Bluehost overview

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Bluehost allows you to get a website up and running in no time. It's a reputable web host that is used by millions to host their projects online, start businesses, and create something new. What makes Bluehost so special? For one, it gives you a free domain name when you sign up and you can start hosting for just $ 2.75 per month. Bluehost offers these and many other features at an affordable price, making it the hosting provider on the market that offers the best value for money.

Bluehost compared to the best web hosting services

Bluehost lets you take advantage of a shared hosting plan for an entry-level price. If you want to be the first to create a website, Bluehost is a safe and affordable option that, as mentioned, also gives you a free domain name as part of the deal. This is a nice perk that sets it apart from the rest, along with its customer support options and affordable additional layers of hosting.

We can't call Bluehost the hosting provider that gives you the best value for money without seeing how it rivals any other provider in the market. To find out which hosting provider was really worth your time, we compared dozens of competitors and narrowed it down to the six best options. Check out all of our top deals for a more detailed look at each one and a buying guide.

Who is Bluehost Best For?

Bluehost is great for beginners starting up a website for the first or second time. Say you're a blogger starting out in your niche. Bluehost makes it easy to get started without losing any of the technical details.

Coupled with the customer support features and the easy-to-navigate cPanel, Bluehost ensures that your learning curve is as small as possible and makes your website available to the world with great availability. However, if you want to start an ecommerce business with tons of products and need the best website speed and dedicated hosting, then you should look at other options first.

Bluehost: the pros and cons

benefits

24/7 customer support: Not every company can offer 24/7 customer support, especially at such a low entry-level price. Bluehost's customer support is there for you when you launch your site and whenever you need additional support to fix site errors that are inevitable.

One year of a free domain: Possibly one of the most appealing features of Bluehost is the free domain name that you get for a whole year. This eliminates the extra step of contacting a third-party domain seller or investing more money at the start of your website.

Free SSL Certificate: An SSL certificate, also known as a Secure Sockets Layer certificate, ensures that the identity of your website is authenticated and encrypts important site information. In other words, it's a must have for any website that you publish. Fortunately, Bluehost offers free SSL certification.

Quick website setup: With Bluehost, you can easily get your website up and running in no time thanks to its intuitive and step-by-step setup. And if you run into any problems, you can have real-time access to the chat support function.

Beginner friendly: Bluehost is ideal for anyone looking to create and maintain a website for the first time. This is because setting up your website doesn't require any advanced knowledge of web management or coding. To sweeten the business, they partnered with WordPress and made sure that installing WordPress is a seamless part of the process.

disadvantage

Site Migration Fees: Granted, when it comes to migration benefits, Bluehost isn't necessarily your best bet. If you need help migrating your website, Bluehost will charge a minimum of $ 149 to migrate your website to or from another platform.

Not the best solution for high traffic websites: If you want to scale up an already busy website and need hosting to meet those specific needs, an entry-level Bluehost plan can't prevent it. You can always upgrade to the more expensive WordPress managed tiers, which we will discuss below.

Bluehost pricing

Bluehost offers several pricing tiers that are pretty straightforward. After looking through them here, you are still not sure which one is best for you. Contact them for a free consultation.

It's worth noting that the price points for each tier of shared hosting that I'm reviewing here only apply if you purchase a 36 month hosting plan in advance. If you opt for a 12 or 24 month plan, the monthly amounts will change accordingly.

If you opt for a monthly plan, your monthly hosting fee will also be a little more expensive. Regardless, Bluehost is still considered to be the cheapest and most valuable plan to choose, especially if you are a beginner.

Here's how each tier of shared hosting is broken down along with its value.

Shared hosting

A shared hosting Bluehost plan is hands down one of the easiest ways to start building your website. You can start with the basic plan for $ 2.95. This is good for building a site with 50GB of storage. That's generous considering they also come with free CDN and a free SSL certificate.

It doesn't stop there. Do you run some websites? Then you should try the Plus tier for $ 5.45 per month. It has everything in the baseline level, plus the ability to host and manage an unlimited number of websites, and it gives you access to Office 365 for 30 days. Not bad. This is the most convenient level if you want to reliably start more than one site from scratch without incurring excessive overheads.

The most recommended tier and the one that gets you the most bang for your buck under the shared hosting plan is the Choice Plus tier for $ 5.45 per month with added security features.

You get everything in the first and second tier plus free domain data protection and free automated backup for a full year. With internet security a growing concern in the online world and the price of this tier being the same as the Plus option, this is the clear winner in my book for affordable shared hosting plans. Additional security functions can only be a plus.

If you're looking for a bit more than that, consider the Pro tier, which comes in at $ 13.95 per month. This plan gives you additional CPU resources as well as a free dedicated IP.

As you can see, Bluehost goes to great lengths to personalize each tier so that they are helpful to meet your needs. I recommend that you take some time to fully review each tier and what they offer and get the best deal for your goals.

VPS hosting

VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting is when the hosting is on a shared server but acts as a dedicated virtual space for your site. VPS hosting has become very popular because it is cheaper than dedicated hosting, but it gives you better security and possibly better performance than shared hosting.

Guaranteed Resources is the name of the game when it comes to Bluehost's VPS hosting options. They do well against competitors as they only charge you $ 18.99 for the standard VPN feature. This includes 2 GB of RAM and an additional 1 TB of bandwidth.

If you look at every Bluehost offering it is clear that they have positioned themselves as a beginner friendly web host, but they also burn the candle on both ends by offering affordable dedicated and VPS hosting. That's a double win for hosting that you can count on if you ask me.

Special hosting

The great benefits of dedicated hosting are security, privacy, and even more control. If you know that the best of the best want to host your website for scalability and reliability, a dedicated Bluehost hosting plan is the way to go.

Is your website growing fast? Do you see more traffic every day? This is where you want to look into dedicated hosting, another reliable Bluehost plan.

To illustrate the power of a dedicated hosting plan, start with a whopping 500GB of storage, 4GB of RAM, and 5TB of bandwidth for just $ 79.99 per month. This makes Bluehost a premium contender in the market, even for the more expensive tiers of hosting.

Managed WordPress hosting

This is an all-in-one managed platform that can be customized to suit all your website needs. All of the pricing plans for managed WordPress hosting through Bluehost include incredibly fast speeds, marketing tools, and layered security features.

The most dynamic tier of hosting Bluehost has to offer is the managed WordPress option. You can either use the Create, Extend, or Scale option. Each one offers a different hosting plan to suit your exact needs. To make the best choice when choosing a managed WordPress option, you should base your decision on the traffic volume for which they are each appropriate.

Each plan is packed with tons of helpful features to help your website grow. This means storage space starting at 20GB, access to over 200 global servers, scheduled backups, staging environments and free SSL certification, to name a few.

Ultimately, what distinguishes each managed tier is its traffic capacity. Here is a brief overview:

Build – $ 19.95 per month, best for 50,000 monthly visitors
Grow – $ 29.95 per month, best for 150,000 monthly visitors
Scale – $ 49.95 per month, best for 500,000 monthly visitors

The traffic breakdown makes it easy to choose a managed WordPress hosting plan that gives you security and a lot of website availability.

Bluehost offers

At this point, you have received information on hosting pricing from Bluehost. But the fun doesn't stop there. In addition to the hosting plans, Bluehost offers other services.

Hosting

Unsurprisingly, shared hosting is Bluehost's most popular hosting plan as it gets you a foot in the door when it comes to getting your website up and running.

I would say the main reason Bluehosts shared hosting is high compared to other hosting providers is because of the free SSL certification and free domain offering. However, if you host your website on a server that you share space with other websites like yours, it does its job.

While shared hosting may be the best, most affordable hosting option for beginners, it is not what you want to hold onto as your website grows.

That is why there is dedicated hosting and VPS hosting. Dedicated hosting is a more robust, reliable hosting option for high-performance site performance. VPS hosting offers more power, flexibility, and control.

Online stores

If you have already decided to start your online shop with WordPress and WooCommerce, you can easily choose between the hosting levels Standard or Premium Store to get started.

For a store with a robust payment processing system that comes with plenty of analytics and the ability to create basic store backups, consider the standard offering at $ 15.95 per month.

Your business may be a little more complex than a simple business with your product lists. If you want to track subscriptions or online bookings and schedules, the premium tier is better suited as a very reliable e-commerce option.

I would say this is my first choice for a multi-faceted online shop with lots of moving parts. I'd rather pay a bit more for all of the premium features than need them and not have them to save a few extra bucks.

Live WordPress Support

Bluehost offers Blue Sky, a service that enables users to learn how to build, expand, and maintain a WordPress website through customized training and guidance. Live WordPress support starts at $ 29 per month for on-demand ticket support and backup assistance and goes up to $ 149 per month for SEO tools, help with content optimization, and mobile optimization, as well as access to Constant Contact.

Professional marketing services

In addition to hosting services, Bluehost has an offering to assist your business with design and marketing strategies so you have more time to focus on revenue generating activities and running your business.

The four main services offered by Bluehost in this area are:

Full service website support with design, marketing, and content help
SEO services to optimize your website and target keywords
PPC services to support pay-per-click campaigns and best practices to get more customers
Website migration assistance, including one-on-one meetings to review your website before and after each migration

The cost of these services is not listed on the Bluehost website. You'll need to contact them to discuss pricing and support options.

The best web hosting services

It is never a good idea to base your decision on information. I recommend reading my list of cheapest web hosting providers to ensure you are making the best choice for your specific needs. Here is a quick rundown of all of my recommendations:

Hostinger – Best Web Hosting Plan Under $ 1
Bluehost – The best value in web hosting
A2 Hosting – The best customer service
HostGator – The best cheap cloud hosting
iPage – Best Cheap Web Hosting Features
GoDaddy – The Best Cheap VPS Hosting

All in all, Bluehost is a reliable web hosting service that gives you the best value for money. It offers a great entry-level shared hosting plan for just $ 2.75 per month, a free domain name for a year, plus free SSL certification and plenty of customer support that you can access anytime.

Any comments on Bluehost as a great hosting service for beginner websites? Let me know in the comments.

Otherwise, you can start Bluehost here.

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