BlueHost Review: Why i recommend Bluehost for WordPress

When you talk about starting a WordPress Blog, 7 out of 10 WordPress experts will advise you to buy web hosting with BlueHost. Besides this Bluehost review, I would definitely recommend them any day too to any blogger who is just getting started with their blogging journey, reason being they are one of the best web hosts when it comes to shared WordPress Hosting and Managed WordPress Hosting. Even WordPress it’s self recommends Bluehost because they have tested and proven that it meets the WordPress minimum requirements. WordPress functions best when running in a good hosting environment and Bluehost has that environemnt. You can view the full list of the official WordPress Web Hosting companies here.

Bluehost is currently owned by Endurance International Group and is among the 20 largest web hosting providers in the whole world. Together with it’s affiliated companies; iPage, FastDomain and HostMonster, they collectively host over two million domains worldwide. Bluehost runs its servers in a fifty thousand sq ft facility in Provo, Utah, which is currently shared with HostMonster. Bluehost was founded by Matt Heaton in the year 2003 but got acquired by Endurance International Group in the year 2010.

Besides the recommendations, Bluehost has built itself to be among the top web hosting companies in the world. In this article, i explain why you should definitely give them a try in case you are looking for a web hosting company to host your existing new website or rather wish to migrate your website to a new server.

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What services does Bluehost offer?

Bluehost offers a variety of web hosting services right from selling web hosting space to registering domains. The company currently offers shared web hosting services, managed WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, WooCommerce hosting, Dedicated hosting and also registers domains. They used to offer web hosting reseller services but phased it out after. Actually i can’t tell whether they reintroduced it but the last i got from them was a recommendation to Reseller Club. I will explain some of the services in this Bluehost review and highlight the features that their respective packages have to offer in relation to the service provided. Before we proceed, you need to know that Bluehost offers a standard cPanel & LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup which are ideal features for running a WordPress site.

Shared Web Hosting: This is the most common and used type of web hosting. If your website is new then i recommend you start from this as you upgrade but if you are receiving over 2000 daily hits then you might have to consider switching to VPS. When it comes to the best shared web hosting companies, Bluehost will always come top on the list. I first hosted on Bluehost 6 years ago and i based on several recommendations from top bloggers before opting to buy web hosting on their server. I had already registered my domain through NameCheap and all i wanted was web hosting despite the fact that all their hosting packages come with a free domain for the first year. To cut the conversation short, Bluehost has three shared web hosting plans; The Basic Plan, The Plus Plan & The Pro Plan.

Managed WordPress Hosting: Built on a Virtual Private Server technology (VPS), Bluehost’s Managed WordPress Hosting has all the essentials and right amount of resources every WordPress website would require to function properly. The package is optimized for security, ability to handle multiple plugins and is extremely fast. Once you sign up for Managed WordPress Hosting, you will also receive support from WordPress experts only and not the general support assistants. They currently have four plans for the service; WP Standard, WP Enhanced, WP Premium and WP Ultimate in their respective order.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting: The company’s virtual private servers are basically built on cloud technology and have increased power. These servers are extremely flexibile / versatile and will give you more control for your websites. If you are looking for increased server power for your websites then BlueHost has four Virtual Private Server plans you can choose from. Plans include; Standard Plan, Enhanced Plan, Premium Plan & Ultimate Plan respectively. With Virtual Private Servers, your websites with become a lot faster with ability to handle a bunch of people online at the same time without any downtime.

WooCommerce Hosting: If you are planning to start an online store using WordPress then this service was designed for you. WordPress is a very powerful CMS with an architecture that enables it function along with the best shopping carts and online stores. When you integrate WooCommerce, taking credit cards and processing orders becomes so easy. Bluehost already has a managed WordPress Ecommerce (WooCommerce) hosting service in place designed to make your website secure, safe and fast. This hosting service comes pre-installed with a SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate to ensure safety of credit card information on your website.

Dedicated Hosting: As most of us know, Dedicated hosting is apparently the most powerful type of hosting and is mainly used on sites that receive millions and millions of traffic. In case you want the best in website performance then you can opt for Bluehost’s Dedicated hosting. Their servers are very powerful, secure and optimized for speed with the best performance. They have a couple of plans that will definitely give you extreme value out of your money. I made a comparison among several web hosts and Bluehost’s plans cost a bit less and i recommend you sign up for it too in case you intend to switch to a dedicated hosting environment.

See prices of all these services here

Besides the services above, Bluehost also offers Domain Registration services and Reseller hosting services. Please note that i have not included the prices of the services above in this Bluehost review article because they are so dynamic but had to include links to the plans and pricing of each of the services to enable you catch up with the current prices. All in all, Bluehost is inexpensive and you will spend a bit less on buying web hosting services from them compared to other hosting providers. When it comes to the cost / price factor, i would recommend them every other day. But why mention the offered services in this review that recommends Bluehost for WordPress? I just wanted to give you a glimpse of all the services Bluehost offers so that you choose what is best for you. This makes it easier for you to choose a hosting service considering what you want; If you had plans of starting up an ecommerce website using WordPress then the WooCommerce Hosting plan should work best for you.

What i like about Bluehost

Bluehost has so many great features that i am going to list and explain. I have tested all these features and i believe you will notice them as well when you host your website on Bluehost for any of the plans. By the end of this Bluehost review article, you will have all the confidence and reasons to buy your first hosting package with this hosting company. Back to the point, what do i like about Bluehost?

Free Domain Name: Bluehost will register for you a free domain for the first purchase of their hosting services. If you buy plans that last for three years plus, you won’t have to worry about renewing your domain until the first web hosting contract expires. Always take advantage of this free domain name. You can still claim your free domain name even when you are migrating your website to Bluehost.

Good amount of server resources: Whether you are signing up for the basic shared hosting plan, plus, pro or VPS hosting, Bluehost provides enough server resources for each of the web hosting services. One of my sites once hit 100,000 monthly hits on the basic plan, something that other hosting companies like SiteGround won’t offer you for a basic hosting package. The CPU & Memory Allotments are also just enough for a WordPress website to function properly else in scenarios of too many plugin installations and traffic hike. Bluehost offers absolutely unlimited bandwidth, disk space and email accounts for most of their hosting packages.

Flexibility: Bluehost allows hassle-free upgrades of plans. If you are planning to upgrade from shared hosting to VPS or a dedicated server, Bluehost does it for you automatically implicating the burden of moving your website personally is ruled out. Upgrades happen so easily with Bluehost and won’t keep you worried since your website remains exactly the same as it was on the previous server. Since their Managed WordPress plan is based on VPS technology, the server resources become dynamic as well implicating your resources keep increasing depending on the number of resources your WordPress site needs at the moment to function well.

Uptime: Bluehost has exceptional uptime and i can assure you that my previous uptime test confirmed my website was off for only 3 minutes in a month which is so far outstanding. One of the most common reasons people keep switching between web hosts is uptime. These are one of the facts that cite out inconsistency in your web host but again you can total uptime in a month! Your site will be off for at least some time which could range from seconds to minutes or worse hours. My recent article that cites out how web hosting affects SEO should explain to you more about the relevance / importance of uptime to your WordPress website.

Website Speed: The page load time and server response time for Bluehost is quite impressive especially for the Managed WordPress hosting plan. The same applies to their shared hosting plans as well but unfortunately hardly loads a site below 500ms. Their Managed WordPress hosting plan has the capability to load a site faster than that because it’s based on virtual private servers (VPS Technology).

Account Isolation Technology: Ever asked yourself why WordPress websites often perform well with less inconsistency on Bluehost shared servers? The account isolation technology of Bluhost has the capability to isolate accounts that consume a lot of resources, which ensures the overall performance of the server remains standard and doesn’t decline to affect other customer sites that share the same server.

Built-in CDN: Content delivery networks are key wen it comes to improving your WordPress site performance and the fact that Bluehost is an official CloudFlare partner, your hosting control panel comes pre-installed with CloudFlare. When you configure CloudFlare on your site, all the static resources on your website will load way faster from CloudFlare’s global CDN network which in turn boosts your WordPress site performance.

24/7 Phone Support & Live Chat: Not so many hosting companies offer this. Sometime back one of my clients website on JustHost got suspended because of inaccurate domain information but it took me several hours (close to 12 hours) to wait for a particular department to help us which was kind of not good. Well, Bluehost will support you anytime either through phone or live chat depending on how you choose to contact them. Their live chat system won’t keep you waiting for so long in the cue which is quite good. Please note that the technical supporter for shared plans are variant from the ones for Managed WordPress hosting plans, only WordPress experts are assigned for Managed WordPress hosting plans.

Automatic daily backups: All your website files will be automatically backed up daily and you will always have a fresh copy of your website in case anything goes wrong with the current files on your server. WordPress requires daily backups reason being so many plugins receive regular updates and not every update is going to work just fine with your current WordPress version. Some of them will break your site but if you always have a fresh copy on the server then this shouldn’t worry you.

Brand: What’s more comforting than dealing with an established brand? In fact, one of the best brands in the hosting company? Like mentioned earlier, Bluehost is one of the official WordPress partners and you can totally trust their services when it comes to giving your WordPress site the best performance.

Those are just some of the factors i like about Bluehost. There are a lot more i didn’t mention because of the need to keep this article below 3000 words! Yes, this Bluehost review is quite lengthy because i wanted to put down something descriptive. This article is probably among the most lengthy Bluehost review articles you will find on the internet.