Bluehost is one of the popular brands in the world of web hosting alongside other top choices such as GreenGeeks and others. The company has fantastic customer support and adheres strictly to modern hardware standards. Their shared server option meets most customer’s hosting requirement for a strong web presence. Besides, it provides other excellent hosting packages for people outgrowing the traffic limit for shared web hosting including its dedicated and VPS hosting niches.
In general, BlueHost has gained a lot of reputation due to the company’s appealing reputation for usability and affordability, which works well for both web professionals and amateurs. Surprisingly, it includes some bells and whistles like marketing credits, free domains, unlimited emails – just to name a few.
But, just as many other popular choices in other fields aside from web hosting, this common option does not translate to being the best when evaluating quality. Let’s take a look behind the scenes and see if BlueHost excels in quality.
About Bluehost.com
To get started, let’s have a look at the hosting company itself.
Bluehost is founded in 1996 by Danny Ashworth and Matt Heaton in Provo, Utah. And, over the years worked its way up with about 750 employees to be one of the most popular and affordable shared hosting services out there today. This company now powers over 2 million websites globally.
This hosting company has an awesome relationship with the WordPress community. BlueHost, since 2006, has being WordPress handpick hosting company. They take pride in their support for several free open-source programs such as WordPress, remarkable hosting infrastructure, and all year-round customer support.
While the Bluehost’s dedicated support team and long history do offer certain levels of confidence, critical evaluation spots some dismaying problems with several Bluehost reviews.
They offer an incredible recommendation for their hosting services without putting any objective metrics or data like uptime and load time into consideration.
Although they are well-known for their WordPress hosting and novice-friendly services, speed and performance are kings.
Thus, we’ll discuss below the scores of Bluehost on these factors and many more.
Pros of Bluehost.com
Just like any other web hosting reviews on our website, we ensure that our reviews are unbiased and offer transparent information to help you decided better on the perfect web host for your business.
Thus, here’s detailed information on the incredible benefits offered by Bluehost
Impressive Uptime (greater than 99.99%)
Bluehost has an uptime that is almost perfect, after undergoing a major overhaul, to be higher than 99.99 percent, which more than what most web host offers out there. Since December 2017 to September 2018, the hosting company has only experienced five outages. The phenomenal uptime of Bluehost is way more than the industry standard of 99.94 percent.
In August 2017, the company had a very low uptime, which they purport was due to several DDoS attacks at its servers and since then the numbers have been very remarkable.
In general, Bluehost offers one of the most reliable web hosting services in our entire reviews.
Fast Page Loading
In early 2016, Bluehost has a low speed that is nothing less close to satisfactory.
With a mean speed of at least 1,500 ms, they were not fast enough and never had a spot on our top 10. As a matter of fact, they ranked No. 20 on several reviews in late 2016.
But, since summer 2017, this company has boosted its load times by almost 300%.
With a mean load time of about 424 ms, which is an incredible turnaround and has ranked high on the top 5 fastest web host on a lot of reviews out there. These surprising unexpected and sudden change in their page load times, prompt questions such as how they could make such drastic improvement. They claim it was due to their strong desire to improve their customer experience and investment in upgrading their Bluerock’ server park. And ever since they have offered a steady fast page load time.
Affordable Introductory Pricing
In previous years, it was hard using any of Bluehost’s services as a result of its hefty price tag and average services.
In 2018, Bluehost had not only made a significant improvement in its load times and uptime but also earned a spot in most affordable web host available on the market.
While Bluehost may not be the cheapest provider out there, its low-price tag and overhaul servers make them a bang-for-the-buck option for both amateur and professional.
Great Security Options
Now, it’s more than essential to go for a web host with enough security options considering the numbers of significant data breaches and cyber-attacks spreading rapidly in the marketplace.
Fortunately, Bluehost features a wide range of excellent tools to prevent and combat several common risks and attacks.
For instances, you can use tools such as Spam Hammer, Spam Experts, and Spam Assassin to prevent spam. It also allows CloudFlare to help protect you from the hazardous DDoS attacks that can lead to your site being shut down due to a proliferating amount of fake traffic sent to your website from different source.
Also, it offers hotlink protection ensuring no one can steal your content and images, SSH access for more secure web sessions, IP address blacklist for blocking troublesome individuals, and many more.
Further, you can encrypt your directories, manage private keys and manage digital certificates, and create a blacklist for IP addresses.
That’s not all: Bluehost integrates multiple security layers to protect users on a level of the account.
With an account on this web host, you can activate the 2-factor authentication, and have redesigned their whole website with token account validation.
In short: Bluehost comes stacked with a plethora of security options that ensures you, your website and audience are safe.
Lots of Integrations, Apps, & E-commerce Features
Aside from the numerous security features discussed above, Bluehost includes a dashboard rich with lots of application allowing users to incorporate differs services such as CloudFlare, Google Apps directly into the cPanel.
To enjoy all the perks Google offers both small and large business, all you have to do is integrate into your BlueHost platforms Google apps.
On the other hand, CloudFlare is a well-known, free CDN service capable of increasing the speed of your site and ensure maximum security by protecting you from potential breaches and hacks.
Moreso, the web host, offers all its eCommerce features in a simplified form, which makes it easy for anyone to seamlessly customize an online store with an incessant number of shopping cart options. Plus, installing this software is a breeze, simply click on the install button, and you are good to go.
Cons of Bluehost.com
Customer Support Could Be Better Technical Know-how
While Bluehost has improved in terms of its response to customer inquiries over the last few months, the quality of the service offered by the customer support team is still lagging compared to other web hosts out there.
It’s a consensus that they handle issues with ultra-fast speed. However, according to customers’ reviews, it takes a lot of inquiries to have an issue resolved, as they eluded some technical questions.
Site Migrations Comes with a Fee
Most hosting providers often help customers move their existing sites to their service without charging a dime. Besides, these procedures are easy and quick. And, more important, you get to win a customer for the next couple of years.
Sadly, Bluehost does not offer this.
They charge a fee of $149.99 for migration and will only transfer not more than 20 email accounts and five websites.
But wait, there’s more. Bluehost charges you an extra fee of $79.99 for a simple introductory of its services which last for only 45 minutes.
This cost makes it a wrong choice for people on a tight budget, as they would have to pay a lot to get started with Bluehost.
