Bluehost: Better Reliability ($3.95/MB)
Bluehost Background Information
Bluehost is currently responsible for hosting over 2 million websites worldwide and is one of the most popular and least expensive shared hosting services available.
Founded in 1996 by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Provo, Utah, it has a staff of 750 employees who work day and night to ensure the highest possible quality of service.
And while the company’s long history and dedicated support staff provide some degree of confidence in their offering, I’ve noticed a serious problem with most Bluehost reviews…
They make glowing recommendations for the service without considering any objective data or metrics (such as loading time and uptime).
But not us…
This review is based on real data and statistics, collected over 3+ years of testing Bluehost’s cheapest “shared” plan.
So what was our experience with Bluehost over the last 37 months?
Let’s dive in and find out…
Advantages of Bluehost
As is the case with all of our web hosting reviews, we are committed to providing you with the most unbiased and transparent information on the web and rely heavily on statistically relevant data and quantifiable metrics to determine the quality of a web host.
These are just some of the “Pros” of using Bluehost services (according to the data).
1. Strong 99.99% uptime (#1)
Since its services underwent a major overhaul, Bluehost has improved its uptime so profoundly that it’s almost perfect (<99.99%).
With only 2 outages in the last 8 months, Bluehost’s phenomenal uptime far exceeds the industry standard of 99.94% and resulted in only 1 hour of downtime out of the 4,380 hours we logged during the period of our review .
Although their uptimes were severely affected in August 2017, Bluehost claims that the issues were due to several DDoS attacks targeting their servers and that the numbers have been increasing since then.
Overall, it’s the best uptime we’ve seen in the last 8 months after monitoring 33+ hosts:
- September 2017 average uptime: 99.98%
- Average uptime for October 2017: 99.86%
- November 2017 average uptime: 100%
- December 2017 average uptime: 100%
- January 2018 average uptime: 99.99%
- February 2018 average uptime: 100%
- March 2018 average uptime: 100%
- April 2018 average uptime: 100%
Simply choosing Bluehost allows eCommerce sites to get a free SSL security certificate, OpenPGP/GPG encryption, and more right out of the box.
6. ‘Official’ WordPress.org Recommended Host
While you should generally take non-data drive hosting recommendations with a grain of salt, when the world’s largest CMS recommends a hosting provider, it’s usually a good idea to listen.
The official WordPress site (WordPress.org) recently redid their hosting page and listed their top 3 favorite hosting providers. Among those included are SiteGround, Dreamhost, and, you guessed it, Bluehost.
With Bluehost’s simple interface, you can access all your websites and email addresses from one place.
Plus, you can customize how you want to design cPanel to fit your specific needs so you can quickly access the features you use the most.
8. 30-day free trial and money-back guarantee
For the commitment-phobic among you, Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, allowing you to try out their services before committing your hard-earned money.
While this guarantee is not as extensive as other competitors, such as Dreamhost, which offers a 97-day money-back guarantee, 30 days is more than enough time to determine whether or not Bluehost is the right provider for you.
However, it is important to note that some terms apply if you want to claim your refund:
Namely…
- The money back guarantee does not apply to add-on products such as domains.
- If you cancel within 30 days but your plan includes a free domain, Bluehost will deduct $15.99 from your total refund amount as a domain fee. The company claims that this is to “cover your costs” while ensuring that your chosen domain name is not lost. It is important to note that newly registered domains cannot be transferred until a 60-day registration period has passed.
Cons of Bluehost
1. Your customer support is fast but could be more knowledgeable
Although Bluehost has seen an astronomical improvement in their customer support response rate in the last few months (in fact, they have a near-perfect internal customer review score), the quality of their customer support still lags behind their peers. contemporaries.
While the customer support team can now handle queries at lightning speed, I found that some of the more technical questions eluded support reps and required multiple queries to resolve.
However, something positive is that his YouTube channel DOES contains tons of helpful video tutorials. So if you don’t mind rolling up your sleeves, you can probably solve 90% of your potential problems by yourself.
2. $3.95/month price only comes with 36-month plan (but $4.95/month is still cheap)
Bluehost is cheap.
single goal as cheap? Well, that depends…
Their super low introductory rate of just $3.95 a month comes with a few strings attached. That is, it requires a three-year commitment.
If you only want 12 months of service, your rate goes up to $4.95 per month.
Personally, I would recommend biting the bullet and accepting their 3-year introductory offer because their basic 12-month renewal price goes up to $8.99 per month.
3. Site migrations are not free…
Most of the hosting providers we’ve reviewed will be happy to help you move an existing site from its current location to your service.
After all, it is a quick procedure for you to change companies and become his loyal customer for years to come.
Unfortunately, Bluehost is not one of those companies.
They charge a $149.99 ‘migration fee’ to do something most provide for free. And them I will not do it transfer more than 5 sites and 20 email accounts.
Speaking of additional fees, a simple 45-minute introductory tour of their services will set you back $79.99.
Again, something most hosting providers are happy to offer for free because you are subscribing to their long-term service.
BlueHost Pricing, Hosting Plans, and Quick Facts
Bluehost offers three shared hosting options to choose from.
However, please note that the price advertised below is a low introductory rate for a period of three years. The rates for shorter plans are more and you can’t get anything shorter than 12 months.
Also, the word ‘unlimited’ does not always mean unlimited (as discussed in the last section).
- Basic plan: For 3.95 a month, you get a website maximum, 50 GB of storage and ‘unlimited’ bandwidth. You also get 5 email accounts (with a maximum storage of 100MB each).
- flatter: $5.45 per month provides ‘unlimited’ websites, storage, bandwidth, email account and email storage and includes 1 domain.
- first plan: Their largest plan normally comes in at $5.45 per month, which provides ‘unlimited’ websites, storage, bandwidth, email account and email storage, includes 1 domain, 1 domain privacy, 1 Spam Experts and Site Backup Pro. (Currently for sale)
You must pay for three years at a time to enjoy the advertised price for their shared hosting plans. It will cost you much more if you choose a shorter term, and the minimum term you can afford is 12 months.
- Free domain? Yes.
- Ease of registration: Easy two-page registration process.
- Payment methods: Major credit cards and PayPal.
- Hidden fees and clauses: Low introductory rate for a minimum of three years (with renewal plans that jump). and that all, we will delete your account if it exceeds 1000 database tables or 3 GB of database in total.
- additional sales: Some upsells… But it’s common in the web hosting industry, so don’t worry about it.
- account activation: Most users enjoy instant activation for most users. If the information is inaccurate or fraud is suspected, activation may be delayed.
- Control panel and dashboard experience: Simple and easy to use control panel.
- Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Mojo Marketplace makes app installation quick and easy!
Do we recommend Bluehost?
Yes.
It is the best in uptime and reliability.
They’re cheap and it’s easy to get started. Hence the reason why Robert Meaning suggests that people start their blogs using Bluehost.
Overall, Bluehost is our TOP 1 host and you shouldn’t go wrong with it.
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