Bluehost Review 2023: Is Bluehost ANY Good? (Including Speed & Performance Tests)

Are you looking for an honest Bluehost review in 2023? Want to know whether Bluehost is worth your money? You’re in the right place.

Bluehost is hands down one of the most popular web hosts trusted by over 2 million users across the globe. I have been using it for more than 10 years on a few of my blogs.

So, in this post, I will be covering everything about Bluehost, including;

• Its performance (speed, uptime, support)
• Hosting features
• Ease of use
• Bluehost pricing 
• Backups
• cPanel Interface
• Benefits, and drawbacks of using Bluehost
• And more…

After going through this review, you will be able to make a wise decision on Bluehost.

Without much ado, let’s dive into the honest review of Bluehost.

Quick Note: You can always save your time by reading the short Bluehost review summary mentioned at the starting of this article.

Honest Bluehost Review: Is It Worth Your Money In 2023?

Bluehost Benefits & Downsides

When my deep study on Bluehost review was done, I left with the amazing benefits Bluehost offers and also with the problems I faced as a Bluehost customer.

Bluehost Pros:

1. Various products available inside Bluehost catalog: Whether you are searching for shared web hosting for your small site or dedicated server hosting for a big complex site, you will get both at an affordable pricing. Plus domain registration & domain transfer can also be done from a single place.

2. Starting with Bluehost is easy & affordable: Just $2.95/month is needed to get the website running.

3. Free Domain name: This is another reason I like Bluehost. Except for the basic plan, you’ll find free domain name benefits attached to all plans.

It helps beginners save an extra $15 and lets them avoid the hassles of DNS configuration.

4. 1-Click WordPress installation: Setting up a WordPress blog and website on Bluehost with a 1-click WordPress installation gives everyone one more reason to go with Bluehost.

5. Free SSL certificate: Web security is something you can not overlook these days and with Bluehost, you will get a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate that can be activated within a single click.

6. Plenty of security measures are available: I found almost all security measures available inside Bluehost work on an automation basis – meaning beginners don’t have to worry about configuration and all.

The list of Bluehost Security Features which safeguard your site 24*7 are:

• Resource Protection
• CodeGuard Automated Backups
• Website Firewall
• 24*7 Malware Scanning
• 24*7 Network Monitoring
• Domain Privacy
• Spam Protection
• Hotlink Protection
• SiteLock

7. Free CDN: Along with a free SSL certificate, you will also get the most popular Cloudflare CDN for free.

8. Free custom Emails: Next, you’re allowed to create a min 5 custom email addresses (@yourdomainname) for free.

9. 24/7 customer support: Sit relax as you are backed by 24/7 expert customer support including live chat and phone support. Vast knowledge base full of articles, guides, how-tos and YouTube Channel is also there for help.

10. Free WordPress migration: It allows you to move your WordPress site from any other web host to Bluehost for free without any worries. I found the Bluehost migration service extremely easy.

11. Industry leading cPanel: Each Bluehost plan is included with the industry’s leading control panel, cPanel which makes managing your website even easier. You will find all essential options like backups, themes, installed plugins, etc at your fingertip.

12. 30 Days Money Back Policy: With Bluehost, you will also get a 30 day money-back guarantee that allows you to try their services risk-free for 30 days.

13. Everything Unlimited: Except for the Bluehost Basic plan, you’re allowed to host unlimited websites with unmetered bandwidth, custom email addresses, and much more.

14. Website Builder: Whether you’re looking forward to starting a personal blog or an online store, Bluehost is certainly a good choice because of its easy drag and drop website builder.

15. Daily Automated Backups: Bluehost has received a lot of complaints about the absence of daily backups. But gladly now it offers a daily automated backup facility through Codeguard in all of its plans except Basic.

Bluehost Cons:

A few downsides of Bluehost that I don’t like:

• Bluehost does not offer automatic backups in the basic plan. (Well, that you can overcome by using any WordPress backup plugins like UpdraftPlus, ValutPress, etc.)
• Bluehost does not offer monthly plans which means you will have to opt for at least a 12 months plan. 
• If you want to migrate 5 or more websites then Migration charges might be applied.
• Renewal costs will bother you the most.
• You might save yourself from Bluehost annoying upselling tricks, but how could you live with the fact that Bluehost doesn’t allow their users to choose the data center manually?

Who is Bluehost For? Final Words on Bluehost

Compiling Bluehost pros and cons, I think beginners should have given a shot to Bluehost. All the required resources with a high performance server are available. The technical hurdles won’t bother them at all as everything (from wordpress installation to backups) is automated here.

Starting with Bluehost is easy, you just need a couple of bucks for onboarding.

For high traffic requirement sites or eCommerce sites, Bluehost top tier performance oriented plans are available. There won’t be any lack of resources. 99.99% uptime ensures smooth web page deliverability across all parts of the world. 

Avoid Bluehost if you are looking to purchase hosting for a year only. Grabbing it for 36 months at once will give you a relief from Bluehost’s most disappointing thing: High renewal cost.

Sharing the Bluehost Performance Test Results

Website Performance directly impacts the SEO of webpages and hence website rankings in SERP. Your site must be loaded at lightning-fast speed for delivering a better user experience. For this, you will need a high-performance web host server.

Do Bluehost servers have a capability? Let’s find out.

Bluehost Speed Test:

To find out what Bluehost has for you in terms of speed, I measured the real-time speed of a blog hosted on Bluehost for over a year now using the top 3 website performance testing tools: GTMetrix, Pingdom, and Google PageSpeed Insights.

Here is the GTMetrix result:

You can see the GTmetrix report which shows 97% overall performance and below 1.0s loading time which is just amazing.

Here is the Pingdom Result:

And finally, Here is the Google PageSpeed Results:

Bluehost Uptime:

Bluehost claims to provide 99.9% uptime. Let’s see how authentic it is.

I have been also tracking the uptime of my blog hosted on Bluehost with the help of the UptimeRobot tool.

Surprisingly, it was 100%.

You can see in the image above, it’s been around 1 and a half months since I started tracking, and there was no downtime recorded.

But this was just a performance proof of one Bluehost hosted site.

What about others? 

I took the help of a real uptime tracker by HRANK, a trusted platform that tracks millions of Bluehost websites every day to bring you objective statistics about every hosting provider.

Here is the Bluehost uptime for the last 30 days, 99.978% which is almost 99.9% as claimed by Bluehost itself.

Verdict on Bluehost Uptime: Bluehost offers exactly 99.9% uptime which everyone demands from their web host.

Bluehost Server Response Time:

Did you know Data Center (Server location) directly impacts the server response time? The closer the server is to your audience’s IP address, the better the website loading speed they will get.

Unlike other web hosting services, Bluehost never disclosed its server location to users. Yes, they won’t allow you to choose it as well during the website configuration process.

So, it’s not possible for me to disclose my Bluehost test site server location. But I can guess my server location is somewhere located in the USA as I purchased my hosting from Bluehost.com

Quick Note: Bluehost offers a free Cloudflare CDN integration which means you don’t have to worry about server location. Cloudflare CDN ensures your visitors will get your webpage delivered from the closest data center possible.

To check server response time, I have used this amazing tool called BitCatcha. This tool basically sends automated traffic to the site from various locations which helps us to determine how well the Bluehost site performed in all scenarios.

Verdict on Bluehost Server Response Time: Bluehost servers are highly optimized and delivered a webpage at a lightning fast speed to all major parts of the world.

Reviewing Bluehost Hosting Types & Pricing Plans

Bluehost offers exciting cheap plans with a lot of freebies included. Let’s explore more…

As of 2023, Bluehost offers a wide range of web hosting services including Shared Hosting, WordPress shared hosting, Managed WordPress Hosting, Dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, and WooCommerce hosting.

Bluehost Hosting Types

Bluehost Pricing Review:

• Bluehost offers 4 Shared plans: Basic, Choice Plus, Online Store and Pro plans
• Basic: This is the entry-level plan by Bluehost that has everything for your first site. For this plan, you will have to spend a minimum of $2.95 per month.
• Choice Plus: This is the most popular plan by Bluehost with added privacy, security features, and a free domain name benefit. The best thing about this plan is that it will cost you the same as the Plus plan i.e $5.45 per month.
• Online Store: This is the recently released plan by Bluehost specially for eCommerce store based sites. You will have to pay $9.95/mo for this plan.
• Pro: This is the most advanced plan by Bluehost best suited by growth seekers. Pro plan will facilitate you with more power with Optimized CPU Resources.But for this plan, you will have to pay $13.95 per month which makes it quite expensive.
• Despite cheaper plans, Bluehost has a bad renewal cost policy and some hidden charges. You can learn all of them from this Bluehost hosting plans post.

Which Bluehost Hosting Plan is more money oriented?

Out of all Bluehost plans, Shared hosting plans are widely picked by users because of the pocket friendliness, high level performance, and freebies included (Free domain, Free CDN, Free SSL).

Quick note: The Performance test I shared in this Bluehost review is conducted on Bluehost shared plans as well. You can always check.

I must say, pick WordPress shared plans because the advantage of WordPress optimization is included in the same pricing and features.

Anyway, these are the shared hosting plans offerings & features:

Verdict on Bluehost Plans & Pricing: I feel, Except for the Pro plan, Bluehost shared hosting plans are value for money and you can choose any plan based on your needs. The only downside I felt is the lack of daily automated backup, free ssl & free domain name features in “Bluehost Basic Plan”. If you are having an eCommerce store, then choosing a “Online Store” plan gives you extra beneficial features such as Store Analytics, eCommerce plugins, etc.

Bluehost Alternatives

How Bluehost Compared with Other Web Hosting Services?

So many web hosting services are available in the market. If you still feel Bluehost is not for you, here are best Bluehost alternatives you can go for;

1. Hostinger

If you’re really tight on budget then you can choose Hostinger which starts from only $1.79 per month. Not just in starting, Hostinger can save your pocket in further years because of low renewal costs compared to Bluehost.

Unlike Bluehost, Hostinger allows you to manually pick a data center of your choice which ultimately is another good reason to go with Hostinger instead of Bluehost. 

Hostinger’s response time is also almost half (686 ms) as compared to Bluehost (1678 ms) which overall made a good impact on website performance and user experience.

We are using Hostinger on one of our side blogs and we genuinely found it very cost-effective.

2. A2 Hosting

If budget is not an issue then you can go for A2 hosting having Turbo Servers featuring up to 20X faster page loads compared to competing web hosting services. The shared plans of A2 are more rich feature wise than Bluehost shared plans. (You can learn more in A2 Hosting separate review post).

Few More Web Hosting Services You Might Wants to Consider:

Other Users Opinion About Bluehost

Want to find out the Bluehost reviews 2023 on major user review platforms? This section is for you.

On Trustpilot;

As you can see above, on Trustpilot, Bluehost got an amazing customer satisfaction rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars from over 7,500 users.

On Capterra;

As you can see above, on Capterra, Bluehost got an excellent rating of 4.2 out of 5 stars.

I have read a lot of Bluehost reviews on the internet, If I have to summarize all of them then this is what I found:

Plus Points:

• Users are highly impressed with the Bluehost performance & security they get at affordable pricing.
• Not a single person feels difficulty in operating the Bluehost cPanel or completing the onboarding process.
• Users are die hard fans of Bluehost customer support. They are literally saying that you can contact Bluehost even in Midnight, they will respond in seconds for sure.

Negative Points:

• Plenty of users have an issue with their confusion about what features or add-ons they should install or not. Bluehost has tons of tools in its marketplace and because of extra charges, users won’t feel motivated to buy them.
• 80% of them are complaining about the absence of manual data center selection options.

FAQs About Bluehost Web Hosting

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