Looking for a web hosting service and not sure which to go for or where to look at. After some research on google, you probably would have come across some websites talking about ‘BlueHost’, it is a popular web hosting company that is currently hosting tremendous numbers of domains and websites from around the world. Now let us dig deep into BlueHost and break down the pros and cons so you can decide whether this hosting company does suit for you to host your website.
BlueHost is one of the companies owned by “Endurance International Group” (EIG) which is a large corporation who also owned several other web hosting companies such as “HostGator” and “iPage”. Despite this giant player owned multiple web hosting organizations, the features and standard of each one may differ and focus on a specific core due to their branding.
It is certain that Bluehost is under the family tree of the colossal and they have the massive financial to put their money into the internet industry and gain most of the market share fraction. If you have been seeing positive reviews online and several websites voted for BlueHost as being the top web hosting service, this is no surprise the company has the budget to get their marketing done well.
Most websites seem to pay attention to how good BlueHost can be and talk less on flaws, this website brings down the mask and we will run through the test of using BlueHost service and break down the pros and cons for our reader to decide for themselves. Alexkij.com is not associated with any third party company, but we earn commission with their affiliate program.
BlueHost Product Package
Domain registration: Bluehost offers free domain names for the first year and charge $17.99 for second year and onward. I can say it isn’t cheap and not recommended to register a domain with the same company that hosts your website otherwise they will have monopoly power over the user and hard to migrate to a different web hosting company for future time. I would suggest you to register a domain with ‘NameCheap‘, they are easy to use and much cheaper.
Shared Hosting: Imagining you are living in a dormitory, you have to stay with your roommates. Running a website on a shared web host is like staying in a dorm. BlueHost has a standardized shared hosting service like other companies, unless you require a large hosting space to manage your content-rich website or hire an information technician to run your complex website. The uptime and speed rate is nearly equivalent to other web hosting services. The price goes from $8.99 to $25.99 on a monthly basis.
WordPress Hosting: If you plan to use wordpress on BlueHost, you have come to the right place. They do offer advanced features that can optimize the wordpress sites with one of the tools like “Staging”. However, the downfall is the hosting price costs $29.99 a month. You can find these same features for a lower price at SiteGround.
VPS is a ‘Virtual Private Server’ that gives you a wall from a shared server to have a private room to host your websites. It is like having a private room in an apartment. It is something between the shared and dedicated web hosting. It is designed for people who need a special server coding or configuration in the server for their own hosting space. The price goes from $29.99 to $59.99 per month. There is an alternative at Interserver for a valued price.
Dedicated Server: Ideal for huge enterprises or big businesses with tons of daily traffic or hosting space resellers. It is like owning a private server without having to share the space with someone. Like living in a private property without a neighbor or roommate sharing the resource. Dedicated server is a top-performing web hosting also comes with a high price tag.
It is a surprise that such a huge company like BlueHost does not have cloud hosting service. If you want cloud hosting, you can check out interserver.
It seems that BlueHost mainly focuses on offering shared hosting service rather than VPS and dedicated hosting solutions.
Beware that when you sign up with BlueHost for the first time, they will give you a big discount for the first year, the yearly renewal price for the second year may put you off. It isn’t cheap to host with them unless you have quite a sum to spend.
Basic
- 1 Domain
- Standard Performance
- Max. 200K Files
- 50GB Storage
- Max. 3GB Databse
- Basic Backup
- $2.95 First Year
- $8.99 / Month
Plus
- Unlimited Domains
- Standard Performance
- Max. 200K Files
- Unlimited Storage
- Max. 3GB Databse
- Basic Backup
- $5.45 First Year
- $12.99 / Month
ChoicePlus
- Unlimited Domains
- Standard Performance
- Max. 200K Files
- Unlimited Storage
- Max. 3GB Databse
- Advance Backup
- $5.45 First Year
- $16.99 / Month
Pro
- Unlimited Domains
- High Performance
- Max. 300K Files
- Unlimited Storage
- Max. 5GB Databse
- Advance Backup
- $13.95 First Year
- $25.99 / Month
Let us break down each price plan for shared web hosting packages.To see much more detail which one is best for.
Basic Plan: For hosting 1 domain with a storage space of 50GB
Plus Plan: Host unlimited domains with infinite storage space. If you have multiple websites, this is great you
Choice Plus: Same features as Plus Plan, include additional security and smart backup system. Great for small to medium size businesses.
Pro Plan: Similar features like the rest, this plan is for those who want a higher performance web server and the advanced tools. The maximum data files you can host ranged from 200K to 300K.
For more information about BlueHost, Click here to visit their website.
Pros & Cons
Now come to our main concept of this article. Let expose the pros and cons of BlueHost
Pro
- New sign ups are significantly inexpensive for the first term, but a huge renewal price for the next year.
- Website up-time is always good as we monitored the percentage and we are very happy with it. (However, BlueHost doesn’t guarantee the minimum up-time nor include an agreement with their clients)
- The best thing about BlueHost is they offered 50GB huge storage spaces that may not reach the limit while other companies usually offered 10-30GB
- Unlimited bandwidth: That means you can drive a mega amount of traffic to your websites without causing a bottleneck.
Cons
- Bad customer support experience: We are quite upset with their support team who are not knowledgeable in solving issues, unless you have your own technicians to do things for you otherwise you have to move to a different hosting company. We believe iPage and BlueHost are using the same customer support team.
- Abusing Up-sell: During your sign-up, you will experience a lot of up-sell. BlueHost tries to squeeze every bit of profit out of their clients. This is a very annoying and arrogant sales process which is not a good experience for us.
- If your website holds a ton of content and media files, I bet you will experience some low loading speed. It seems the speed time doesn’t keep up with the huge storage space they are offering. Look elsewhere if speed time is your primary concern.
- BlueHost has servers that are located only in the United States. If international traffic is your main source of visitors, anyone who comes from outside the U.S. will experience slow site loading time.
- Bad Backup Option: BlueHost has their default backup system but it is full of flaws. What they do is try to up-sell their advanced backup tool option to their clients.
- No Free Website Migration: Even for the first time sign up, this service isn’t available. If you need to migrate your website to BlueHost, it would cost $150 to migrate a maximum of 5 websites.
Why we don’t recommend BlueHost
Not ideal for hosting Ecommerce or serious bloggers without much technical skill. For beginners, don’t even think about it, their support team isn’t very helpful. If you are running a large project website and require a high performance web hosting I suggest you to look for alternatives like Interserver.
Advance hosting features like Git-repository and staging area are not available on BlueHost as well. If you need these tools I suggest you check out SiteGround.
Summary
BlueHost isn’t our favorite web hosting company. As you read from our review and realize that this company has more cons than pros, they are very commercial in doing up-sell rather than providing a quality service and products to their customers.
Good things about BlueHost are the large storage space and unlimited bandwidth but the rest are not as good as many claimed them to be, because BlueHost is paying all those bloggers to do a review only focus on the positive rather than the cons.
The server up-time is good but the speed rate is below average. The most cheesy experience with BlueHost is that they give you a great discount for the first-year, once you are hooked to their service then they will charge you a regular high price for the second year.
There are a lot of rooms that BlueHost needs to work on like the speed rate and support team. They have the worst support I have ever experienced ever since I started on my website journey.
Look elsewhere there are much better alternative web hosting companies available.