BlueHost Review 2024: Analyzing Speed & Uptime Performance.

Bluehost, one of the oldest web hosts, was founded in 1996 and has grown to become the most well-known brand in WordPress hosting. They are an official ‘WordPress’ recommended hosting company. With Bluehost, you never have to worry about your website being slow, even when there is a high traffic volume.

Their skilled support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week via phone, email, and live chat. They are rated first in web hosting for small enterprises. In addition, they are offering users an exclusive 75% discount, a free domain, free SSL, and a free Site Builder with templates.

Pros

  • Most affordable pricing.
  • Free domain name.
  • Free CDN + SSL
  • Excellent client support.
  • Officially recommended by WordPress.
  • 1-click WordPress installation

Cons

  • Higher domain renewal prices

Bluehost Review By Me

Bluehost is one of the world’s biggest web hosting companies and an official WordPress hosting provider. Bluehost provides a wide range of hosting options for both beginners and medium to large organizations, as well as 24/7 customer service. Check out our experts’ thorough Bluehost review to see if Bluehost is the correct solution for you.

In this detailed Bluehost review, we’ll put their promises to the test with a rigorous and extensive analysis of industry-standard benchmarking techniques.

We’ll look into the following areas:

  • Speed: How quickly will your website load with Bluehost? We will evaluate their speed and server response time.
  • Performance: How does Bluehost handle traffic spikes? We’ll put that to the test by running a stress test and seeing how well it handles heavy traffic.
  • Reliability: Will your website be online 24/7/365 with no downtime?
  • Customer Support: Can you rely on Bluehost’s customer service when you need instant assistance with your website?
  • Features: Do they provide all of the capabilities you’ll need to create your website?
  • Pricing: Do they offer the best prices in the industry? Are there any Bluehost discounts that will help you save money?

This is our comprehensive Bluehost review, and we’ll go over the benefits and drawbacks of utilizing Bluehost in detail. If you don’t want to read the entire evaluation, here’s an overview scorecard of Bluehost with our opinion right below.

Free Domain
Performance gradeA+
Average load time1.1 s
Average response time140 ms
Free domainYes
Free SSLYes
1-click WordPressYes
SupportPhone / Live Chat / Knowledge base

Bottom line: In our Bluehost review, we found them to be dependable, speedy, reasonably priced, and with friendly 24/7 hosting support.

That is why we have recommended Bluehost as one of the best WordPress hosting providers.

Now, let’s go over our complete review so you can make your decisions.

About Bluehost

First, let us look at the company itself.

Bluehost started in 1996 and has progressively grown into one of the world’s top web hosting companies. It now runs over 2 million websites from around the world.

Bluehost Hosting

Bluehost has a longstanding engagement with the WordPress community. They have been an official WordPress.org recommended web host since 2006.

They take pride in their 24/7 assistance, excellent hosting infrastructure, and support for free and open-source technologies such as WordPress.

Pros and Cons of Bluehost:

All the top web hosting providers have advantages and disadvantages. Some are manageable, while others are unavoidable.

After evaluating Bluehost, we discovered the following pros and cons that users should consider.

Pros:

First, let’s look at what makes Bluehost the best choice.

  • Pricing: Their hosting options are affordable for the majority of customers, particularly those who are just getting started.
  • Reliability: They support a huge number of websites with minimal downtime.
  • There are no hidden charges: There are no additional fees when you sign up for your account.
  • Free domain: When you sign up, you will receive a free domain name for the first year.
  • Free CDN + SSL: Each website receives a free SSL certificate and a free Cloudflare CDN to prevent malware and increase security.
  • Money Back Guarantee: They provide a 30-day money-back guarantee for all plans.

Cons:

As we mentioned earlier, every hosting company has downsides. The following are some downsides to using Bluehost as your host.

  • Higher domain renewal price: Their free domain renewal pricing is above average.
  • Upselling Addons: They have a strong upsell approach during enrollment. However, you may easily uncheck SiteLock and all other add-ons if you do not require them.

Bluehost Performance Tests

The most important performance metric to consider is speed. It has an impact on both the user experience of your website and your WordPress SEO rankings.

According to studies, a 1-second decline in website performance reduces conversion rate by 7%, while a 3-second wait costs you 50% of your traffic.

Strangeloop performance case study

Let’s see how fast your website will load on Bluehost.

Bluehost Speed Test Results:

To have a faster website, you must select a fast website hosting business. Keeping this in mind, we built a test site to determine how quick Bluehost is.

Our test site was built with WordPress and the default Twenty Twenty-Three theme. We imported dummy content for theme development, which included photos. Then we utilized Pingdom to check the website’s speed.

Here are the test results:

Bluehost speed test results

As you can see, our test site loads in under two seconds. This result is surprising given that our website wasn’t using any cache plugins or speed optimization techniques.

However, the speed test alone is insufficient because this test site did not receive a lot of traffic.

To see how Bluehost servers would handle additional traffic, we sent virtual users (VU) to our test site using Grafana Labs’ K6.

We used it to progressively increase the number of visitors to 50 to see how the server would manage more requests from multiple connections at the same time.

Here’s a screenshot of our results.

Bluehost stress test results

The gray line represents the amount of active virtual users on the site, while the green line represents the server response time.

As you can see, the server load was consistent throughout the test, even during high traffic.

This test suggests that if you want a super fast website, Bluehost could be the right choice.

It is also worth noting that we did not experience any errors or downtime during our testing.

Many hosting companies offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee. We created an uptime monitoring alert for our test account. The screenshot below provides a detailed look at Bluehost server uptime.

Bluehost uptime test results

Bluehost Server Response Time

When you test a live website with tools such as Pingdom, you can observe how everything loads. This includes images, which take far longer to load than simple text.

To acquire a more realistic server response time, we used Bitcatcha. It allows you to test the server’s response speed without loading any data.

Bluehost response time test result

As you can see, the Bluehost server in the United States performed in a fraction of a second. The answer was slightly faster in other locations, but still less than a second.

If your website’s target audience is in the United States, this would be beneficial. However, if more of your users are from other regions of the world, you can relocate your server.

Bluehost Hosting Plans & Features

Bluehost has a selection of hosting solutions to suit all budgets and sizes. This covers shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, cloud hosting, WooCommerce hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and others.

Let’s look at Bluehost’s plans and features.

  • WordPress / Shared Web Hosting: Shared hosting is an excellent option to launch a new website with a low traffic level. In a shared hosting environment, your website will share server resources with other sites.
  • WooCommerce Hosting: WooCommerce is WordPress’ most popular eCommerce plugin. It allows you to effortlessly create an online store using WordPress. WooCommerce hosting provides you with all of the capabilities you need to get started with your e-commerce store.
  • VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting: As an upgrade to shared WordPress hosting, VPS hosting provides virtual dedicated resources in a shared environment.
  • Dedicated hosting server: When you choose a Bluehost dedicated hosting server for your website, you will have complete control over the server’s resources. The downside is that you have to manage the server on your own.

All plans come with an easy-to-use hosting control panel, which allows you to manage your hosting, build databases, and more.

Bluehost provides a custom control panel that is simple for beginners to utilize. It also employs a customized version of the cPanel hosting dashboard to provide more advanced features.

Bluehost control panel

A breakdown of Bluehost’s shared WordPress hosting plans

Bluehost offers a shared hosting option suitable for new websites.

Their shared plan is offered in four levels, with variable initial pricing.

Bluehost pricing

Let’s look at Bluehost’s pricing and what’s included with each plan.

  • Basic: With the basic plan, you can only host one website. It supports one domain, 10GB of SSD storage, and five email accounts, each with 100 MB of disk space. For the first term, you will pay $1.99 each month. When you renew the account, you will be required to pay $7.99 every month.
  • Choice Plus: This plan provides three web pages and 50 GB of storage space. You will also receive free email accounts. The first term starts at $3.99 per month. When you renew the account, you will be required to pay $13.99 every month.
  • Online Store: This platform is suitable for eCommerce stores and includes premium WooCommerce add-ons, saving consumers hundreds of dollars. It starts at $7.45 per month and renews at $18.99 per month once the introductory deal expires.
  • Pro: The Pro package costs $9.99 per month for the first term and $20.99 per month thereafter. It contains all of the above plans’ features, as well as 100 GB of storage and up to 100 websites that are geared for large traffic.

All plans include a free domain name for the first year, free SSL, and 24/7 live chat support.

All plans include malware scanning, 1-click staging, free CDN (Cloudflare with Argo routing), DDoS protection, and other features.

All options (except Basic) feature free domain privacy for the first year.

Upgrades to a higher plan are simple, allowing you to start small and scale up as needed.

Bluehost Customer Support & Service

Everyone requires assistance from time to time. You must find a web hosting business that provides assistance and support when you need it.

Bluehost has a large library of articles, step-by-step guides, and video tutorials as part of its broad knowledge base. This is quite useful for beginners, and a simple search can rapidly answer the most frequent concerns.

However, in some cases, you may need to speak with a person to get additional assistance.

Bluehost offers a 24-hour support system in which you may contact their support team professionals via live chat or phone help. This is useful when you need immediate assistance from technical support experts and know they are only a click away.

Bluehost support website

One feature that is missing is a ticket-based assistance system. Bluehost recently opted to discontinue ticket-based help in favor of a more personalized approach through live chat and phone support.

However, some customers may still miss the ticket-based help system, which is especially useful if your problem cannot be fixed in a single live chat or phone call.

Final Thought: Is Bluehost the Right Choice for You?

After reading this evaluation, you may be thinking whether Bluehost is the best option for your website.

Many websites consistently rate Bluehost as the number one web hosting company. They provide a diverse choice of hosting options, as well as other tools that make it simple to create your website.

All of their programs offer skilled 24/7 support from qualified employees.

Most significantly, they provide reasonable starter programs for any budget.

If you’re just getting started, a Bluehost shared hosting package is an excellent choice. It’s affordable and includes all of the necessary equipment. As your website expands, you may easily upgrade your hosting package.

Ready to launch your website with Bluehost? Click here to choose your Bluehost plan.

For Further Reading:

FAQs About Bluehost hosting

In this detailed Bluehost review, we attempted to cover all elements of their hosting services. The following are some of the most frequently asked Bluehost inquiries we receive from our users.

  1. Can I make an online store using WooCommerce on Bluehost?

    Yes, you can. In truth, Bluehost is a top WooCommerce hosting service provider. Their beginning plan is ideal for launching an online store.

    However, keep in mind that you will need to upgrade when your store’s traffic increases. Hopefully, by that time, you’ll have made enough money to cover the upgrade charges.

  2. Can Bluehost handle high traffic?

    Their shared plans are ideal for new websites and small businesses. Our stress test handles 50 virtual users without slowing down.

    These strategies can handle both normal and unexpected traffic spikes. However, they still have restricted server resources. If you foresee a lot of traffic, you should consider upgrading your hosting plan.

  3. Why use Bluehost for WordPress?

    Bluehost is one of the world’s leading hosting companies and an officially approved WordPress hosting service. They have been a long-time supporter of the WordPress community and are well familiar with the platform.

    Their platform is well-optimized for WordPress websites and designed to run WordPress at optimal performance. They also have WordPress engineers on their staff, so you know your website is in capable hands.

  4. Is Bluehost good for beginners?

    Yes. Bluehost is good for beginners, blogs, and small enterprises. They are frequently recognized as the most beginner-friendly by industry professionals. When you sign up, they automatically install WordPress. They also provide an easy-to-use control panel that allows you to manage your hosting account independently.

    There is a wealth of resources accessible, including extensive manuals, video lessons, and articles. You also receive 24/7 access to their knowledgeable, user-friendly assistance via live chat and phone.

  5. Do I need a credit card to sign up with Bluehost?

    Bluehost accepts credit cards, but you can choose to show other payment options during checkout and use PayPal if you choose.

  6. Is Bluehost better than GoDaddy?

    Bluehost is better than GoDaddy in terms of support. The Bluehost My Sites dashboard and general onboarding process are much more user-friendly. Not to mention, Bluehost web hosting is more affordable for small enterprises.

  7. Where are Bluehost servers located?

    Bluehost has its own in-house data center in Utah, in the western United States. It has a large 50,000-square-foot creation that acts as its principal data center.

  8. How does Bluehost compare with SiteGround and HostGator?

    When comparing Bluehost alternatives like SiteGround and HostGator, you need to be aware of a few pros and cons.

    Bluehost provides greater value for the price than SiteGround. Their prices start at $1.99 per month and offer a free domain, whereas SiteGround’s plans begin at $4.99 and do not include a free domain.

    On the other hand, the SiteGround platform has superior performance and security features.

    Bluehost and HostGator share many similarities in terms of hosting CPU resources, functionality, site migration tools, cost, and more. Bluehost rivals like as Hostinger, InMotion Hosting, and DreamHost provide comparable services.

    We believe Bluehost’s user experience is somewhat superior because they have invested heavily in their WordPress website builder platform.

  9. What Bluehost plan should I get?

    If you’re creating a new website, blog, or online store, we recommend starting with their basic plan. It is enough for a basic website, and you can always improve later.
    Ready to start your website with Bluehost? Click here to choose your Bluehost plan.

Disclosure: This article includes affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting us.

Leave a Comment

0 Shares
Share via
Copy link