Bluehost Review 2021 | Best Web Hosting Service for 2021
Did you know that Bluehost is home to more than 2 million websites?
That’s a lot.
Having such a vast customer base is enough evidence that they are doing something right. Their uptime is reliable, server speeds are good, and all of their hosting plans pack useful features for beginners and intermediates alike.
Bluehost also has helpful 24/7 live chat and phone support, and you can safely give them a try with their 30-day money-back guarantee.
However, there are a few downsides, too, like higher renewal prices and some restrictions on the cheapest plan.
We base all our reviews solely on real data like uptime, speed, and cost.
So, without further ado, let’s take a closer look at Bluehost and find out if they can provide the high-quality website hosting service that you need.
General Info & Hosting Overview
| Our Rating: | Our Verdict: 5.0 |
| SPEED: | 688 ms (April 2020 to March 2021) |
| UPTIME: | 99.96% (April 2020 to March 2021) |
| SUPPORT: | 24/7 Live Chat, Phone, Email, Knowledge Base |
| APPS: | WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, and More Than 75+ Open Source Projects |
| FEATURES: | Unmetered bandwidth, Unlimited Websites and Storage, Free Domain 1st Year, Free SSL Certificate and CDN, Spam Experts, Domain Privacy, 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee, WordPress 1-Click Install |
| HOSTING PLANS: | Shared, WordPress, VPS, Reseller, and Dedicated Servers |
| SITE TRANSFER: | Single WordPress Site for Free |
| PRICING: | Starting at $2.75/mo (renews at $8.99/mo) |
Pros of Using Bluehost Hosting
Bluehost has been around since 2003, so they have plenty of experience to know what makes a hosting service excellent.
Their introductory prices are affordable, customer support is easy to reach and helpful, and you get many useful features to go with your hosting plan. In addition, they provide reliable uptime and fast server speeds.
Let’s take a more detailed look at Bluehost’s strong points.
1. Great Uptime Through 12-Months (99.96%)
Uptime is one of the most critical aspects when choosing a web host – after all, if your site is down, your users can’t access it. So, consistent uptime should be one of your top priorities when looking at hosting services.
After reviewing over 40 web hosts, our benchmark for “good” uptime is 99.93%. So ideally, we don’t want to see anything less than that.
The good news is that Bluehost easily surpasses this benchmark, comfortably keeping our test site live for 99.96% of the time during the last 12 months (April 2020 to March 2021). The total downtime was a bit less than four hours for the whole year.
Here’s the breakdown of Bluehost’s average uptime in the past 12 months:
- March 2021: 100%
- February 2021: 99.97%
- January 2021: 100%
- December 2020: 99.98%
- November 2020: 100%
- October 2020: 99.67%
- September 2020: 100%
- August 2020: 99.99%
- July 2020: 99.98%
- June 2020: 100%
- May 2020: 99.90% (scheduled maintenance)
- April 2020: 99.99%
2. Fast Page Loading Speed (688 ms)
Research conducted by Google found:
“As page load time goes from 1s to 3s the probability of bounce increases 32%.”
This translates to your visitors being 32% more likely to leave your site. And it only gets worse with longer page load times.
Furthermore, Google is more geared towards mobile-first indexing. This means that your site also needs to be optimized for mobile users, or otherwise, you’re losing traffic.
Either way, a slow website almost always means less traffic and, therefore, lower sales numbers. So right after uptime, page loading time is the second most important thing that can make or break your website’s success.
Our test site with Bluehost has offered an average load speed of 688 ms over the past year. While it isn’t competing for the top positions, it isn’t bad either.
3. Low Introductory Pricing ($2.75/mo)
Bluehost’s default pricing starts at $3.95/month, which is an introductory price from the regular $8.99/month rate.
However, the good news is that we’ve been able to work out a deal with Bluehost for our readers that takes the starting price down even further to $2.75/month.
For this price, you get pretty much everything you need for a single website. That includes 50 GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, and more. So you’d be getting a pretty good value for the price, plus their consistent uptime and page loading speeds.
Still, the cheapest plan does have a few restrictions that we’re not entirely happy with – but more about this later on.
4. Packed with Security Options and Features
Since Bluehost is one of the “cheapest” options on the market, we are pleased to see that they don’t cut too many corners on critical security options and features.
Already with the cheapest plan, Bluehost provides your site with a free SSL certificate. You also get access to great features like a free CDN (Cloudflare), a one-click WordPress install, multiple CMS integrations, and additional eCommerce plugins.
Higher-tier plans come with the Spam Experts add-on, domain privacy protection, and server backups. Also, you get more advanced security features such as SiteLock, which helps prevent malware attacks.
Codeguard is another form of protection, which provides daily backups so you can roll back previous versions of a site, should it get hacked.
Postini, from Google, is the final security tool worth noting. It provides spam protection for your email, so anything suspicious is prevented from getting into your inbox.
5. Easy to Use for Beginners
Some of the web hosts we’ve seen can be considered the best only if you’re an advanced user. But, Bluehost is great for beginners, too.
Their customer portal is intuitive and clean (although, we have experienced it is a bit slow at times). And the layout of the cPanel control panel makes Bluehost even easier to use. Beginners can easily install and start WordPress through cPanel. All you need to do is a point and click in most cases.
If you don’t want to use WordPress, you can also begin creating a website with a website builder tool (such as Weebly or Drupal). You can then customize a template by just dragging and dropping elements on your page.
Bluehost also has features for advanced users who want to use their code to create their site.
6. 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee with all of their hosting plans.
You can try out the service to see their performance for yourself and ask for a refund if you’re not completely satisfied. We have a few words of caution, though.
According to Bluehost’s terms, here’s what does and doesn’t fall under that guarantee:
- You can only get refunds on the web hosting cost, not any other products like domains or other add-ons.
- Bluehost would deduct $15.99 if you received a free domain name in your plan.
- Bluehost does not refund any requests after 30 days.
It’s not precisely a no-questions-asked policy like we’ve seen from some hosts. So make sure you agree with these points before signing up.
7. 24/7 Customer Support
Bluehost provides 24/7 customer support over live chat, phone, and an email ticketing system. On top of that, they have a vast knowledge base packed with answers to frequent questions and useful information.
We went ahead and tested their live chat option, and the experience was pleasant.
We got answers to our questions quickly, and the representative was knowledgeable. Sure, some responses felt copy-pasted, but the follow-up questions prompted improvised and helpful answers.
8. One Free WordPress Site Transfer
If you already have a site and want to switch to Bluehost’s hosting plan, then this perk is for you.
Bluehost only recently started offering a free site transfer with all of their plans.
There are a couple of terms to this free service, though. First, the site needs to be a WordPress site. And secondly, you have to request the migration within the first 30 days after signing up with a hosting plan.
All you need to do is contact their customer support team and follow their directions. The migration usually takes around 1-3 business days to complete.
If you don’t have a WordPress website or have more than one then it costs $149.99. This gets you up to 5 website migrations and 20 email account migrations.
9. The Official WordPress.org Recommended Host
WordPress is the most widely used website platform on the market – ~44% of the entire Internet is built with WordPress.
It’s safe to say that they have an authoritative word when it comes to hosting solutions. WordPress only officially recommends three hosting partners to use with a WordPress site:
- Bluehost
- DreamHost
- SiteGround
Of course, you can use almost any web hosting provider to create a WordPress site. But the fact that Bluehost is one of the few officially recognized partners is encouraging.
Cons of Using Bluehost Hosting
Bluehost has some great perks going for their hosting service, but there are a couple of hiccups too.
Even though we’re happy to see such low introductory prices, the renewal rates can get a bit steep.
Let’s take a closer look at these downsides.
1. Higher Renewal Rates
The best way to get the lowest possible price for hosting is to prepay for one, two, or even three years upfront. The average monthly price decreases, but you’re also committing hundreds of dollars in advance.
Rest assured, you can use the 30-day money-back guarantee to get a refund if you don’t like their service. However, once the initial plan duration is over, you can expect a steep rise in the rates.
Let’s say you commit to the cheapest plan for three years, which is $2.75/month. After the initial period, the next period’s renewal price starts at $8.99/month with a three-year commitment.
In this case, the subsequent period is three times more expensive than the first.
2. Cheapest Plan Restrictions
Bluehost’s cheapest shared hosting plan comes with some heavy restrictions.
You can only have a single website, the storage space is limited and the only security feature you get is a free SSL certificate. So, if you have multiple sites or want more security, you have to go for at least the next pricing tier, which is twice as expensive.
Sadly, such restrictions on the cheapest plan are quite common in the web hosting industry. The companies compete over who can lure the customers in with the lowest price, only to upsell a decent hosting service at a higher price.
Bluehost Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts
Here’s what Bluehost’s shared hosting pricing plans look like:
| Basic Plan | Plus Plan | Choice Plus Plan | Pro Plan | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $2.75/month Renews at $8.99/mo | $5.45/month Renews at $11.99/mo | $5.45/month Renews at $16.99/mo | $13.95/month Renews at $26.99/mo |
| Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Storage | 50 GB | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Email Accounts | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Other Features | – | • Spam Experts | • Spam Experts • Domain Privacy & Protection • Codeguard Basic | • 2 Spam Experts • Domain Privacy & Protection • Codeguard Basic • Dedicated IP |
Quick Facts
- Money-Back: 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Website Migration: Free transfer for 1 WordPress website. Other migrations are $149.99 for up to 5 websites and 20 email accounts.
- Free domain? Yes, for the first year. Then renews at $15.99 per year.
- Ease of Sign-up: Easy and guided sign-up process.
- Payment Methods: Major credit cards and PayPal.
- Hidden Fees and Clauses: No refund on domain names. Renewal rates for both domains and hosting are much higher than the introductory rates.
- Upsells: Some upsells during sign-up, but nothing too aggressive.
- Account Activation: Instant activation in most cases. If the information is inaccurate or there’s suspicion of fraud, activation might get delayed.
- Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: Easy-to-use cPanel
- Installation of Apps and CMS (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Mojo Marketplace makes app installation quick and easy.
Do We Recommend Bluehost?
Yes, we do.
Bluehost has performed slightly better in the past, but they still provide a reliable service with decent server speeds.
Also, they offer strong security options, a great money-back guarantee, plenty of user-friendly apps, and multiple tiers of hosting packages suitable for different customers. The pricing starts at $2.75/month with our special discount.
Still, Bluehost isn’t perfect, though. The hosting plans’ renewal rates will increase dramatically after the initial signup period, and the cheapest plan has some critical restrictions compared to the next tiers.
But overall, Bluehost delivers decent performance and good value for your money.
Have you used Bluehost before? Please consider leaving a review below — good or bad — doesn’t really matter as long it’s helpful to our visitors.
AMIT T
My review
Well I think Bluehost is far better than Hostinger and others because their after sale service is fantastic. I used GoDaddy earlier which ate up all my data for a year. My website was destroyed. This time I got it with bluehost and my service is very nice :).
Jennifer
Difficult to work with
I had Bluehost help me build my business website. They seem to have a hard time holding onto employees, as I went through 3 designers. The first 2 designers left the company in the middle of my project, no one contacted me to arrange for a new designer and I had to call both times to get my project started again. It took way longer than they said it would to complete my website, mostly due to having to work with three different designers. After two years I realized that there was a part of my website that was written into the code and I was unable to edit it. I called and they tried to charge me to make the changes when our original agreement was that my website would be completely editable. They eventually made this part editable but messed up another part of the Homepage in the process. I called, and again they tried to charge me to fix their mistake. Both calls took over an hour each just to get to someone who could actually help me. I eventually gave up and spent 4 hours figuring out what they had done and fixed it myself. I am not happy with their customer service and would not recommend them.
Elise
THE WORST
Have been a customer for 15 years but recent server issues with Bluehost has left our company website SO SLOW for the past month that it is barely usable as a website. Now it has become worse with our website not coming up AT ALL. To top it off, Bluehost is the WORST customer service recently — we’ve wasted HOURS for WEEKS just trying them to get the issue fixed– it took WEEKS to even get your “customer service” to admit there even was a problem on their end. THERE IS. Google it and you will see SO MANY PEOPLE with the exact same issue for the past couple months. So why do we have to sit on the phone with “customer service” telling us the same robot script over and over instead of taking responsibility for the bad product and FIXING IT?? We might never get our SEO ranking back after this, it has cost us money & business, and there is no established plan of action from Bluehost. Like its bordering on fraud– we pay for a server that functions and it doesn’t, but we still have to pay?
Kerri
Absolute disaster
I don’t even know where to begin with Bluehost. This tool is an absolute disgrace. I am not exaggerating that every single time I have used this site, there has been some technical error. I am in constant contact with support and at this point I probably know everyone on that team. If you are curious about what technical issues this site has, name one and its there. For example, there are multiple times that my site wasn’t even listed. Support had to back up my account about 3 times. The add-ons wouldn’t function. The website would often be an error page. I could go on…
And I had only had my account for about 25 days.:)
So pay a little more for an actual working website.
Nathan R
Bad Uptime, Worse Customer Service
Bluehost is absolute garbage. Our website gets a 404 error 95% of the time when you visit, and their customer support has been completely useless in getting that fixed. They pretty clearly overload their shared hosting platforms with way too many sites to save money.
Fred
Money stealing machine
Check every time how much money they take on your credit card because they have a bad habit of taking more than you owe them. In addition, they will continue to take money from your card even after you stop hosting your site with them. It is therefore necessary to delete the payment information. They did this to all of my clients.
Nathan S
Fine as long as you never have to talk to them.
More than a dozen requests later, they still can’t fix the registrant on my domain.
I have never experienced people who go so far out of their way to avoid actually accomplishing any work. It’s amazing.
Sandy M
BlueHost Has Failed with WordPress
nakul v
service deteriorating
Been a Bluehost client for over 10 years. Every year for the last 4 years they have more issues with service than the year before. Customer service was prompt earlier, pro-active to solve issues for you; now it’s more about buying this service or buying that. Constant issues with their new website panel which never shows your sites; and security sucks compared to earlier. Bluehost was the best place to host wordpress, It promised a great experience, it was 4 years ago. Malware is becoming a major concern, my sites have been infected and bluehost won’t cooperate to help reinstate with clean backups even though they have them. it’s been 4 days and my sights are still down! Trying to get me to spend $300 dollars per domain to buy sitelock.
Alfie D
My experience with Bluehost so far
I’ve been hosting my two small business websites with Bluehost for over two years now. During this time I’ve had very few issues from the hosting side. Pages have always been up and haven’t had any complaints from my customers about the websites being slow. Don’t have much experience with their support, but the few simple questions I have had have always been answered under 15 minutes.
I use their Choice plus plan.
Ryan
My bluehost experience
Our company has used Bluehost for several years, and they have been nothing but frustrating. If we didn’t have so many websites and emails hosted with them, we would leave in a blink. Our websites are constantly down, but they tell us it’s because we have too much traffic on our sites. We don’t. The most traffic anyone of our sites gets in a month is maybe 15,000 visits. We have our SSL set to auto renew, but they never auto-renew. Our sites just go down. And when we ask them why, or ask them to fix it, they just send us a link and tell us to fix it. They really are a horrible hosting company. I don’t know why they come as recommended by WordPress (which is why we went with them), but they definitely are not recommended by this long time customer. We are trying to switch hosts asap.
Response received from Marissa, Bluehost (Responded Oct, 2020):
Hello Ryan,
I apologize for such a late response. I also want to apologize for the frustration you have been dealing with in trying to get these issues resolved. I would be more than happy to look into the traffic to the site and the auto SSL problems you have been running into, as well as anything else I can be of help with. Please feel free to reach out to me via socialsupport@bluehost.com and I can take a look. I look forward to hearing from you, thank you!
Marissa
Community Manager Bluehost
Le H
Good Service
I was totally inexperienced in making a website, and although I was able to do the content after a lot of trial and error myself, there were 2 occasions when I had to ask Bluehost for help. The first was getting my site active, which I was unable to do myself. The man who helped me worked 45 minutes to get the website active and also to get my SSL working. The second time was when someone had hacked into my website and taken it over. Bluehost got rid of the parasite in under an hour. I’ll stick with them.
Neal
Epic Fail
I have been a long time user of Godaddy, have certainly had my fair share of problems with them! My last 3 new clients all had/wanted bluehost. I have heard “Bluehost is the best hosting for wordpress sites”. I have experienced nothing but problems with all three bluehost accounts. One account… was throttled because of excessive cpu usage, yet you can’t view or watch your usage in the cPanel, they removed it! Last issue was today. New account, new hosting plan. 1)WP install did not match the PHP version on the hosting plan. 2) wp dashboard links took 20-40 secs to load followed by connection closed errors. Complete uninstall and restall of wp same issues. spent 2 hour on chat only to end in tickets being made and told that it can take 42-72 hours to hear a response. Brand new account, no plugins installed, no images uploaded, not a single page created… and yet WP Dashboard won’t work correctly. Sure I have problems with Godaddy, and frankly would not refer anyone to them…and sure the hell won’t be referring anyone to bluehost.
Response received from Marissa, Bluehost (Responded June, 2020):
Hi Neal,
I am very sorry to hear this has been your experience with Bluehost so far. If you wouldn't mind emailing into socialsupport@bluehost.com I would be more than happy to take a look into this for you and get it resolved as quickly as possible. Thank you!
Marissa
Community Manager Bluehost
James P
Got locked out my account
Having used Bluehost, I came to learn a year later that my account was intercepted and hacked, and Bluehost refused to give me access back to my bank account. They wanted proof that I couldn’t possibly provide to confirm I owned the account.
Since then, I set up my own reseller hosting company and haven’t had a problem since. I guess the issue with Bluehost is that they’re very hard to get support from when you genuinely need help.
I don’t have anything negative to say about Bluehost besides that, and I did manage to backup my website in the end and host it elsewhere; but the stress cause and the way the issue was dealt with didn’t impress me.
Cesar
Way too many bugs
I am a new client been with them for 3 weeks now, so far here are my findings:
MY SITE the dashboard feature that lets you manage your websites. Rarely works it is down 80% of the time.
SSL: You can simply create or migrate your site and add SSL yourself like most other hosting companies. I.E. Godaddy. You have to contact support, and their chat support is a hit and miss. 50% of the time they know how to help you. the other 50% they are clueless.
CHAT SUPPORT: Is a job. They are incapable of reading the client message before asking questions. They are not well trained and, for the most part clueless.
I would not in good faith recommend them. They are a work in progress.
Response received from Marissa, Bluehost (Responded May, 2020):
Hi Cesar,
We are sad to hear you are having issues with our support. If you would like to send an email to socialsupport@bluehost.com with the domain name we would be more than happy to take a look into this for you. If you have any more questions please feel free to reach out, thank you!
Marissa
Community Manager at Bluehost
adnan a
Great for small and medium sites
I worked for many years with hosting a BlueHost, I did not find better ones than the price and speed of the servers, although they are joint hosting, but unfortunately they do not have servers outside the United States and many services such as encrypting the SSL site are not available free of charge for countries like Iraq. I do not know why.
Karen
Great Hosting Site
Great hosting site with excellent prices. I have been using Bluehost for approximately 2 years now and have had a great experience with using WordPress and associated plugins and themes. I am building three websites and if I have had any questions, they have been there to help and resolve the issue. You are always made aware of updates to plugins and they notify you of new and upcoming changes before they happen. I have been very pleased with all aspects of their hosting services.
Hari S
Excellent Uptime
I am using the Choice plus plan of Bluehost shared hosting since Aug 2018. My website never went down so far.
Moreover, pricing is cheap. One drawback is that website speed is not fast. But I can understand that shared hosting has its limitations. Overall, I am happy with this web host.
Carter
Disappointing
Bluehost has been very disappointing. I used them as my first hosting provider and was very disappointed. First off, the TTFB time (time until the server responds) averages between 0.8 and 1.2 seconds. This is too long compared to other hosting options. I have had issues with their DNS and other simple account features. The UI is almost too simple. It makes it hard sometimes to find a specific thing. On the upside, I have reached out to Bluehost support and they have always been friendly and helpful. So if it wasn’t for their support, this review would be one star.
Robert H
Good website performance
I have had my website with Bluehost for about seven months now and had only minimal problems so far. When I tried to use my free SSL certificate, there was a problem so I couldn’t use it. So, I used the live chat to contact the support, who was able to solve the problem in a few minutes. After that, everything went smoothly for a few months.
After I published more and more content on my website, I was still able to easily achieve a loading time of about 1-2 seconds with the standard performance.
However, I had minor failures this and last month so that I could not reach my website, and I could not log into my WordPress account either. But that only lasted for a few minutes. That being said, I’m happy with Bluehost and its performance, so I don’t want to switch to another hosting provider until now.
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