BlueHost Review: A Reliable Host for your WordPress website
BlueHost is a well-established US web hosting company, which is in the business since 1996. The company offers various hosting plans for different needs including shared, vps, dedicated and cloud. There are over two million websites hosted on BlueHost’s servers, having customers from all over the world.
After this quick intro, I would like to talk more about the pros and cons of BlueHost and share our personal experience with this web host. In this BlueHost review will also reveal what we didn’t liked during our tests.
Our Experience with BlueHost
BlueHost is among our favorite web hosting companies. They provide excellent tech support and their service is top as well. However there has been two major outages back in 2013, when many websites, including ours as well, where down for several hours. I have never found out what the issue was, but I really liked the fact that they have been taking care of this problem quickly and have updated clients constantly on their social media accounts.
After the service was restored, Ron LaSalvia the COO of BlueHost has expressed his message to customers: ‘We understand that your sites are your lifeblood, as well as the engine to our economy, and we have committed all company resources, nationwide to a swift resolution and full restoration.’
We have been using BlueHost since 2011, but we have only started monitoring their service in mid-2015. Here is a graph that shows the uptime and response time of the tested website. The data is provided through the UptimeRobot service:
GRAPH
The tested website is hosted on a shared server at BlueHost, and as you can tell from the graph, has a pretty good uptime (99.98%) and a very good average response time (807 ms) (at time of writing).
What we like about BlueHost
Various Affordable Hosting Plans: at BlueHost there is always room to grow. In my opinion for a quickly growing business is important to choose a web hosting that can support your needs in the long run. At BlueHost you can start your website with a shared hosting and upgrade easily to VPS or Dedicated as it gets bigger.
At BlueHost you can also opt for cloud hosting at very affordable rates. They also offer managed WordPress hosting with dedicated support team.
User Friendly Support and Interface: creating and managing your website with BlueHost is easy. For help you can always contact the company’s tech support by phone, email or live chat. They are very helpful and friendly.
BlueHost accounts are managed through cPanel, which is designed for simplicity. From the control panel you can manage your billing, email accounts, websites, scripts, add-on domains basically everything.
Great Commitment to Open Source: BlueHost allows many open source scripts to be installed on their servers including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and many other open source shopping carts as well wiki sites.
BlueHost has been also supporting the WordPress.org project, by sponsoring WordCamps and contributing the core development as well. At the time of writing BlueHost is hosting over 1 million WordPress sites on their server. A significant amount, if we consider that half of the websites hosted by the company is created with this CMS.
There are four different managed WordPress hosting plans available at BlueHost, starting at $24.99 per month. The WordPress optimized plans will provide your site with great speed, higher security and expert dedicated WordPress support. The custom technology and server setup allows them to provide with the best performance to WordPress sites hosted with them.
What we don’t like about BlueHost
Although BlueHost offers 24/7 online support and 30-Day money back guarantee, I was unable to find any information regarding their uptime. As for instance, eHost guarantees 99.9% uptime for shared hosting, BlueHost does not offer such guarantee in their terms of service.
While other hosting companies will do this for free, BlueHost charges $149.99 for website migration service. In my opinion this is a bit overpriced.
Conclusion: is BlueHost right for you?
In my opinion BlueHost is great for any type of website. Whatever you are building your first blog and just starting out, or looking for a reliable host for your growing business website, BlueHost has the solution for you.
BlueHost is constantly upgrading their servers and quality of service, which helped them to stay in the hosting business form more than two decades. We highly recommend BlueHost for both beginners and advanced users.
