With operations starting from 2003, BlueHost powers more that 2 Million Websites all over the World.
That’s a Huge Number?
Having such a huge customer base showcases, that Blue host provides world-class hosting services. Blue host has secured a name as most trusted and reputed brand when it comes to WordPress Webhosting.
Bluehost is officially recommended by WordPress for Web Hosting. It powers thousands of Websites all over the world and supports thousands more every day, is owned by Endurance International Group which has other brands like HostGator, Site Builder and Reseller Club etc.
It has best is class support system which is available 24/7 over Live Chat, Emails or phone. They provide complete peace of mind in regards uptime reliability, automated security updates, backup data protection and world class support.
With Bluehost start with hosting plan tailored to your specific needs whether you are looking to create a website, blog or an online store.
However their some cons also, like higher renewal prices and restrictions on some cheapest plans.
We base all our analysis based on Uptime, Speed, Pricing and Support system.
So let’s dive deep in and find do Bluehost the most trusted and provides high quality Web hosting service that you need.
For complete analysis and a comprehensive review of Bluehost, we will test their promises with industry benchmarking tools.
Lets know the areas we will look into:
- Speed: Speed is very crucial factor for any website. We will see how fast a website loads with Blue host by assessing avg. response time?
- Reliable Hosting: Is you Website available 24/7/365 without any downtime.
- Customer Support: Can you get instant customer support, in case of issues with your websites.
- Features: What features are provided apart from basic Web hosting?
- Pricing: Do they have best pricing plans in the industry?
This are important parameters to look into while selecting Web Host. If you do not want to read the whole review, here is quick guide and everything in nutshell.
About Bluehost
Bluehost started in 2003, was founded by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Provo, Utah. Within 4 years, it registered 500000 domains and by 2008 it had one million domains registered. In Nov 2010, Bluehost was part of Endurance International Group (EIG).
In 2013, it launch VPS or dedicated hosting services and optimized hosting for WordPress was launch a year later.
Bluehost has a long relationship with the WordPress community. They are an official WordPress.org recommended hosting company.
Lets start our analysis is
“BlueHost Most Reliable and Affordable WebHost 2021”
Key Essentials – Bluehost Uptime, Speed and Support.
Speed and Uptime are the basic factor, in deciding a Webhost and subsequent success of your online presence. Well support system is also important in long run.
1) Excellent Uptime 99.98%
The most crucial factor for any Webhost provider is Uptime. Website uptime is the time that a website or web service is available to users in a given period. If you have more instances of downtime i.e non availability of website to your visitors, results in less traffic and lower ranks in Google SERP’s.
Represented as a ratio of the time available divided by the total time.
Uptime / total time = availability percentage
Bluehost has 99.98% uptime means (1 hour, 10 minutes and 7 seconds of downtime per year)
Although 100% uptime is the goal, the industry considers 99.99% uptime as high availability.
Every website hosting provider wants to keep uptime as high as possible, and rightfully so to provide most reliable and fast services to customers.
Blue Host delivers rock solid numbers over a period of last 3 years.
- Avg Uptime in 2018 – 99.99%
- Avg Uptime in 2019 – 99.98%
- Avg Uptime in 2020 – 99.98%
“Bluehost is definitely a reliable host”
2) Speed
Speed is more important factor, than uptime for a Webhost. A slow or sluggish response time can take away all your visitors when it comes to seamless browsing experience.
Studies reveal that 1 second drop in speed, results in 7% drop in conversions rate and 3 second delay hampers 50% traffic.
Bluehost provides quick TTFB ie time to transfer first byte.
TTFB involves 3 basic steps.
- Request time from client to servers (basically HTTP requests) which involves DNS lookup times, latency geographical distance between server and client and complex firewall rules.
- Server processing time: After first step, server starts processing the requests. The delay here maybe due to factors such as slow database calls, too many 3rd party scripts, badly optimized code and WordPress Themes and inefficient server resources.
- Response to Client: The final step is response of server to clients. The lapse here is due to slower network speeds either on client side or servers site. Also if client has low speed Wifi, its results in low TTFB.
Bluehost has main server in Provo Utah USA and secondary servers in Orem Utah USA, Mumbai India, London UK, Hong Kong and Shanghai China resulting in optimized resource sharing and reduces latency issues.
The average response time not only for first byte is less but also to load a web page is good for Blue host servers.
3) Customer Support
In my experience, large hosting companies usually struggle to provide quality customer service, Bluehost is an exception.
Bluehost provides 24/7 phone support and live chat support and Email support. They have huge knowledge base and tutorials to help customers worldwide.
The Support staff is courteous and knowledgeable to provide quick response to your queries. In my personal experience of last 2 years, I find Blue host support answers your queries with greater consistency, very quickly and courteously.
I had some issues with installation of plugins, which resulted in nonperformance of my Website. I just called customer care at Bluehost in midnight and got my problem solved flat in 2 mins. My site was up and running.
With vast team of 750 plus people, Bluehost provides around the clock support to more than 2 Million customers.
With small Email Verification at start of phone call, you will be rest assured that your problems will get resolved.
“BLUEHOST is having excellent service and constantly improving”
4) Pricing, Plans and Features
Bluehost has variety of hosting plans to offer, for all sort of customers, budgets and sizes. This includes Shared Hosting, VPS, Dedicated servers, Cloud Hosting, Managed WordPress, Woo Commerce hosting etc.
Let’s check various types of hosting Bluehost offers in detail:
Well For all beginners, this plan suit your requirements. When you are just stepping in, you require less resources from servers, so webhost can share server resources among various websites.
For example Site A Site B Site C Site D share the same server. Since single server hosts, multiple websites the cost of hosting is the cheapest.
As seen above shared hosting plans or basic plans start with 2.95$ per month with renewal for 3 years i.e you have to shell out 106.2$ at one go for renewal for 3 years.
There are options to begin with shorter contracts, but the prices grow with those a bit.
Here’s the full picture:
|
RENEWAL PERIOD |
BASIC PLAN (per month) |
PLUS (per month) |
CHOICE PLUS (per month) |
PRO (per month) |
|
12 MONTHS |
4.95$ |
7.45 $ |
7.45 $ |
9.50 $ |
|
24 MONTHS |
3.95$ |
6.95$ |
6.95$ |
9.50$ |
|
36 MONTHS |
2.95$ |
5.45$ |
5.45$ |
9.50$ |
Okay, what Bluehost is offering in this plans?
- Basic features required and server capabilities required by most of the users.
- Making this features easily available.
All this plans comes with same basic set of features, with couple of key differences. So none is more power than other, as far handling of load and scale of website all are at par.
The only difference is size of website and no of websites you are allowed to run.
- Basic plans allow only one website to install and has 50 GB SSD storage.
- Other plans allow unlimited sites to be install and unlimited SSD storage.
Apart from this all basic plans comes with
- 24/7 Best in class customer support via chat and phone call
- Access to custom themes in Bluehost panel
- One click install of WordPress,
- Website Builder,
- Free one domain name for first year plus access to domain manager to add, transfer and manage your domains.
- Free SSL across all domains.
- Free CDN a (Content delivery network) means that your website’s data is served from various servers across the web instead of just one machine; this improves your site speed.
While Choice plus and Pro plans comes with free automatic backup of you websites which secures your site from unusual crashes and system failures. Also Domain privacy is provided to safeguard personal details from unwanted spammers.
Well, WordPress Hosting and Shared hosting has same set of pricing and features.
“Note: Well Blue host provides one of cheapest plans for shared hosting, but renewal rates are lot higher. See the crossed rates below the main, which are renewal rates that the prices you are going to pay after initial contract is over.”
Manage WordPress Hosting
The basic WordPress hosting plans are just basic especially for beginners. Once you are up and have establish your name with more traffic and visitors to your website, you require advance package i.e Manage WordPress Hosting.
With more power under the hood and more newly enhanced infrastructure provides
- Multi layered caching to boost speed
- Fully redundant WordPress platform
- Auto scalability to handle traffic surges.
- Multi-tiered security and more.
- Full control of with advance analytics into customer activity.
- SEO recommendations to boost traffic and Social media marketing and management.
All plans comes with basic features of:
1 )With 200 plus edge servers, helps in storing and delivery very quickly
2) Free SSL across all plans and SEO tools to enhance yours site visibility on search engines.
3) All plans include daily scheduled backups, malware detection and removal, multi –tiered security and multi-layer caching
4) Site staging which helps in testing new design or copy without affecting the current website.
Build Plans comes with pricing of 9.95$ per month for 36 months term with basic features and is best for traffic of 50000 visitors per month, and 20 has GB of SSD storage.
One can buy build plan for 3 month – 16.95$ per month, 6 month -13.95$ per month, 12 month -11.95$ per month and 24 month -10.95 $ per month.
Grow Plans comes with pricing of 14.95$ per month for 36 months term with basic features and is best for traffic of 150000 visitors per month, and 40 has GB of SSD storage and SEO Tools,10 GB Video Compression, Review Tools and 30 Days free trial of Microsoft Email.
One can buy Grow plan for 3 month – 22.95$ per month, 6 month -19.95$ per month, 12 month -16.95$ per month and 24 month -15.95 $ per month.
Scale Plans comes with pricing of 27.95$ per month for 36 months term with basic features and is best for traffic of 500000 visitors per month, and 80 has GB of SSD storage and SEO Tools, unlimited video compression, Review Tools, PayPal Integration and 30 Days free trial of Microsoft Email.
One can buy Grow plan for 3 month – 35.95$ per month, 6 month -32.955$ per month, 12 month -29.95$ per month and 24 month -28.95 $ per month.
Professional Web Hosting:
-
VPS Hosting
VPS Hosting or Virtual Private server hosting is website hosting that allows for resources such RAM and CPU dedicated to your account. This is done by virtualizing the server and splitting the resources among the users on that server.
This means you are assured of the resources on the server regardless of what other users on the server are doing. This helps in mobilizing your resources for better stability and performance.
Unlike Share Hosting which does not guarantee of RAM and CPU resources, VPN does and also provides full leverage to access the root perform commands and configure changes as per your requirements.
VPN plans starts from 18.99$ per moth for 3 years renewal and 59.99$ per month for 3 years renewal for maximum VPS plans
-
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated Hosting is owning a whole server, Blue host provides a whole server dedicated to you. Since whole server is allocated to you, there is no limits to how you can optimize, customize and manage your resources.
With free domain for first year, you can add more VPS, share hosting, manage hosting and manage all in one place. Easily manage all websites, emails, files and resources from one location.
With total control in your hands, you are able to increase storage as per your requirements. With dedicated customer support, specifically trained to assist with dedicated hosting issues.
Dedicated Hosting is basically very large companies, which require servers which are fully loaded with resources and not shared with anyone.
Dedicated Server Hosting starts with 79.99$ per month for 3years and premium plans cost 119.99$ per month.
Do we recommend? Is Blue host good??
“Blue host is one of the most reliable and affordable Webhost”
Best customer support and strong product offerings makes Bluehost one of the top ranked Web hosting in the world.
Still, Bluehost suffers on account of higher renewal rates and cheap plans having some critical restrictions as compares with others.
Overall “BLUEHOST delivers one the best performance and offers good value to its customers”
