Bluehost Review

Is This Web Hosting Company Worth Signing Up For?

Brad Smith  —  · Read user reviews

Bluehost 2020 review

Did you know that Bluehost is home to more than 2 million websites?

That’s many.

Having such a vast customer base is enough evidence that they are doing something right. Their uptime is reliable, server speeds are good, and their hosting plans pack useful features for beginners and veterans 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.

But before we move on to the review, we have great news to share:

Typically, shared hosting plans offered by Bluehost start at $3.95/month. But we arranged a special deal for our readers and got the price down to $2.75/month. So, if by the end of this review you want to sign up with them, then feel free to enjoy this offer. However, rest assured this deal doesn’t make us biased towards Bluehost. We still 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

SPEED: 581 ms (Last 12 months, updated October 2020)
UPTIME: 99.98% (Last 12 months, updated October 2020)
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, Spam Experts*, Domain Privacy*, 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
*Not included in the cheapest plan
HOSTING PLANS: Shared, WordPress, VPS, Reseller, and Dedicated Servers
SITE TRANSFER: Single WordPress Site for Free
PRICING: Starting at $2.75/mo (renews at $7.99/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 Throughout the Year (99.98%)

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 30 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 99.98% of the time during the last 12 months (November 2019 – October 2020). The total downtime was just an hour for the whole year.

Here’s the breakdown of Bluehost’s average uptime in the past 12 months:

  • October 2020: 99.97%
  • September 2020: 100%
  • August 2020: 99.99%
  • July 2020: 99.98%
  • June 2020: 100%
  • May 2020: 99.90% (scheduled maintenance)
  • April 2020: 99.99%
  • March 2020: 99.98%
  • February 2020: 100%
  • January 2020: 100%
  • December 2019: 100%
  • November 2019: 100%
Bluehost 2019-2020 performance statistics
Live test site: hostingfacts-bluerock-bluehost.com | Avg. uptime and speed: 36-months+

2. Fast Page Loading Speed (581 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 581 ms over the past year. While it isn’t competing for the top positions, it isn’t bad either.

Bluehost’s average uptime and load time statistics:

Bluehost detailed performance statistics 2019-2020
Bluehost average load speed 2019-2020 | See stats

3. Low Introductory Pricing ($2.75/mo)

Bluehost’s default pricing starts at $3.95/month, which is an introductory price from the regular $7.99/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.

They are the best cheap host we have seen since we started writing reviews at HostingFacts.

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.

Bluehost customer portal example

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 being 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 point and click in most cases.

bluehost cpanel

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. Even though there was a warning that the queue was longer than usual, we got through to an agent in less than five minutes.

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.

Bluehost Customer Support live chat example

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.

Bluehost single free site transfer terms

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 – ~47% 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:

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.

Bluehost official recommendation by WordPress.org

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.

Bluehost shared hosting pricing based on the term example

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 $7.99/month with a three-year commitment.

renewal prices for shared hosting plans

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 $7.99/mo		 $5.45/month
Renews at $10.99/mo		 $5.45/month
Renews at $14.99/mo		 $13.95/month
Renews at $23.99/mo
Websites 1 Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited
Bandwidth Unmetered Unmetered Unmetered Unmetered
Storage 50GB 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 HostingFacts deal.

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.

Visit www.Bluehost.com

P.S. 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. Thanks for your support.

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89 user reviews for Bluehost

Nathan S

1 — 

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

1 — 

BlueHost Has Failed with Wordpress

I have set up many Wordpress websites using other host providers but this was the first time using the BlueHost Wordpress platform. It has been a problem from the beginning. Over the past 5 months since setting the site up for a friend, we have had constant database connection errors, problems accessing the wordpress backend dashboard, the site being down, etc. I have regularly called BlueHost regarding the ongoing problems but always seem to get the runaround. The last straw was today when I tried to make a Black Friday update notification on our home page and the page would not load at all. I tried other pages too and all gave me errors. Called BlueHost and they said it was a plug in conflict. After hanging up with no resolution, I started making plans to move my site. I checked the BlueHost site about an hour later and low and behold I could access the page. The problems have nothing to do with plug in conflicts but BlueHost's backend system. Sites don't just stop working suddenly and then start working with plug in conflicts. Very disappointed.

nakul v

5 — 

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

5 — 

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

1 — 

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 [email protected] and I can take a look. I look forward to hearing from you, thank you!

Marissa
Community Manager Bluehost

Le H

5 — 

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

1 — 

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 [email protected] 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

3 — 

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

2 — 

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 [email protected] 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

3 — 

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

5 — 

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

5 — 

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

3 — 

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

4 — 

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.

Julia

5 — 

Easy to use

I've had my blog and store for years but know very little about the technical side of how to set it all up and so on, but I was in need to change web hosts(ughh that previous host still gives me anxiety) and a couple of friends recommended Bluehost. So I signed up and was so surprised about the ease of use. Almost everything is done for you automatically and the things that you need to change have tutorials or support helped me out in no time at all. I have been with them for two months now and couldn't be happier!

Bradley R

2 — 

Shady webhosting practices

My site has been under daily attack from every port scanner around the world. When I first reached out to bluehost they tried to refer me to a sitesecure monthly service. Maybe this is common among all hosting platforms. But, to me it seems shady. I refuse to pay an additional monthly service. They should secure their customers host account. So I took matters into my own hands and learned about .htacess. My .htacess is now the size of a novella, but it feels like I'm just plugging holes.

Enrique s

2 — 

2018 the year bluehost went down the drain

Ever since bluehost stopped providing the free comodo ssl certificate, I've been experiencing constant issues with expired certificates, but the real downer is the customer support has been awful, I have to contact their support 3 or 5 times everytime this issue presents itself. And after almost a year of having this same issue every two or three months i still do not have a long lasting solution and it seems that every day their customer support gets worse.

E H

2 — 

Luck of the Draw

After nine years working with Bluehost, it's hard to completely throw them under the bus, except for their Tier 1 "Tech Support" which seems more like an ABM tool than an actual help by design. However, every now and then, about 15% of the time; I get a smart fella on the phone who is capable of understanding my needs. BlueHost have gone downhill by trying to compete with WIX, et al. - I won't be staying.

Philip

1 — 

Won't acknowledge downtime

UptimeRobot indicated my site went down six times in a few hours. I contacted Bluehost support and their response was that

"Since it is the third party tool which is showing the server logs , we will not be able to completely relay on that, even if website loads slow it would monitor and consider the website is down for few mins."

I explained that tools like Uptime Monitor are there to prevent humans from having to sit in front of their monitors 24/7 to ensure the website doesn't have problems. I then asked "Just to clarify, before BlueHost will investigate further, I will need to actually see an error message that indicates my site is down. Is this correct?"

To which their support replied "Yes, you are correct."

Cait

4 — 

Good For Hosting but Don't Add Additional Services

I have been using Bluehost for years now with little complaint. This past year I tried adding SiteLock security through Bluehost. What a nightmare! It automatically auto-renews and there is no way to cancel it through the user portal. You have to call someone. I did that and the next day got charged AGAIN due to a "bug" and they had to manually remove the software from my site. I was also out hundreds of dollars for over a week while the reimbursement was processed. The only compensation I got was a single month of free hosting. If you're looking to host with Bluehost I think it's great, but I would caution against going through them for additional services.

Jake M

4 — 

Good But Too Complicated

I have used Bluehost for a while for one of my clients and found out that it's very good in terms of services and customer support but when it comes to new users without technical knowledge using their panel its difficult at once to use it. As per my experience for me, it felt a little bit complicated but the service and customer support is great.

Terri S

5 — 

Great service / Good for beginners

I was completely new to having a website. The pricing is fair and relatively inexpensive. Whenever I have questions, I'm able to get answers through their web chat or by calling. I was able to build a basic website using the available free options through Bluehost. Their auto-renew is easy to manage. It's been relatively pain-free. I like the service and options.

Todd

5 — 

Great Hosting / Little Hassle

I migrated over to BlueHost after I found that my previous hosting company was blocking my client's emails as Spam without notifying either party. BlueHost had been recommended by a colleague and the process to migrate my URL was fairly painless. Unfortunately, the platform that I had built my site on previously was not supported, and I had to rebuild from scratch. (this I don't consider a negative, just a factor of doing business) I tried a WordPress site, but found the format too constricting. I eventually used an HTML based product and I was easily able to upload those files and create my website. I wholly recommend BlueHost as web hosting provider.

Monika S

5 — 

Excellent Service

Great hosting. Excellent prices. I have never had any trouble with the hosting. Anything I need to update, I am told in advance. The customer service is great. Waiting period is not very long. Help is there at your service 24/7. When needed, the blue host reps have walked me through the steps and resolved the issue at hand. Fast, efficient and there for you.

richard

5 — 

cheap but still a little nasty

Having used Hostgator for years with approximately 30 websites I have never had a problem. What interested me to Bluehost was the 36 month $2.95 option with FREE SSL. As a bit of a techie myself I am finding the Bluehost Chat Support very limited and abrupt with an Iron Curtain between the first line of support and higher level which we don't have direct access to. I will give Bluehost a 95% rating because it's a great package (when it works) however I shall be going back to Hostgator later today if another promised resolution fails to update the SSL certificates within the next few hours.

(update it worked, partially!) I'd suggest Bluehost is best suited for individuals rather than business. It's a shame they don't migrate sites without a $150 charge as it's possible that problems will have been avoided in the first place. Saying this I do not wish to pay $150 if it's just going to fall over again!

Hostgator 95% as more costly but far better self control. Bluehost 95% because it's a lot for your money. My choice? Hostgator for business

Charles

1 — 

I got them Bluehost blues

I've had Bluehost for over a year and am deeply disappointed. The people who run the service spend all their time pitching extra services instead of making their service better. When I sought advice from them, they recommended I buy services that I later found I didn't need. (They lied to me.) When I tried to turn off the autorenew for these services, I was told by their rep that THERE WAS NO WAY TO TURN OFF AUTORENEW. In other words, they would keep recharging my card forever. I told the rep flatly that they had no legal right to charge my card for a service that I canceled. He said he turned it off, but they didn't, and have been emailing everyday. (I canceled my card to avoid the autorenew.) I could go on with other complaints but will keep this short. Don't use them. They're gangsters.

Eric M

5 — 

I can talk to a living, breathing human being

Bluehost offered me a free month of hosting to post a review. I turned down that incentive because I don't trust compensated reviews of any kind.

Our web needs are fairly simple and in the 7-8 years we've used Bluehost we've been delighted by both the company's web hosting performance and their customer service.

It's rare to call ANY large company's customer service line and find yourself immediately connected to a live, knowledgeable CSR who will patiently work with you until your question is answered or your problem is resolved, but that's always been our experience with Bluehost.

That alone is worth the what we pay them.

Deb G

5 — 

Novice-friendly

Setting up the e-commerce was a bit confusing, and I have found their how-to information a bit thin. I think they could do a better job of documenting this for newbies like me. However, I figured it out, and it has never caused me problems. Their tech support is great to work with, and have always been very polite and knowledgeable. I am not a professional web anything, so they really do make it as easy as one could expect it to be for a complete novice. I have never had an issue with down-time, slow page loads, etc., so I have been very pleased.

Patty

4 — 

Overall pleased

Overall Bluehost meets our needs and the price is right. As a small not-for-profit our needs started out pretty simple. We are currently changing and expanding our web presence and I am hopeful that Bluehost will be able to continue to provide what we need. I have had good luck with support with one exception. My home IP was blocked and I was unable to access the site from my house for over a week. I work from home so it was a big deal. They kept saying it was my ISP when it actually was being blocked by Bluehost. I jumped through many firey hoops before it was finally fixed.

katie

5 — 

They Make Me Happy

I literally can't state just how happy BlueHost makes me. Everytime I call in, they are super friendly and knowledgeable. I don't have to wait 30 minutes for someone to answer the phone either. Anytime I have an issue, they literally are HAPPY to resolve it. I have yet to speak with someone at Bluehost that was rude or not helpful. THEY ARE GREAT and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND using them. Awesome job bluehost!

Mike M

2 — 

Migration is a Nightmare

I have four websites hosted with Bluehost and after having my fifth website designed I decided to have it migrated over. This is a big membership style website and I wanted to have as little downtime as possible so I had the migration done by Bluehost a couple days before New Years when my business would be slow. They told me my SSL certificate would migrate over, my site was not secure so then they told me they were wrong and I had to get another one. 30 days later the site kept having many issues and not secure and then to find out Bluehost never completed the migration properly so they had to do it all over again. This took another week. Their system with migration is the worst ever because they do not use any type of support ticket system. If you send in a support ticket it will take at least three days for someone from the migration department to contact you. If they email you a question it will take them at least another three days to respond again because I am told every email or support ticket goes to the bottom of the list and you are not able to chat among a support ticket. They also have no phone number and the support or customer service at Bluehost tells me they also cant contact them because they all are outside contractors. So with a couple questions back and forth it took ten days before they said they finished the migration but forget a step and it never happened. When we realize what happened and luckily my other hosting company still had my site live, we had to start all over.

Now three months later most of our dashboard does not work, we realize that our site is being directed to a http and not a https sight and our site shows unsecure. When you type in https and my website address the site is all screwed up looking and if someone uses a Mac is automatically takes them to this screwed up site. I have spent over eight hours talking to the support at Bluehost over the past three days. They first said my developer had written the code incorrectly, then they said I had the wrong SSL certificate (they are the ones that got the certificate for me), then they said they were going to un-install and re-install the certificate and when that did not work they realized the last support person installed it wrong. My developer tells me that Bluehost has not configured the site properly during the migration. They tell me that I would have to reach out to the migration department because they have no way of doing that but they think the code is wrong and not a migration issue. I know it will take 3-4 days for the migration department to contact me and they will ask me questions which will take another 3-4 days and at the end they probably will deny any responsibility. So I am forced to pay my developer $300 to go in an correct the problem on the website that BlueHost created.

Wade M

5 — 

I had to come here to give her more than 5 stars

Very professional and awesome to work with!!

Frank M

5 — 

A Completely Worry-Free Experience!

I am in my second year of hosting my first-ever website on Bluehost, and I have had no problems or down-time.

Mark M

5 — 

A+ for Bluehost

I switched from another host because of frequent outages & poor customer service. Bluehost has been a great choice. It was easy to transfer my website with very available customer support. The dashboard is easy to understand & navigate. The price is a good value. They are an excellent choice for WordPress hosting. I have experienced virtually no outages since moving to Bluehost. Also speed & server response times were much improved. I am glad I found them.

R H

5 — 

Very Happy with Bluehost

Excellent "up time." Seamless updates. Good security options. I wish I had more and better skills so I could take advantage of more of the features available to me on Bluehost.

Elizabeth A

2 — 

Short and bitter

Due to a change in circumstances I had to cancel my subscription. Never would I touch their chat service again. I spent over an hour trying to cancel. Had to go to my email to get token number. Returned and it was another person. Person number 3 told me that my account name and all else was not correct. But passed by persons 1 & 2. After asking for someone else with more authority she stated that my account was cancelled and that I would have to answer some questions. She disappeared. I logged in again for person no. 4. She knew what was going on. Gave me the questions then it was done and she disappeared. My original cost was $385. I am going to receive back $201. It cost me $184 for 24 days. That is their guarantee. I believe they tried every trick in the book to frustrate me and walk away including lies.

John L

5 — 

top-notch service

Count me a satisfied customer. This website is the oldest of the four I’ve hosted at Bluehost since 2010 — and I wouldn’t dream of moving any of them. They are cost-competive and service oriented. By the numbers:

1. Account services and maintenance has always been excellent. They were good to work with setting the accounts up, and were very good helping me set up the best value package to meet our needs,

2. Security is a strong point. I appreciate their diligence in protecting my asset. I would characterize them as an optimal mix of strong procedures and realistic administration.

3. Tech support– Has been top of the line — knowledgeable, good listeners, patient, and understanding, excellent communicators.

Mike M

5 — 

Most dependable, reliable hosting company

I have hosted seven of my customer’s websites on Bluehost for nearly ten years. Not once during that time have my clients lost one minute of hosting service for any reason. Part of the reason for that I believe is because of the periodic updating of their servers. Bluehost appears to be operating and meticulously maintaining state of the art servers. Another factor in Bluehost’s outstanding performance in the quality and skill of the technical support representatives. When I have had a question about online renewal of my customers domain licenses or hosting or file uploads I can confidently tell my customers that I will have an answer for their questions in a matter of minutes. My confidence in Bluehost technical support was developed over those same seven years in never once having to wait for my call to be picked-up, never once having a support person provide an incorrect answer or solution to a request, never once having to ask a representative if they could transfer me to someone who spoke English. I will always reward a vendor that provides this level of service and this level of professional integrity, with my loyalty.

Lauren B

5 — 

Customer Service

I switched TO Blue Host a few months ago after having had Justhost.com and then Ipage.com as hosting companies I used for years switching both times because their customer service went way downhill.

My number one reason for joining any hosting service has been ‘quality customer service’.

In my experience, live customer service is 100 times more effective than chat which can often be a big waste of my time and energy.

Clearly there is a competitive market for hosting and keeping costs down and prices affordable which makes customer service via chat much more cost effective. However, not all chat support is the same and as soon as a company makes live support inaccessible, I am out.

After numerous terrible experiences with chat support with Ipage.com… I switched to Bluehost. I have been able to get effective chat support and ‘live’ support with Bluehost and THAT is what I was shopping for.

My internet needs are simple. I host various domains with fairly simple websites. I do not use WordPress/Templates. I use a free version of Serif that lets me build a simple site with more flexibility. This works fine with Bluehost it just took a little effort to figure out how to publish with a slightly different file path. My sites and email work just fine.

I recommend Bluehost to everyone, especially because, after my previous experiences, I think the only way to keep great customer service going is to keep a good hosting company growing.

My sites and email work properly.

Kenny

2 — 

Stay away from Bluehost

Tech support answers the phone quickly, but is trained to blame your code for any outage or issue with their web hosting servers. The agents answering the tech support lines have very substandard technical knowledge and don’t expect them to help with any technical issue.

I started with a plain shared website. Performance was horrible. Was upsold on a more expensive plan, improved somewhat but ended up with a another upsell just to move my site to another server because support was unwilling to help with issue that was plaguing the old server. After a couple months of trouble free time on the new cloud server, issues started popping up again. Frequent server down times or restarts, random reverse proxy or load ballancer timeouts. As soon as I can find a block of time to migrate my web site I am leaving.

Yolla

5 — 

No issues

Signed up with bluehost couple of years ago, been happy ever since, site runs smoothly support is helpful. I do want to say that I did not expect the renewal price to be higher than what I paid initially; I did look up renewal pricing with other web host, it turned out that they all charge a higher renewal price; I stayed with Bluehost where I remained happy.

Alma T

5 — 

Cannot be happier!

Just got off a call with Joe from support, been working on launching the site, and he was super helpful. As a person that had no clue how to set up a website it was really important for me to find a company with affordable pricing, one that has helpful resources, and great support. When I first wanted to start my websites, I search how to set up my blog and found lots of resources on how to do it on bluehost, when I encountered issues installing a theme I contacted support and they were really helpful. The rep was nice enough that he suggested couple of plugin to help me with my SEO stuff. So far been really happy with bluehost!

Al

5 — 

Love you bluehost!!

I have been with Bluehost for 6 years now and I cannot be happier, the initial pricing that I signed up for was very reasonable, I still remember price shopping around and noticed that Bluehost was recommended by many influencers in the industry, they are also the top recommended host on WordPress, going with them was for sure the right choice. I love how they do the auto update for my WordPress site, i have had an issue with a couple of bad plugins, but with the current auto update, things cannot be more secure. I learned that they recently started offering free SSL, soon I will be selling a couple of products on my site, having the free SSL cannot be better.

Ivy F

2 — 

Over Zealous Security

The account was deactivated for suspicious activity. Please send a copy of 1. A government-issued ID showing the name of the account owner, 2. Some form of official documentation substantiating address, such as a utility bill in hard copy, or other business/personal documents to [email protected] to reactivate the account.

In the middle of setting up my email address for my site, less than 18 hours of signing up for the service; I get the above email stating my site has been deactivated due to suspicious activity. Really? All I did was send 5 test emails when configuring Microsoft Live and ThunderBird email clients. I was the one who got suspicious…you want me to send you a copy of my drivers license and a utility bill to you or you wont reactivate the account and website? It goes without saying, I cancelled the service and now am waiting 5-10 business days for a refund. Wow!

Yasin

1 — 

Not Trustworthy

I used their VPS for a few years with some problems (had to solve lots of them my own). Uptime was good, speed was mediocre and apps were working good but if you have a problem their staff cannot solve and just tell try this try that.

My first big problem was about disk space. It was going up full for every 2 – 3 months. Of course their staff couldn’t solve the problem. It was not my problem or my software’s. I had to solve this by myself by using SSH for hours.

Lastly they started to not to accept my credit card. I used the same card for years on their site without any problem. They said try different cards. We tried lots of different cards and their service refused all of them with nonsense errors. Even our banks couldn’t understand what is going on. We are using the same credit cards all over the world without any problem.

Our service down for about 2 weeks because of bluehost. STAY AWAY from bluehost.

Paul M

3 — 

Small print: be careful of refund claims with Bluehost.com

Bluehost is fine like you say, but it didn’t work for me. I decide on a refund and I had checked out the details under refund. “Bluehost will deduct a non-refundable domain fee of 15.99 from your refund.” which is fair enough, but they also opted me in for privacy, which I didn’t notice and didn’t require since I was just testing, so I was charged extra for that. They argue the small prints made it clear, but the line

“Bluehost will deduct a non-refundable domain fee of 15.99 from your refund.” could have included more details of what else could be taken from your refund. it just seems a little sneaky not to outline everything under the refund section. There answer to me was, if it wasn’t clear, you should have asked us.

Richie

3 — 

Bluehost is starting to stink

the emails were working today and all of a sudden after 9AM PST, the emails stopped working. So I contacted bluehost to find out what’s going on. I logged into the account and check as well. i went into the email area and found that all the emails on the account is gone. WTF! I’m with the agent chatting and it’s now 10:31AM PST and still no answer as to what happened and what is going on.

Ryan

2 — 

Don't do it!

Bluehost has been a bad experience! We started using Bluehost about 5 years ago to host a few of our company websites. Things were fine. Then we added more websites, as well as our company email. In the last few months, we noticed our websites would go blank during the day. No explanation from Bluehost as to why it was happening – you would think they might contact us and inform us of the problem, and offer some solutions. We had to contact them – their suggestion was to move to a dedicated host because our website traffic was too large for a shared server. So we migrated. Apparently Bluehost does zero backups, and we lost a lot of valuable emails in the process. They also removed our SSL certificate, and told us it would cost $149/yr per site to get it back (we host about 20 sites). It also altered our ability to upload media files to our websites via wordpress, adversely limiting our ability to do work on our websites. Their answer is to use FTP – however, when you have 10 people who work on your websites and are familiar with WordPress, there is a learning curve to FTP.

Long story short, Bluehost caused a HUGE disruption to our business. And when you call customer support, they give you the run around (“let me transfer you to that department”), only to find out their knowledge and experience is very limited.

Hope this review helps. If your hosting needs are minimal, you’ll probably be fine with Bluehost. You get what you pay for.

Amin

5 — 

BlueHost is the Best

I’m with bluehost for more than a year now.

Never had a problem with them , online chat and customer support are always perfect.

Cpanel is simple and it contains everything you need.

Simply Bluehost is the best.

Munna H

4 — 

Bluehost should not be your only choice

Web hosting is crucial for your WordPress site. The performance of your site mainly depends on your web hosting service. There are different web hosting providers. Bluehost is one of the leading. But I think it should not be your best choice.

I am not happy with their customer support, it is not a cheap web hosting service.

Their tech support is not perfect for the users especially the beginners. Because they have many problems.

Bluehost performance is average. They have many things should be improved.

Fahad N

5 — 

Bluehost is a reliable host

Every hosting has it’s own pros and cons. If you ask me whether bluehost is the best hosting then I would say No.

There are better hosting providers like aws (Quora runs on aws), Google hosting.

If you are just now starting to blog and if this is going to be your first website then, Bluehost is a reliable host.

But for starters, it is really difficult to use aws or google hosting server. You need to be well-versed with a command line to use these services. That’s why I recommend a shared hosting provider.

When it comes to shared hosting all hosting providers are the same. I recommend bluehost because of their refund policy and 24/7 support etc..

Akshay

5 — 

Bluehost The Best

Bluehost is the best hosting provider,using it for last 2 years and no problems there.

John T

2 — 

Problems with my emails

I Am to the edge of losing my job now due to the worst desision of my life: moving to Bluehost! It was so a terrible mistake, it has been a nightmare since the beginning. I can firmly tell you after talking to one after one after one support agent thay they don’t have the slightest idea of what they are talking about, support agents can barely speak good english (worst than mine), they talk like they are on India or somewhere there, and they are not prepare for REAL TROUBLE, they are just prepared to dumb solutions like: restart your computer, use another browser, it is your ISP problem, for God’s sake! This is a nightmare.

I been struggling with email problems since 2 weeks ago! Talked to many support agents, one and another, waited for long times (right now I have a chat with them since 3 and a half hours ago and they don’t have a little idea of what to do), they have given me a lot o stupid excuses like (“sorry the chat is slow” or “I am just a representative not a specialist”).

I sent them a TRACE from my IP to their IP and they don’t even now what a TRACEROUTE is!!

shravan

5 — 

Top wordpress hosting provider

I’m using WordPress hosting account on Bluehost from last 2 year but still, i’ve not found any problem with this hosting company, their customer services is very good and prices are also better than other hosting company so I suggest this hosting company all of you.

Daniel

3 — 

Not That Happy

Well, I switched to BlueHost to increase the page load speed, etc. That’s not happening! In fact, it’s really bad with going into wp-admin. The recent outage took me by surprise and in talking with them I asked about “cloud redundancy” and was told the entire cloud service was down. There is something definitely wrong with that picture and they really need to look at how they are configured. Anyway, the pricing hook is dead on and I was believed to think I’d get the intro price for 12 months but guess what? Not gonna happen unless you do 3 years. I talked, at length with sales before making the switch and wasn’t told that, in fact was told just the opposite. So, yeah I felt the bait/switch routine.

I do like the ease of setup and the tools for sure. The $150 buck we can transfer talk went in one ear and out the other. Fortunately for me, I have an IT background and didn’t need that but they should have been clear about that for those who need that kind of assistance.

Bottom line, when my 12 months are up, I am going with another provider period. I refused to transfer my domains over to BH and glad I did, so I should have any issues with that come moving day.

Adithya

5 — 

Definitely a good web host

I would like to start by saying that BlueHost is a pretty great Web Hosting Service. I have used it for Hosting WordPress Websites and I can see it is having great speed, good functionalities and OK Support. Another great thing that really made me go for is their Affordable Prices. I find the prices just right.

Happy with BlueHost. I had few minor issues but that wasn’t big of a deal. I still continue to use BlueHost and I would recommend it for fellow bloggers and Web designers.

There are rarely any downtimes. I never faced any huge downtimes with bluehost.

If you are looking for a good Web Hosting with great Speed, Security and Reliability for an Affordable Price, Blue Host is one of them.

A.I.N

1 — 

Horrible host. Horrible Tech support

I have been with Bluehost for up to 5 years but I am totally fed up. For the first time in a long while I finally got 3 sites that were getting traffic! What did Bluehost do? The throttled the sites and now it takes over 10 minutes to load a page.

Its been 3 days today of back and forth – CPanel is frozen. My 3 active sites are frozen! Tech support blames me for not optimising my databases. They want me to add something called CDN. The last person I spoke to tried to sell the cloud service to me. I finally got it. I am been held hostage. I HAVE TO upgrade or be damned! I have gone as far as asking how to add this CDN – me not being too techie but I seem to have hit a wall with tech supp. or they are pissed off with me for being so dumb!

How am I supposed to optimise the sites when they are inaccessible. CPanel takes 10 minutes or more to transit between pages. Its not something you would wish on your worst enemy. I have tried to explain this vicious circle to no avail.

To date I have spoke with 5 different tech support guys but they throw it back in my face. Not being a techie, I am left with 3 crippled sites with no clue who to turn to. Recently they no longer respond to emails. My business is crippled – just when I finally started getting traffic.

I will advise to look before you leap with this host.

Mary D

5 — 

BlueHost.com

I have been very happy with Bluehost.com. Their technical support had helped me through humps. Can’t ask for anything more at $3.49 per month for a 3-year into price with multiple websites.

Adey

5 — 

Bluehost Review

I am using Bluehost from 2014 and my experience with Bluehost is just excellent, I never encountered a single hosting problem in last 3 yeas, The customer support provided by them is even awesome. I 100% Recommend Bluehost to everyone.

Dev

4 — 

Far from perfect, but better than most

I have been with BlueHost for a 2+ years now. I have a WordPress and a PHP site hosted with them. I agree that performance isn’t great (as the numbers show) but luckily my sites are small and don’t get much traffic so I don’t think it affects me much. If any of my sites get popular or start making me money, I would probably switch over to something else. But for now, the price is great – I locked in my rate for 3 years so I wouldn’t have to worry about the price going up..

Brian

2 — 

Getting Worse

I’ve been with bluehost 10-15 years, and used to be quite happy with their hosting, prices, and I understood the limitations of shared hosting, but for the most part it didn’t matter for my purposes. I now have a few packages personally, shared, VPS, Cloud, and manage about 50ish of my clients that use bluehost as well. The last 6 months service-wise has been appalling. Slow, lies, misinformation, and it honestly feels like they’ll tell you anything to get you to just go away; try to get them to listen to logic, forget it! I am now recommending all of my clients on bluehost leave, because when they have issues I don’t want to be the one they call to deal with BlueHost’s support. I also agree, their server responses have gotten extremely laggy, and oddly enough the shared hosting seems faster than packages that are supposed to be much better.

Eric P

2 — 

No Technical Support

I have had a site with Bluehost, mostly problem free for the past five years. Previous issues have been resolved efficiently, but not anymore!

Last week I received an email from them stating that ‘Emergency Maintenance” was required on my box, and that it would entail 30-90 minutes of downtime. Not so. They completely broke my site, and I am unable to get through to their technical support, so I have critical data trapped in a database I can’t access because they scrambled the configuration. I can’t even put up a temporary site on a dynamic host to keep my business running! SO PISSED right now.

Haitham

5 — 

Good

I’ve been with Bluehost for almost a year, I have a VPS with them, the uptime for the last 12 months is 100%, support is beyond good, they reply to me quickly usually within 5 minutes, last Friday morning, I was playing with Apache setting, trying to optimize Apache through WHM and finally I got a 403 forbidden error, my website went down, I couldn’t fix it… so I connected live chat support, they responded in less than 60 seconds, after 5 min. live chat support couldn’t fix the issue, he said to me: ”please wait for 5-10 min, I’ll get you a senior technician to fix your problem” 7 or 8 minutes later, he said to me : you site back to work , the senior technician said there was a problem with WHM and he gets it fixed” it took 17 -18 min. to fix my issue….

To be honest, shared hosting sucks, there’s no good one, but you can find someone who is less bad than the others….all shared plans have limitations, probably, one day, you’ll be on the suspension list!

Most customers with shared hosting are second-degree customers, you get what you pay for, for example, A2 hosting, they have priority support for $19 a month, without priority support, it’s almost like Bluehost support… and maybe even worse…

Jared M

2 — 

Custom Service and Tech Support Virtually Non-Existent

You can pretty much judge / rate / review ANY company–in ANY industry–by their level of customer support. And from the perspective, Bluehost should be rated a 1 out of 10. If you are an existing Bluehost customer, there is literally no way to contact them directly. They have an ticket and a chat feature only… both of which are outsourced to India and take a LONG time to get through to anyone… and usually results in zero actual assistance or results.

They have, literally, outsourced 100% of their customer support and tech support to a foreign their party that has no idea what they are doing. And even if their outsourced / 3rd party tech support was “OK”, that doesn’t excuse or explain completely cutting yourself off from your customers… the people that pay your bills. In my experience, that’s the beginning of the end for any company–when they simply do not want to have any direct contact–or feedback–from their customers.

It took me 20 to 30 minutes in a chat queue and another 15 or 20 minutes going back and forth with the person on the other end of the chat to get a simple contact email for bluehost–because there are none published anywhere on their site or online. Not for basic questions–about anything. Not for feeback–about anything. Not for suggestions–about anything.

Hosting companies know what a complete pain in the ass moving your websites to a new host usually is… so, once they have you as a customer… they rarely provide you with any real support. It’s a common and ongoing problem. Bluehost is my 3rd hosting company. I thought I had finally found a host that had at least a reasonable level of service… but I was wrong.

Eunge

5 — 

They're OK.

Some issues you mentioned perhaps are true, but it’s just to make BlueHost black.

The shared hosting service is upselling universally, including technical support, hardware and bandwidth. In this industry, a tech representative is serving for 5,000 users at least by design, considering the salary of US$3000/mo and the service fee of US$4/mo only. Otherwise company makes no profit. In this case, when you have an issue according to the server even the network which are generic to almost the other users, the technical support is NO possible for anything certainly.

I have personally visited more than famous hosting companies in US. Unlike many other companies doing support outsourcing, BlueHost is obviously the best one in many aspects. They have 2 standalone buildings (3-floors for each) with 200+ full-time employess and 400+ interns.

Corey

2 — 

High renewal costs

I was sucked into the low price offer and the recommendation from WordPress.org, I did have good service for 3 years. I then noticed my Jetpack plugin show a lot of down time moments through out 3 year period. Also it is quite slow, and speed is important for ranking with google. But what stopped my trust was the renewal fee of $11 a month, that is more than 100% increase in price. I think someone managing Blue Host decided that since customers are on auto renewal, lets just double the price and we will be instantly rich.

Jeff

5 — 

It all depends on your situation

I JUST switched to today so don’t consider this to be a full review, but I do have some observations worth noting.

Within the span of a day I got this cheap little account to host 2 WordPress sites and one static site, all without additional fees. The cPanel is good. The WordPress install worked well. Everything so far is working out.

But the path to get here involved a support chat session lasting 45 minutes with someone so horrendous that all I can do is laugh now. To be fair, he must have been dealing with a dozen customers at once but he was so fine with being incompetent that he must have been at his wits end. I decided to abort this chat and look up info elsewhere and things worked out, but had I actually listened to anything he said I would have messed everything up very badly.

Also the FTP is horrendously slow ( 44kb/sec ), 2x slower than godaddy which I though must have been the worst but nope. Honestly this won’t usually matter to much since most large file transfers will be http and not ftp but it’s worth mentioning.

Julie

5 — 

Bluehost is Worth Your Money

Bluehost is a money-worth as I am using it for two years and have to faced nay big issue, other than slight downtime’s which can come with any web host, but most of the times, my website was up and running within few minutes.

Also, my technical problems were solved by Bluehost staff very quickly, so I would highly recommend Bluehost to all the new bloggers and webmasters.

Esjay

2 — 

Leaving Bluehost after 8 years

Used to be a good hosting company. Downhill for a year now, with problems escalating since Jan 2016. Cpanel does not work. Hotlink protection does not work. Contacted support and they tried to blame me. I told them it was a file change they had made and I had deleted my htaccess file and used their own cpanel hotlink protection and it failed. Support person deleted files they had changed to erase their fingerprint and it still does not work. Domain manager, cannot disable Privacy Protection. Chat support unable to assist said created Help ticket. Copy sent does not include issue. Contacted support again to verify ticket and was told nothing they can do, Domain Support not in on weekends! So much for the 24/7 support they advertise! Make Copies of EVERY contact with Bluehost including your billing info. This is interstate commerce and carried out over wire.

firos

4 — 

So far OK hosting

I am using Bluehost for last 5 years to manage around 30 websites.

Here is my exact feedback.

1. Email service is bad. Very slow. Poor interface. Most of my customers complained about email slowness, so we were forced to switch email hosting to Rediff/Google.

2. Support is good. Everytime support is available on chat or call. They are supportive and many times they helped me to fix the issue except few times depends on the chat person.

3. Worst thing is, if they found any website malware issue, they will simply deactivate the service and all of my customers started to complain.

4. Hosting multiple websites on server facitlity is good. Cpanel features are good. WordPress installation is also good.

5. Cost is too affordable.

Solo

4 — 

OK but declining

I managed a website on a wordpress platform for a medium size business for 4 years. Their hosting service started out well for us but after about 18 months the site speed started to decline so I upgraded to a VPS business package which only helped for a few months.

As time went on I experienced declining results in page load speed, a marked increase in traffic throttling (a real bummer when multiple clients are trying to browse your site), and more frequent down times.

In the beginning I was very happy with Bluehost. Having that first year happy experience set me up for disappointment later as the site grew along with hosting expenses.

I will say that Bluehost support on the phone was great the first year and their resource library will walk any newbie through just about every question asked in simple clear video tutorials. For a small noncritical site I think they are a fine host, but for a business wishing to be successful I don’t recommend them after your site traffic grows.

Ben Y

2 — 

Used to be Good - But Stay Clear Now!

I have had nothing but trouble with bluehost. I manage a number of sites, including our company website, and their support was unhelpful at best. My almost brand new (ie, not bogged down) WP installation was dealing with 10-15 second load times, if it would load at all. It was a combination of DB and filesystem issues. And another site was taken offline for almost 3 days due to bluehost’s database issues, and as I was transferring a third away from them, the whole server itself crashed, leaving me without my site’s data for the rest of the day, and the site offline. Their hosting on some of their boxes is simply unreliable, and their databases are even worse.

I’m not sure if their infrastructure is crumbling or if it’s just incompetency, but in 2 months, 3 separate sites (hosted on 3 separate boxes…I checked) all experienced relatively serious issues thanks to hosting issues.

For those who say their uptime and site load time has been great with wordpress, I suspect it’s because they aren’t checking their site often. Run some scripted cron checks and you’ll see how bad things are sometimes. I’m not saying every site is down all the time, but it’s far too often for a supposedly reliable host.

In other words, I am staying clear of bluehost, and moving all my clients away from them as soon as I’m able. Stay clear. And now I’m going to be sharing these reviews far and wide.

Sorry, Bluehost. You just can’t treat customers like that, especially customers who are responsible for sending you over $100/mo. You’re not making that from me anymore, and you’ll not be seeing my business anytime soon.

Jaylord C

5 — 

Bluehost is doing their job!

I would definitely recommend Bluehost as your hosting provider because of the excellent features they give that other hosting providers can’t. Whenever you have a problem, customer support is very important and they give 24/7 round the clock support so no need to worry. Although their pricing is cheap than other providers, ‘reliability’ of their servers are outstanding! And the feature that I liked most is their user-friendly control panel. Right from creating your account ’til hosting setup, the process is sure easy to understand and you would complete it in minutes.

I highly recommend Bluehost especially if you have a WordPress site. Just a couple of clicks and you’ll have.

WordPress installed and working on your site without touching a line of code.

Joseph D

2 — 

Dropped the ball

We’ve been with Bluehost for many years. Recently we have encountered problems with e-mails sent from the site. When something goes wrong and there have been no software changes on our end, the finger points to a server issue. The most recent problem was html-formatted e-mails being sent from the code by the mature and widely used phpmailer library. They were being sent as plain text with nr paragraph codes embedded. A ticket to technical support was returned telling us that they don’t offer software support (which we never asked for) and to upgrade PHP from 5.3 to 5.4. This was the wrong answer, given that phpmailer works back to PHP 5.1.

They also had a DOS attack that took them more than a day to fend off.

Ignacio C

4 — 

Good, but not premium

I’ve been using Bluehost many years.. I’m on a shared hosting plan with no traffic limit. The price is standard and in general – the performance is ‘OK’, however lately looks weak…

I feel that my site’s performance is has been going down over the past 6 months. I have a standard WordPress site with very low traffic and a latency of 15secs! I contacted support for help and their answer was to follow the standard guidelines, the same info as you can find over the net yourself.

That made me feel like they DO NOT appreciate me as client and maybe it’s time for me to look for a new hosting provider…

Max

4 — 

Good for new sites

Bluehost has been around for a long time and I have been a happy customer for a few years.

Pros:

1. cPanel

2. Adwords credit (not sure if anyone needs it, though)

3. Good for a bunch of small websites. If you have 15 sites that receive barely any traffic (under 100 visits a day)

Cons:

1. A bit slow if the site grows bigger

2. Renewal pricing is not the same as promotional pricing on signup.

Jonathan S

2 — 

Very serious email problem

I had been hosting with Bluehost for a few months. A client called me and said they were having trouble logging into their email. I logged into cpanel and they were correct, their email address was somehow missing. I quickly called bluehost, and they agreed that some hosting accounts were just dropping email accounts. All the emails were still on the server, but every once in a while I would need to recreate the account for the client to access it.

I was shocked of course that such a well known host would have such a huge problem, and not even warm me about it! A client could lose thousands before realizing that the problem was simply that their email had gotten closed with no warning before or after. Here is the kicker: Bluehost had no idea when it would be fixed or even had a short term solution for me. They were saying that it was something I was just going to have to deal with.

That day I opened with a new company, moved my sites, and never looked back…

Mitch

5 — 

Good Experience

I have been a Bluehost user for almost 5 years now. Bluehost has consistently provided outstanding tech support. I would absolutely recommend Bluehost to a friend.

Keith S

5 — 

Bluehost is great.

Definitely have to shout out for BlueHost. I have three domains registered, with two active websites. Registering the domains was a piece of cake as was setting up the first website. The second was originally a WordPress free site that I moved to BlueHost. The transition was seamless.

My only frustration has been with an online Chat support session where the supported didn’t seem to read my comments, or couldn’t understand me. Other than that, I am REALLY pleased with BlueHost and will recommend them to everybody.

Mali

4 — 

More complex than advertised

As someone who has never built a website, I was hopeful that the easy-to-use advertisement of Bluehost would ring true. Unfortunately, once I began the process of building the website, it got complicated and getting help would cost me even more money!

While I am still working on the site, I was a little disappointed and cannot yet say whether or not it will have been money well spent. What further irked me, however, was that they immediately tried to sell me more stuff and badger me into ‘upgrading’.

That said, there is plenty on offer when building the site, which makes the process more complicated for non-techies like me, but will surely be an asset for serious site-builders. For example, lost of free downloads, templates and the like as well as WordPress, which I am learning to use.

Overall, I have to say the jury is still out, but I’m hoping it will be worthwhile.

Alicia R

5 — 

Good company, but a bit slow...

Overall, I’ve had a great experience with Bluehost, and I’ve been using them for about 4 years. I started with the Basic shared hosting package and later upgraded to the Business Pro plan.

I’ve experienced very little downtime (I noticed my site down once for about 10 minutes), and I’ve found their platform very easy to navigate. Because of that, I haven’t had to talk to support much, but when I have, they seemed very friendly and helpful. I have never had any security problems, either.

The biggest drawback is that my site isn’t as quick as I’d like it to be. I’ve done a lot to try to speed it up, like optimizing images, installing a cache plugin, etc., but my site still takes about 3 seconds to load (tested by Pingdom). That’s on the Business Pro plan, and that’s faster than the Basic plan.

If you’re looking for a fast site, Bluehost probably isn’t the answer, but if you need something easy to use to get you started, it’s a good company to work with.

Joseph

4 — 

Decent host

I’ve been using Bluehost for several years – mostly for myself and some of my clients (I’m WordPress developer).

I’ve yet to seen a problem or an error from a client side. I’d say they are pretty decent host for a small to medium sized blog/website.

Peter

4 — 

Good :)

I like these guys a lot better than my previous host. They have great tech support (most of the time), are polite and responsive (short wait times). I especially like the tools they provide: cPanel, WordPress Tools, SpamAssassin, etc. Highly recommended.

Scot M

4 — 

Low price, but works well...

The WordPress-specific hosting plan at BlueHost feels a bit pricey, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get over that feeling, but the setup and management steps I’ve taken with my new site have been noticeably faster than other WP sites I’ve run.

The 20 points I knocked off were mostly about the need for some polish in the cPanel / WebDisk / domain management areas. Like when I log in, I land on what it tells me is a deprecated page…or when the step-by-step instructions didn’t actually match the steps in application. Luckily, I’ve done most of this before and setup and testing continue.

Richard

4 — 

Bluehost is better than 1and1 BUT...

The GOOD

Gets a site up ASAP! A simple site, like for a small business, will be fine with Bluehost. Their people actually will assist with WordPress related problems and issues, which 1and1 would not even touch.

The BAD

Once your site actually starts to get traffic and scale, Bluehost falls apart. The service seems set up for sites with zero – 50 daily visitors. My site on a dedicated Premium Bluehost account struggles to cope with 3000 unique visitors daily. Crashes frequently.

HB A

5 — 

Solid performance

I manage several websites with Bluehost and have nothing but a good experience with them. Their cPanel is well laid out and easy to do most tasks like upload WordPress or setup email accounts. There are plenty of helpful tutorial videos and pages that get you going as well.

The few times I’ve need customer service they were always available quickly and went above and beyond to help me resolve my issues. Their price point is very reasonable for the features and performance and they offer an good affiliate program as well. I will continue to use and recommend to others.

Jasper R

5 — 

Great experiences so far..

I’ve had great experiences with Bluehost.

First of all, I find the interface very easy to use, which is not the case with some of the other services that I’ve tried. I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to find what I was looking for as I’m not very technical and not familiar with a lot of the hosting lingo. The tutorials are also very helpful.

Secondly, site performance is excellent, my site is fast and always online. Finally, the customer support via chat is very fast. I also love that it’s 24/7, so I’m not tied to US working hours. I’ve always been helped pretty quickly. All in all, Bluehost is the best hosting service in my opinion.

Ryan J

5 — 

First website? Give it a go...

BlueHost has consistently been a reliable hosting service since my first day as a digital entrepreneur. Their prices are affordable and the quality is on par. The customer service is quick and always able to resolve any questions or concerns that I have.

Long story short, if this is your your first website, give BlueHost a shot. We recommend it highly to all Startup Savant readers.

Dom W

5 — 

Best platform for beginners

Bluehost is hands down one of the best hosting platforms for beginners.

It’s price-friendly, and the interface is easy to get around, unlike some other hosting companies that give a very scary and tech-heavy dashboard. It’s also friendly on the wallet, has excellent support, and isn’t going to randomly go offline if your site gets more than 10 visits.