to our site. They steadily developed to 100 guests to perceive how the worker would deal with expanded solicitations from numerous associations without a moment’s delay.
Here is a screen capture of our outcomes.
Testing Bluehost load sway
The blue line is the quantity of dynamic virtual clients on the site, and the green line is the worker load time. As should be obvious the worker load stayed stable all through the test even at top traffic.
This test shows that on the off chance that you are searching for a truly quick site, at that point Bluehost can be an ideal fit for you.
It is likewise imperative to take note of that we didn’t record any vacation during our testing. See the screen capture underneath for an itemized take a gander at Bluehost worker uptime.
Bluehost worker uptime and reaction time
Bluehost Server Response Time
At the point when you are trying a live site utilizing devices like Pingdom, you are essentially perceiving how everything on your site loads. This incorporate pictures as well, which take any longer to stack than plain content.
So as to get a more exact worker reaction time, we utilized another instrument called Bitcatcha. It permits you to test worker reaction time without stacking any information.
The Review
Bluehost Web Hosting
Expensive but highly efficient web hosting provider
PROS
- The first term is cheap: But be aware of the renewal rates, they are high.
- Generous storage: Their shared hosting plans offer loads of storage.
- Unmetered bandwidth: Bluehost won’t limit the traffic that your website(s) can get.
- Solid uptime: Generally speaking, my uptime tests with Bluehost have always been good. But unlike other providers, they don’t offer an SLA (Service Level Agreement) that guarantees a minimum uptime.
CONS
- No free migration: Unlike most of their competitors they won’t migrate your sites for free. If you want to use this extra service, it’ll cost you about $150 to migrate 5 websites.
- Bad support: Along with iPage, it is one of the worst support teams I’ve ever dealt with.
- Poor backup options: Their default backup solution is fairly limited. My guess is that they try to push users to get their paid product.
- Solid uptime: Generally speaking, my uptime tests with Bluehost have always been good. But unlike other providers, they don’t offer an SLA (Service Level Agreement) that guarantees a minimum uptime.
- Constant upsells: Their system is packed with continuous upsell pitches, which gets annoying.
Bluehost
