BlueHost Review
What is BlueHost? In search of a web host recommended by WordPress? Find out why Bluehost is one of the best WordPress web hosts in our Bluehost review. BlueHost is a powerful hosting platform that mainly dedicates their hosting to WordPress based websites. They were founded in 2003 in Provo, Utah, where their headquarters remain to this day. They currently have over 2 million websites all over the world. Bluehost claim that there’s thousands of new websites added every single day. I figured there must be a reason for this, so I decided to write an unbiased and honest review based on actual experience. With a team of almost one thousand members, BlueHost has a reach for fast customer service times. It’s my job to test their features by purchasing a hosting plan and putting BlueHost to the test! VISIT BLUEHOST.COM (£2.30/MONTH) Check out our step-by-step guide to signing up to BlueHost and getting your first WordPress website live here. Packages & Pricing One of the things that separates BlueHost from other competitors and a lot of other major service providers is that they offer a wide variety of packages. I’ve personally tested all of the functionality on BlueHost and want to let you in on their secrets! There are three different options for shared web hosting on BlueHost. First, you have your basic package which comes with a few restrictions. Basic Package (£2.30/Month): With BlueHost’s basic package you get 1 website, 50 GB website space, 5 parked domains, 25 subdomains, 5 email accounts, and 100 MB storage per email account. If you’re happy to dish out on an extra £2 per month, you’ll be able to enjoy many more features as well as unlimited space and bandwidth. A superb choice for medium to large websites, or even online stores. Plus Package (£4.25/Month): With BlueHost’s plus package you get unlimited websites, space, bandwidth, parked domains, email accounts, and email storage – ideal if you’re looking for a mid-range plan with no limits. You’ll also receive £150 worth of marketing offers and credits for free – a handy little bonus to get your marketing campaign set up! If you liked what you saw with the Plus Package then you’d be silly not to sign up to the Prime Package. Their promotional price drives a hard bargain that is absolutely not to be missed. Prime Package (£4.25/Month) – PROMOTION PRICE: Currently at an absolute bargain, BlueHost’s prime package comes with the same benefits as their plus package, as well as SpamExperts, Domain Privacy, and Site Backup. Perfect for businesses or for those who want a little bit extra. BlueHost Pricing Summary I’d consider BlueHost’s pricing plans to be extremely affordable, especially given that their premium (prime) package is now only £4 per month! To put it into perspective, that’s probably the cost of your lunch, and it’s definitely worthwhile. Unlike most other web host’s, BlueHost have NO hidden fees when signing up, so what you see is what you get. This (to me) is such a relief. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to think you’ve got a bargain, only to find out there’s loads of hidden fees on top. VISIT BLUEHOST.COM (£2.30/MONTH) When you sign up with any of BlueHost’s plans, you’ll receive a free domain for 1 year, which I think is pretty handy, especially if you’re starting your website from scratch. Usability This is one area where BlueHost truly excels in. When it comes to the ease of use for customers, BlueHost has designed easy to understand interfaces for hosting of all levels. Whether it’s the backend billing system or the WHM access, I was thoroughly impressed with how easy it was to find everything. It might take you a little while to get used to where everything is the first few times you access the back end, but it’s very convenient and easy to use. All of BlueHost’s plans come with 1-Click installs, including the usual and popular WordPress, Magento, etc. making it very easy to manage your hosting, domains, websites, and databases all in one place. For beginners or experts, BlueHost’s control panel will glide you through the process without any confusion. For resellers, you’ll get access to a control panel that allows you to transfer domains, register domains and manage all of your clients in one centralized place. We could manage the DNS for all of our clients, set up accounts for new clients or manage accounts for existing clients. Also, for sites that are hacked, BlueHost offers some level of support but they do cost money. Performance & Uptime Performance and uptime statistics are incredibly important when choosing a web host; if you’ve gone to the effort of building or having a website created for you, you want the world to see it right? BlueHost promise blazing speeds, but it’s no good me just taking their word for it – I wanted to check it out for myself (that’s why I’m here). As promised, I signed up to BlueHost using their Basic Package, which included a free domain name and free installation of WordPress. I set up our website and registered with Pingdom in order to monitor our website, hosted with BlueHost, to keep track of our pagespeed, uptime, and performance. Obtaining real time data is the only way to ensure that I can provide you with valid test results, so let’s take a look at the results. Load Time – Unoptimised WordPress site Using our test website, we received a page speed load time of just 1.8 seconds, and a performance grade of B (83/100). Averaging out at 85% faster than most other web hosts, without any plugins or addons to improve page performance. Considering the data we used, we were really impressed with the figures that Pingdom provided to us; being a UK based web review, we wanted to gain tangible data by testing within Europe. Load Time – Optimised WordPress site BlueHost’s WordPress web hosting comes with a selection of useful tools and features. These features can help to optimise any WordPress website, including
