Bluehost Review 2023: Is Bluehost ANY Good? [Including Speed & Performance Tests]

Bluehost Web Hosting
bluehost review

Name: Bluehost

Offer price: 2.95

Currency: USD

Operating System: Any

Application Category: Web Hosting

4.5

Summary

Bluehost has a reputation, especially in WordPress hosting services. Just like 2 million users, I found Bluehost web hosting service fast and effective in delivering performance. The test site I used recorded 99.99% uptime for a span of 30 days. The customer support agents are highly trained here and attentive, usually replying in seconds.

Bluehost comes with a free domain name, daily automated backups, easy to use cPanel, free migration, and 30 days money refund policy. 

Pricing is reasonable too. Small blogs and Business sites can be hosted on Bluehost for just $2.95. I found the Bluehost Choice plus plan more valuable in terms of money & features. The basic plan is not worth it, as it does not offer a daily automated backup facility.

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.
bluehost review 2023

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

Bluehost Overview (Features)Details
PricingStarts from $2.95/mo
Free PerksFree Domain Name, Free CDN, Free SSL, Free Manual Backups
Uptime99.974% (Last 30 Days)
Speed Score97 (Desktop), 82 (Mobile)
Refund Policy30 Days
Payment MethodsAll International Debit & Credit Cards, PayPal UPI
MigrationFree for single WordPress website
BandwidthUnmetered
Customer SupportLive chat, Telephone 24*7, Ticket Email System, Knowledge Base
Backups & RestorationDaily automated backups & 1 click restoration via codeguard
Hosting PlansShared, WordPress, Managed WordPress, VPS, Dedicated, WooCommerce
cPanelIncluded
Domain RegistrationPossible
TrustPilot Ratings4.2/5

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. It does not matter which Bluehost plan you choose, you will get a free domain name (including .com) for a year.

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.

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.

bluehost cPanel

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.

bluehost-cloudflare-cdn

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.

bluehost-live-chat-support
Bluehost agents gave me an immediate response within a second.

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.

bluehost migration service
Contact the Bluehost migration team either via phone at 888-401-4678 or through live chat.

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.

bluehost cPanel

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:

bluehost gtmetrix performance

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:

bluehost pingdom performance

And finally, Here is the Google PageSpeed Results:

bluehost google page insights desktop

Bluehost Review 2023: Is Bluehost ANY Good? [Including Speed & Performance Tests]

Verdict on Bluehost Speed: I never expected good performance results from low end hosting plans. But this is not the case with Bluehost. My site was hosted on the Bluehost most basic plan without a caching plugin installed and surprisingly it passed all the tests and cleared the core web vital metrics as well

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%.

bluehost uptime robot

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.

bluehost uptime last 30 days
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.

bluehost server response time
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 Hosting TypesWho Should Prefer & WhenPricing
SharedBluehost shared plans should be considered when budget is a problem and you are happy to share server resources among multiple sites. Perfect for small business sites, blogs, etc.Starts from $2.95/mo
WordPress SharedSuitable to WordPress users. Here, WordPress will be pre-installed and rest things will be the same as you see in shared plans.Starts from $2.95/mo
Managed WordPressThe advantage of being “Managed” is included in WordPress plans. Highly optimized & performance oriented plans where the WordPress backend related optimization is done by the Bluehost engineers.Starts from $19.95/mo
VPS Web HostingGood platform to host web applications. Dedicated CPU resources & root access is given.Starts from $19.99/mo
Dedicated Server HostingPick these Bluehost plans when monthly traffic exceeds 100k and high performance is the priority. One website would be allotted a whole server resource.Starts from $79.99/mo
WooCommerce HostingWooCommerce is included by default and other essential features for eCommerce sites will be given. Hence 100% suitable for WordPress eCommerce sites.Starts from $9.95/mo
Quick note: Save big on Bluehost by redeeming the latest Bluehost Coupon Code.

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 and security features. 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:

FeaturesBasic PlanChoice Plus Plan Online StorePro Plan
PricingCosts $2.95/moCosts $5.45/moCosts $9.95/moCosts $13.95/mo
Websites 1 SiteUnlimited SitesUnlimited SitesUnlimited Sites
Website Space10 GBUnmeteredUnmeteredUnmetered
BandwidthUnmeteredUnmeteredUnmeteredUnmetered
Domain PrivacyNot includedNot includedIncludedIncluded
Free SSLIncludedIncludedIncludedIncluded
Free Daily BackupsNot includedIncludedIncludedIncluded
Store Analytics & eCommerce pluginsNot includedNot includedIncludedNot included
Dedicated IP & Optimized ResourcesNot includedNot includedNot includedIncluded
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 feature 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;

bluehost reviews trustpilot

As you can see above, on Trustpilot, Bluehost got an amazing customer satisfaction rating of 4.2 out of 5 stars from over 4300 users.

On Capterra;

bluehost reviews 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

Is Bluehost good?

Yes, if we consider Bluehost features, speed, uptime, and support for the price of just $2.95/mo, Bluehost does its job perfectly.

Is Bluehost easy to use?

Absolutely! Automatic WordPress installation, 1-click SSL, CDN activation, and easy custom email creation, all these features make Bluehost an extremely easy-to-use web host for everyone.

What are the Bluehost hosting plans?

There are four plans for shared hosting, Basic, Choice Plus, Online Store and Pro that will cost you $2.95/mo, $5.45/mo, $9.95/mo, and $13.95/mo respectively.

Which Bluehost plan is best for beginners?

For those who want to start with 1 website, the Basic plan is sufficient for them. But if you are looking forward to hosting multiple websites, go for the Choice Plus plan.

Bluehost vs Hostgator which is good?

Bluehost and Hostgator are part of the same Endurance International Group group and offer similar features. But pricing wise, Hostgator plans are cheaper as compared to the Bluehost.

Which is better Bluehost or GoDaddy?

GoDaddy is a renowned name in the domain registrars but if we talk in terms of web hosting services and performance, Bluehost is way better than GoDaddy.

Bluehost vs Dreamhost?

Both Bluehost and Dreamhost are officially recommended by WordPress.org. Still, I highly recommend Bluehost over Dreamhost, trusted by 2 million users. 

Is the Bluehost domain free?

Yes, you will get a free domain for one year with every plan you choose at Bluehost.

Is WordPress free with Bluehost?

Yes, Bluehost is known for WordPress hosting. With Bluehost, 1-click WordPress installation is available for free.

Can I pay Bluehost monthly?

No, you will have to subscribe for at least a 12 months plan.

Is Bluehost worth the price?

Yes, Bluehost is worth every penny as you can get their hosting for as low as $35 a year where you’ll get excellent hosting features like free domain, SSL certificates, unlimited emails, and more.

Is GoDaddy better or Bluehost?

When it comes to web hosting, Bluehost is way better than GoDaddy. GoDaddy often has uptime issues with their hosting servers whereas Bluehost has an incredible 99.9% uptime.

What are the pros and cons of using Bluehost?

The pros of using Bluehost include: extremely cheap hosting plans starting at just $2.95/month, free domain, SSD storage, free custom themes, 24/7 support, and more.

The cons of Bluehost are: limited storage space and you need to pay extra for a few add-ons such as backups, website migration, etc.

We get a commission when you buy a product via our affiliate link at no additional cost.

About Author
Anil Agarwal is the Founder of Bloggerspassion. He is a full-time blogger and SEO expert who has been helping people build profitable blogs for over a decade Now. He has been featured in Over 100 Publications including Forbes, The HuffPost, HubSpot, Shopify, Semrush, Kinsta, Bluehost, Hostinger and G2.com etc. Know more about Anil Agarwal from here.

Reader Comments (6)

  1. Bluehost is one of the most reliable & best web hosting in the industry, It is officially recommended by WordPress, Thanks for this awesome unbiased review.

    Reply
  2. Thanks for providing this review because I am finding the best hosting platform and now I am trying to host my website on Bluehost.

    Reply
  3. Hello, I was in sort of dilemma regarding Bluehost services. By writing this article you have cleared all the questions regarding Bluehost. Your review is totally beneficial for me in all the possible way.

    Reply
  4. Hi Anil sir,
    Great article. Can you make a comparison between Bluehost and Hostinger. I know Hostinger is cheap compare to Bluehost, but What is the value for money? And thanks for a good review on the Bluehost. I would love to read more article in future also.

    Reply
  5. Bluehost is one of the most reliable & best web hosting in the industry, It is officially recommended by WordPress, Thanks for this awesome unbiased review.
    Lots of Love
    Ayush Mishra

    Reply
  6. hello
    thankyou for this review’.
    I was planning to buy bluehost subscription . This post was very useful and helpful

    Reply

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

bluehost offer
35 Shares