Bluehost is one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress-recommended hosting provider since 2005. But if you’re like most smart people, you don’t make decisions based on endorsements. You want to do your research and see how Bluehost compares to others in the market with real speed test results.
In July 2026, I tested Bluehost the same way I tested 14 other WordPress hosting companies, with an identical WordPress site on a custom domain, the same tools, and the same checklist.
This Bluehost review will show you the real numbers from my rigorous speed test using industry-standard benchmarking tools.
Quick Answer – Is Bluehost Worth It?
Yes, Bluehost is worth it if you are a beginner who’s looking to start a website. It scored 69 out of 100 on our WPBeginner Score, which places it 6th out of our 7 recommended hosts.
In our hosting speed test, Bluehost performed well and the website loaded with a 933 ms LCP (Largest content paint). It is one of the easiest hosts to start with, and WordPress.org has recommended it longer than any other host.
Their entry plan allows you to host up to 10 websites for $2.99 per month, and you get a free domain for the first year. It’s a great pick if you’re launching your first website, blog, or a small online store. However if your priority is raw speed and you have a high traffic eCommerce website, then you may want to look at a more managed WordPress hosting provider like Levamo.
Bluehost at a Glance
| Bluehost Test Summary (July 2026) | |
|---|---|
| WPBeginner Score | 69 / 100 |
| Speed (LCP) | 933 ms |
| Global response time | 599 ms average across 6 regions |
| Uptime | 100% over a 30-day monitoring window |
| Pricing | From $2.99/mo with our link, renews at $9.99/mo |
| Support | 24/7 live chat and “Ask Blu” AI assistant (no phone support on the entry plan) |
| Best for | Beginners building their first website |
You can see how Bluehost ranks against all the hosts I tested in our best WordPress hosting comparison, which uses the same data as this review.
About Bluehost
Bluehost started in 2003 and now powers more than 5 million websites. It has been on WordPress.org’s recommended hosting list since 2005, longer than any other company.
While the official WordPress endorsement matters, I did not let it influence my review. The verdict below comes from what my hosting speed test actually measured.
Pros and Cons of Bluehost
Pros
- Officially recommended by WordPress.org since 2005
- Simplest setup of any host I tested – Bluehost installs WordPress for you at signup
- 10 websites, 10 GB NVMe storage, a free CDN, and AI setup tools on the $2.99 entry plan – most hosts at this price allow one site
- Staging, SSH access, and object caching included on every plan – features some hosts save for higher tiers
- Reasonable renewal at $9.99 per month, with a free domain for the first year
- 100% uptime during our 30-day monitoring window
Cons
- Slower speed than many other hosts we tested – 933 ms LCP, where the fastest host we tested loaded in 358 ms
- Weekly backups only, where DreamHost includes daily backups at a lower price
- No phone support and no domain privacy on the entry plan
- Aggressive upsells during signup – you can uncheck them, but you have to pay attention
- Several “free” extras convert to paid after the first year or first month (more details in the fine print section below)
How I Tested Bluehost (Methodology)
I used the same testing protocol for every hosting company in our comparison. I set up an identical WordPress site with a default theme and test content, including images, on a custom domain with no caching plugins.
Then I ran the same four tests – GTmetrix for speed and LCP, k6 for stress with 50 virtual users at the same time, a response-time test from 6 global regions, and 30 days of Uptime Robot monitoring.
Those four tests make up the performance side of the WPBeginner Score, which counts for 80% of the total. Each test carries a set weight, so no single lucky number can carry a host.
The other 20% of the score comes from value. For that part I look at what the plan really costs and gives you in return – the intro price, the renewal price, how many sites and how much storage you get, the plan limits, and the quality of support.
The full methodology, the exact weights, and every host’s raw numbers are in our best WordPress hosting guide.
Bluehost Performance Test Results
Below you can find my full Bluehost speed test results.
Speed Test – 933 ms LCP
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how quickly the main content of a page appears. It is the speed number Google’s Core Web Vitals care about most.
My Bluehost test site showed an LCP of 933 ms, and the full page loaded in the same time.
I will be honest about this number. Under one second load time is fine for a starter site with no optimization.
However, when I tested other popular hosts, the median LCP was 659 ms, and the fastest hosting company, Levamo, loaded in 358 ms.
If raw speed is your top priority, Bluehost is not the winner on our data.
Server Response Time – 599 ms Global Average
Speed test tools load the whole page with images included, but that’s only one part of the performance. To see raw server speed, I also measured time to first byte (TTFB) from data centers in 6 regions around the world.
Bluehost averaged 599 ms across the 6 regions.
Response times were good in North America and most regions. South America and Japan were noticeably slower.
Our test site ran in Bluehost’s default US location, so this pattern makes sense. If your audience is mostly in the US, then Bluehost speed will be just fine for you.
If your audience is global, then make sure to turn on the included Cloudflare CDN. It serves your content from locations closer to your visitors.
Stress Test – Blocked by Cloudflare Protection
To see how a host behaves under a traffic spike, I send 50 virtual users to the test site with k6 by Grafana Labs and record the P95 response time.
When I ran this on Bluehost’s test site in our latest round, the test could not complete. Bluehost’s built-in Cloudflare integration flagged the synthetic traffic as an attack and blocked it, even after allow-listing.
Our last completed stress run on Bluehost held a 140 ms P95 at 50 concurrent users, with no failed requests.
The block itself has an upside. The same protection that stopped my load test is what stands between your site and a real DDoS attack.
But it also means I cannot give you a current under-load number for Bluehost server, and I would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
Uptime – 100% Over 30 Days
I monitored the Bluehost test site with UptimeRobot, checking every 5 minutes. Over the 30-day window, it recorded 100% uptime with no incidents.
Bluehost also guarantee their shared hosting with a 99.99% uptime SLA. The fine print is worth knowing because if uptime falls below that, then you can claim a single 5% monthly credit, and you must claim it within 30 days.
In our monitoring window, Bluehost stayed above its own promise.
How Bluehost Compares to Other Hosts We Tested
The speed test numbers on their own do not give you the full picture. Here is how Bluehost performed compared to other similarly priced hosts from our comparison, all tested with the identical setup.
| Host | LCP | Global response | Uptime | Intro / renewal | WPBeginner Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bluehost | 933 ms | 599 ms | 100% | $2.99 / $9.99 | 69 / 100 |
| Hostinger | 659 ms | 227 ms | 100% | $2.69 / $10.99 | 88 / 100 |
| SiteGround | 608 ms | 369 ms | 99.96% | $2.99 / $17.99 | 75 / 100 |
| DreamHost | 986 ms | 658 ms | 100% | $1.99 / $7.99 | 64 / 100 |
The WPBeginner Score weighs performance at 80% and value at 20%. Bluehost’s 69 reflects exactly what you see above – it trails on speed and response time, while its value for a beginner is strong (10 websites where most entry plans give you one).
To see the full rankings, and the raw data for every host we tested, check out our best WordPress hosting guide.
Bluehost’s Infrastructure and Technology
Most other Bluehost reviews skip what’s under the hood on their shared hosting platform, and I believe it’s worth highlighting.
Storage and caching – every plan runs on NVMe SSD storage, which is the faster generation of SSD. You also get two caching layers included, static content caching and object caching, on every plan.
Some hosts charge extra for object caching, so seeing it in the $2.99 plan at Bluehost is a genuine plus.
Data centers – Bluehost recently migrated to the Oracle Cloud data centers which offer state of the art infrastructure. Bluehost allows you to choose from different data center locations across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia during checkout. I recommend choosing the one closest to your audience.
CDN and security – free Cloudflare CDN comes with every plan, along with free SSL from Let’s Encrypt and malware scanning. The Business plan and higher add an extra web application firewall and DDoS protection.
Developer and maintenance tools – every plan includes SSH and WP-CLI access, a one-click WordPress staging site, and managed WordPress updates. Bluehost keeps your WordPress core updated for you, which removes a maintenance task most beginners forget.
Bluehost Hosting Plans and Pricing
Bluehost offers shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, and WooCommerce hosting. For most readers of this review, the shared WordPress plans are the relevant ones.
- Starter – 10 websites, 10 GB NVMe storage, 5 email accounts, and capacity Bluehost rates at around 40,000 visits a month. $2.99 per month for the first term with our link, renews at $9.99 per month. Staging, SSH, and object caching are included even here.
- Business – 50 websites, 50 GB NVMe storage, unlimited email accounts, and capacity for around 200,000 visits a month. Starts at $5.99 per month, renews at $13.99. This tier adds phone support, a web application firewall, DDoS protection, and free domain privacy for the first year.
- eCommerce Essentials – 100 websites, 100 GB storage, and capacity for around 400,000 visits a month. Starts at $13.99 per month, renews at $21.99. It auto-installs WooCommerce and bundles commerce add-ons – subscriptions, memberships, paid courses, an affiliate program, and one-click checkout – that would cost real money as separate plugins.
All plans include a free domain for the first year, free SSL, the Cloudflare CDN, malware scanning, the free Yoast SEO plugin, free WPForms plugin, and weekly backups. All plans also come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
In my experience, a new site will not outgrow the Starter plan for a long time for most small business use-cases.
You can move to the Business plan when you need phone support, domain privacy, or the firewall, and pick eCommerce Essentials only if you are building an online store on day one.
Free and Paid Hosting Addons
Bluehost’s headline price is honest, but several extras start free and quietly become paid. Knowing these up front will save you surprise charges.
- Free domain – free for the first year on 12 or 36-month terms, and you must claim it within 90 days. After year one it renews at the standard domain rate. If you cancel hosting within the 30-day guarantee window, Bluehost deducts a non-refundable domain fee from your refund. This is fairly standard practice across all shared hosts that offer a free domain.
- Professional Email – a one-month free trial that auto-renews at $2.99 per month unless you cancel. Your 5 included cPanel email accounts on Starter are separate and stay free.
- Domain privacy – free for the first year on Business and up. Starter does not include it at all, so your registration details are public unless you pay for it.
- SiteLock and CodeGuard – paid add-ons Bluehost offers for extra security and backups. The included malware scanning and weekly backups cover the basics, so skip these at signup and add them later if you need them.
- Refund rules – the money-back guarantee covers hosting only, runs for 30 days, and excludes add-ons like domains. Bluehost gives no refunds after day 30.
Bluehost for WordPress Beginners
This is where Bluehost really stands out. When you create a Bluehost account, they install WordPress by default, so there is no setup step to get wrong.
The custom dashboard is the clearest I have used on a budget host. Websites, email, domains, and security sit in one place, and cPanel is still there for advanced tasks like databases.
Bluehost has also added AI site creation tools and AI agents that help you build and manage your website. I would treat these as a convenience rather than a reason to choose a host, but for a first-timer they remove real friction.
Bluehost Customer Support
Bluehost offers 24/7 live chat, a large knowledge base with step-by-step guides and videos, and an AI assistant called “Ask Blu” that handles common questions instantly.
The entry plan does not include phone support, so chat is your only option if you start on the Starter plan. There is also no ticket system, so an issue that needs multiple sessions means re-explaining it in chat.
To be fair, phone support is rare at budget hosting prices, and most hosts at this level stick to chat. Bluehost adds phone on the Business plan or higher. Of all the budget hosts that we tested, SiteGround was one of the few that included phone support on every plan.
Who Should Use Bluehost and Who Should Look Elsewhere
Choose Bluehost if you are building your first website, blog, or small business site and want the simplest possible start. The official WordPress.org recommendation, the automatic install, and 10 websites on the cheapest plan make it the lowest-friction way in.
Its 100% uptime in our monitoring backs the reliability claim.
Look elsewhere if raw speed is your priority, since Hostinger and SiteGround both beat Bluehost by a wide margin in our tests. The same goes if you want daily backups on a budget (DreamHost includes them at $1.99), need phone support on an entry plan (SiteGround), or run a high-traffic site that needs proven performance under load (try Levamo and see our full hosting comparison).
Final Verdict – Is Bluehost the Right Choice for You?
Bluehost is perfect for beginners who are just starting out or someone building a small business website. They’re officially recommended by WordPress.org which is a big endorsement.
My verdict – if this is your first website, visit Bluehost and start on the Starter plan. If speed is your deciding factor or you have outgrown your first site, our best WordPress hosting comparison shows which host won each category on the same tests.
FAQs About Bluehost
1. What are the disadvantages of Bluehost?
Based on our tests, the main ones are speed (933 ms LCP, not as fast as others that we tested), weekly rather than daily backups, no phone support or domain privacy on the entry plan, and upsells during signup. Several free extras also convert to paid after the first year, which the fine print section above covers.
2. Is Bluehost good for beginners?
Yes. This is actually where Bluehost really stands out. Bluehost installs WordPress for you at signup, the dashboard is simple, and 24/7 live chat is there when you get stuck. It is the host we recommend most often to someone building their first site.
3. Can Bluehost handle high traffic?
Bluehost rates the Starter plan for around 40,000 visits per month, which covers most new sites comfortably. In our last completed stress test, Bluehost held a 140 ms P95 response with 50 concurrent users and no failures.
Bluehost’s own Cloudflare protection blocked our most recent re-test, so we could not measure its current under-load behavior. For consistently high-traffic or eCommerce sites, a managed host is the safer pick.
4. Can I make an online store with WooCommerce on Bluehost?
Yes. The eCommerce Essentials plan auto-installs WooCommerce and includes premium commerce add-ons like subscriptions, memberships, and one-click checkout.
For a new store with modest traffic it works well. As your store grows, plan to upgrade, because stores are harder on a server than blogs.
5. Is Bluehost better than GoDaddy?
For WordPress, I believe Bluehost is definitely better than GoDaddy. Bluehost’s onboarding and dashboard are more beginner-friendly, and its pricing is clearer for small sites.
We have not run GoDaddy through our new speed test protocol, so I will not compare speed numbers until we have, but based on my historical experience, I am pretty confident in my answer.
6. How does Bluehost compare with SiteGround and Hostinger?
On our identical tests, both SiteGround and Hostinger were faster. SiteGround loaded in 608 ms and Hostinger in 659 ms, against Bluehost’s 933 ms.
Bluehost counters with the simplest setup and 10 websites on its entry plan. SiteGround costs more at renewal ($17.99 per month), and Hostinger also skips phone support.
The comparison table above has the full numbers, and our SiteGround vs Bluehost comparison goes deeper.
7. Where are Bluehost’s servers located?
Bluehost recently moved to Oracle Cloud, and they now offer server locations across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia that you pick at checkout. Our test site ran in the default US location, which is why our North American response times were strong while Japan and South America lagged.
The included CDN closes most of that gap for global audiences.
8. Which Bluehost plan should I get?
We recommend starting with their Starter plan. It covers 10 websites and roughly 40,000 monthly visits, which is more than a new site needs.
Upgrading later takes a few clicks, so there is no reason to overbuy on day one.
WPBeginner users get an exclusive 70% off on Bluehost with our Bluehost coupon.
Changelog
- July 2026 – Rebuilt the review around our July 2026 test data (speed tested July 21, response time July 24, 30-day uptime window). Added the WPBeginner Score, the comparison table against similarly priced hosts, the infrastructure section, the pricing fine print, and corrected the Starter renewal price to $9.99 per month.
We hope this review helped you with your WordPress hosting research and helps you choose the right WordPress host for your needs. You may also want to see our pick of must-have WordPress plugins for business websites.
If you have any questions or feedback about my Bluehost review, please send me a message. I love hearing from our readers. Also you can scroll below to read real Bluehost user reviews from other business owners from around the world.
Larry Lannan
I started a local news blog 4 1/2 years ago. After a bad experience with another hosting company, I asked around and found lots of satisfied customers using Bluehost. I had never used Wordpress before. Bluehost had outstanding support and helped me get started on Wordpress and everything has run smoothly the last year. Choosing Bluehost has been a good decision for me.
Rick Sampson
I am well pleased with Bluehost but have had an ongoing problem with WordPress … the inability to easily post email addresses. I’m not a “coder,” so I need a shortcut to do it … and I haven’t been able (in over a year) to find one or even how to find one!
Daniel Bader
Bluehost is an awesome hosting company, and I’ve tried several others in the past. Any issues I’ve had have been resolved quickly and professionally. Keep up the superb service! I applaud the CEO for running such a great company.
Thank you!
Donna Stephan
Hosting is very good. The pricing can get out of control.
Victor Bennison
After unhappy experiences with some other providers I became happily acquainted with Bluehost. I’m particularly happy with their customer service. I’ve been a happy customer for many years.
Jeff Brown
I have had no negative experiences wit BlueHost, and am very satisfied so far! Thanks for keeping the prices reasonable! Jeff
Varun
Hi,
I am using BlueHost from last 2 year, really great hosting provides and nowdays its was fabulous. Thanks for the review excellent article and written off. Please keep sharing.
Thanks,
Regards,
Varun
aurora
Honestly, I’ve been happy with blue host either. Support is a hit or miss; some of their staff are willing to help you out even more because they are bored, but some won’t because they’re talking to a whole bunch of clients at the same time.
Mansoor Bhanpurawala
I am researching on Bluehost and the opinion of people here are all very valuable, thanks for sharing and thanks to the site!
Richard Covert
Mixed review for BlueHost.
*I have had good service and customer support
* I have waited an hour to get to the first level of support- horrible music
* I’ve had white screens of death that we not fixed form restoration from back-up
*I’ve gone through long periods of 99.9% uptime
*I’ve had a couple month of less than 90% uptime according to Pingdom
*Bluehost tried upgrade my service even after I restored my renewal setting to my normal settings.
*Bluehost decided I should renew for 3 years instead of 1 Year
If you have great service from BlueHost great. Not everyone does.
BlueHost cpanel is great
I am giving DreamHost a try for my newest site and podcast home base..
Debra
Terrible phone support. I have been on hold for 47 minutes now, waiting for billing to answer.
Steve Q
Like many here, I’ve been using BH for years. In that time I have set up many client sites there. But no more. Their support has fallen off markedly over the past year or two with extremely long queues and inconsistent quality in the support reps – some are well-trained and other not at all.
It seems to be the nature of hosting. You find a great host and within a couple years you watch them slowly dwindle until they become just another go-daddy.
Noel Leonard
BlueHost is sending emails presenting themselves as GoDaddy; claiming that peoples accounts are suspended for non-payment. Everything in the email seems completely legit for GoDaddy; but if you click the link to resolve the issue, it takes you to BlueHost.com.
Shah Faisal
Its not from BlueHost , Someone is referring u to bluehost.
Affiliate Links
Ryan J
Blue Host is generally okay. The server my site is on is down today for a DDOS attack. Has been going on for more than 12 hours. If you think 12+ hours of downtime is good, so long as the hosting is cheap, this is the company for you.
J. Prendergast
I was with Bluehost shared hosting for years until they started outbound filtering of email which causes the mail forwarding set in cpanel to break. The effect of the change was that you would get some mail forwarded, but other mail would drop and you would never know. I had to move my hosting to another company since not receiving some emails is not something I could tolerate.
Laura
Where’d you move to? I’m looking for one who’s CS I can reach on the phone without holding for half a day.
David
Help Me to Choice…. OPTIMIZED HOSTING for WordPress (blogger) or VPS HOSTING (Standard) on Bluehost which are the great package for my growing website? is there any suggestion Please….
Thank you so much in advance
David
Sacha
I’ve used Bluehost for a while for several websites and I haven’t had any major problems.
I’ve had a few minor issues, but the staff have also helped me put things right in a matter of minutes.
I also like the WordPress installer.
My only dislike is the pricing of the domain names. Not a big problem, I can just register my domain names through GoDaddy.
Alastair Bell
In the main I’ve been quite happy with BlueHost (though my usage has been very very light so I haven’t had any issues with traffic).
I wasn’t particularly impressed in my last invoice to find I had an increase in costs and an associated entry “Upgrade Plus Web Hosting” – I had no knowledge of any ‘upgrade’ nor any need for it and in my view should have had some correspondence to say what it was at the very least.
I had been thinking about cancelling the hosting anyway (I’ve not used it at all the past 18 months) and the price increase was the push required.
Marcelo
Bluehost used to be a decent host.
These days went from bad to worse. Support takes at least more than 10 minutes to respond to your question.
I purchased a SSL certificate more than 10 days ago and it was not implemented. I’ve contacted Support 4 times already for this issue and nothing.
Very frustrating!
Sacha H
I wanted to create a small WordPress website and I decided to host it on BlueHost shared hosting because they are reccomended by WordPress themselves.
I must say that they are really good.
They actully have a big blue button in the control panel that says Install WordPress which is really helpful.
I just installed WordPress with MOJO Marketplace and focused on my website.
Overall, BlueHost are great if you just want hassle-free WordPress hosting.
Sacha
BlueHost seem pretty good.
I have a WordPress website hosted with them and I haven’t had any issues.
I especially like the 1-click installation with MOJO Marketplace.
I would highly recommend them if you just want to host a basic WordPress website.
Irene
Beware! Awful hosting. Crooks and tricksters. They promise full refund you get part of it. They tried to cheat me many times during only 2 weeks. They tried to charge $50 for a wordpress theme each month instead of one time fee. Beware of these crooks.
darius miller
We have used bluehost for three years. Service interruptions are common. Hold times are awful. I was just on hold for 40 minutes with tech support trying to resolve yet another service interruption. Called the sales number and it was answered by a person in three seconds.
Bruce Wilson
If you like a confusing control panel and waiting on hold for 30 minutes for technical support, Bluehost is for you!
Brook
I was a Bluehost customer for many years, and back in the days when Matt Heaton ran the company things were great. Over the past two years their service has deteriorated badly; lots of down-time, auto-renewed accounts when set to “manual”, renewed an account which was not mine on my credit card!
Starting mid-2014 I gradually closed / shifted all my sites from BH to other hosts. Sorry BH – you were excellent under Matt Heaton, but these days… forget it.
Anonymous
I’ve not been a customer of Bluehost, but one of my friends has an account with them for several years. In the past year, my friend’s server kept getting hacked. Upon contacting Bluehost, my friend couldn’t get his site back up despite that Bluehost said they would help. Mind you that my friend is a small business owner who has little knowledge about web stuff, and I believe the majority of hosting account owners are just like him. Therefore, they would naturally turn to their hosting companies for help when things go down. Unfortunately, Bluehost has failed twice in helping him out in the past year, big time.
My friend’s website got hacked sometime in May or June of 2014. Bluehost managed to upsell him and make him purchase their sitelock service. My friend paid for the service, but Bluehost didn’t get his websites back up. In the end I had to jump in and troubleshoot the code for him and remove/replace the hacked files. Months later, his server got hacked again. This type, with a different type of attack that result in a similar end result. The code were inserted into many locations in his server, and seemed to have been spreading by day. My friend turned to me for help again, and in the end I went through each of the contaminated file to fix the problems and got the websites up again.
We don’t know what has allowed the hack to take place, especially given that my friend had purchased the sitelock function with Bluehost. I was concerned that it would happen again, so I wanted to zip up his current root folder to create a backup on the server. You know, I just don’t want to download potentially contaminated files onto my computer plus he’s got a huge root folder. I tried zipping up his files in the file manager inside cPanel, it takes forever and I never ended up seeing the finished compressed file in the server. I then tried to create a backup via ManageWP. ManageWP generated an error that had to do with the server killing compression processes due to timeout issues. So I got on live chat with Bluehost on my friend’s behalf. I began the chat with them at 11am and now it’s 1:04pm. The guy I chatted with wasn’t able to fix it, and he just transferred me to another person when I hadn’t had a chance to see what he’s typed yet. Now I’m with another person and may have to waste even more time for him to say the same thing the last rep did. The last rep basically asked me to use FTP clients like filezilla. I told him that filezilla doesn’t have the function to compress files in remote servers. He then asked if I knew about SSH… However, zipping up a folder in your server shouldn’t be this huge hassle at all. I have hosting accounts with 2 other companies, and their file managers can compress my root folders under 20 minutes even if they’re large files.
I especially find it unacceptable when my friend didn’t get the support from Bluehost to fix anything. He has been paying almost double the price of what other hosting companies would charge for a similar package, and he’s not getting what he deserves to have out of this deal at all. Bottom line is, there’re better service providers out there who are more responsible and would cost less.
Tilak
I am also using bluehost for last five years, services offered by them is good but their terms and conditions changes time to time. I faced lot of problem with this hosting and planning to switch over to other. The reasons:
1. They automatically upgraded my hosting account during the renew process. when asked to customer people they can’t downgrade my account.
2. Customer support is really pathetic. They can’t solve problems efficiently.
john
Bluehost has been far better over the last year than 1&1 internet, my first hosting provider for a few months after starting my website.
But there are MAJOR problems with Bluehost — which is something I am realizing only after month 10 and trying — with serious hiccups — to upgrade from Bluehost VPS to Bluehost Dedicated Servers.
What Bluehost does well is help get 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 1&1 would not even touch.
What Bluehost is AWFUL at is far worse, however.
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.
To top it off, when something is REALLY WRONG — they have no clue how to fix it. you will spend hours if not days calling back, explaining the entire issue again, and then getting the same crappy story.
their CSR people are nice, but generally spotty in being able to identify any causes beyond the absolute basics. once a problem goes to an “admin” — you need to walk away.
Either it will be fixed in 15 minutes, or prepare to wait up to three weeks for zero reply or help or updates.
Once an “admin” is working on an issue, the regular CSR people cannot touch it, nor provide updates.
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM
is the price. prepare to spend up to $350 monthly for service and servers that are SLOW AND FAILURE_PRONE.
prepare to receive zero actual expertise when you call, and BEWARE that many of the customer-service people will recommend solutions that actually make a site far, far worse in the long run.
Finally, when you do upgrade to the DEDICATED SERVER, expect very little/no improvement in performance versus the VPS accounts.
Overall, I am thinking of leaving Bluehost and am spending time investigating web servers FOR SCALE and ACTUAL EXPERTISE.
For what Bluehost bills, they are a D+ solution overall.
And the servers crash ***FREQUENTLY***
Laura
Got my annual Bluehost hosting renewal notice and just before clicking “okay” was told that my new 1-year “upgrade plus web hosting” would be $143.88 vs. the ~$80 I used to pay! I’m now on Chat with a customer service rep saying that I don’t need “upgrade plus” shared hosting but am not being given an alternative in the checkout cart. The chat is taking forever (with a robot?)
Meanwhile their site shows these rates: http://www.bluehost.com/shared
Addendum–the robot just quoted me a price of $81.49 and says they’ll put through the order for me. Hope this works…
Joshua
Too expensive for what I’m doing, there are a lot of there webhosting companies now that can do pretty much the same job the A LOT cheaper. I tried to renew and they pretty much doubled the original price trig to charging almost 150 a year. I didn’t have any problems, but they need some better prices
Charlie
Used BluHost when I was thinking about starting a website. When I signed up I saw that it was like $4 a mont and thought that was great. Well I get an alert on my phone that I was charged $150. Turns out they charge you for 36 months worth of everything up front as well as the domain name. They game me absolutely NO warning about this. BUT, when I live chatted with one of their reps he sent me an email with the cancellation form and within 10 minutes I had every penny that they charged me back in my account so I have to give them credit for that.
Altaf Hussain
Well I vouch for their shared hosting, been with them for a decade, given them several referral business, most of my clients were with bluehost shared. But dedicated hosting sucks. I had a very very bitter experience with bluehost dedicated hosting. I will never ever suggest anyone here, nor will I renew the contract with them. Yeah I know I can cancel the account and get refund, just being there as we are in the middle of something.
Think 100 times before signing up with bluehost for dedicated hosting. If there was rating of below -100 I would give them one. The biggest mistake of my hosting career is a dedicated hosting with bluehost. For shared hosting i’m still with them, The worst ever downtime, and its happening everyday, thanks to the loads of monitoring softwares and websites who are sending in all those reports.
Hal Gilley
I had several sites hosted by Blue Host and was somewhat satisfied until attempting to close my accounts. I was moving and unable to keep my domain up to date so I closed all but unfortunately forgot one. This was very unfortunate for me due to the fact that auto renewal was operational and my email address had changed due to the COX network.
Alex from Blue Host refused to work with me concerning my issue and even said Blue Host would fight any attempts by me to dispute the $25 charge with discover. WOW, this is certainly NOT customer service. Quite the opposite. I had no access to email to receive the reminder of 3 day renewal.
The only thing remaining is to post my TRUTHFUL as well as regretful experience on all Web hosting review sites. Discover will also be disputing the charge on my behalf.
Jan Gibson
Have used Bluehost for 2 years now and they have been very reliable. HOWEVER, when your current contract expires, be prepared for a large price increase and I’m talking over 60%. This is ridiculous. Looking for another good provider if anyone has any suggestions?
Christine
Justhost – so far haven’t increased their promo price upon renewal.
Geraldine Forster
Well I have to say that I am NOT at all happy with Bluehost.. I signed up with them yesterday after giving them all my credit card details and address in the UK.. As I am a traveler just in case they needed to contact me I listed my Thailand mobile telephone number… All was accepted and even receive the confirmation email that I could get started on my (Very Urgent0 website.. When hey ho after a few hours I receive another email saying that my account had been deactivated!!! After much ado on chat .. I was told that as my phone number didn’t coincide with the country of my address my account had been frozen! They then said I should phone them from my mobile in Thailand to the USA!! I did ask them if they were going to pay for the call! Now they say I have to send a photocopy of my Passport or Driving license plus a photo copy of my credit card ..
I personally think this is disgusting.. they have all my details and my credit card details.. Plus whatever way, if I wish to cancel I still have to send them more info and to top it all I cant recover my domain name… I leave you all to form your own opinions
Rajat
I am thinking of hosting my site on bluehost. Should i register my domain with them too or register is from somewhere else?
Editorial Staff
Bluehost gives you a free domain, so why not take advantage of that offer.
Admin
Sib
Speaking from experience, I wouldn’t recommend registering the domain name and hosting with the same company. What happened in our case was that we moved to another hosting company for better service, and the previous company didn’t “push through the DNS for nearly a week. We were not in control of our own domain name. Even though we created a cname and pointed to the new server, the former (unreliable) service had to “push it through” – and they took their time in doing so. Nearly a week of down time. An obvious act of retaliation for moving hosting to another company. I would keep those two separate. Sib
Chris
I have been very happy with Bluehost hosting, but I see no advantage to having them also be the registrar other than convenience of having just one bill. I usually see what sales or deals are going on through several registrars. I say just find whoever seems to be cheap on domains and fills your needs. Google Domains for example gives you dynamic dns and domain privacy for free, which you won’t find most places.
Eliza
I believe bluehost is the best of all.
Editorial Staff
Eliza, yes they are pretty good
In the past, they didn’t have options for large sites, but now they even added dedicated servers. It’s nice to see how they are evolving.
Admin
Max Iceman
I am really glad that i choose BH. Never had any problems with them.They have live support and money back guarantee. I signed up for 3 years( the best price option), and will do it again.
Luis
I am researching on Bluehost and the opinion of people here are all very valuable, thanks for sharing and thanks to the site!
Editorial Staff
You are very welcome Luis. That’s why we created this page, so others can make an educated decision.
Admin
Josephine Nolan
I haven’t had the issues noted here, and I’m a ten out of ten reviewer for Bluehost for customer service. Since I don’t want to maintain expensive servers, Bluehost’s level of service is critical. They’ve never failed to fix an issue — mostly my issues, not theirs — and they won’t hang up the phone until you’re satisified it’s fixed. I have Network Solutions, GoDaddy and two others for other sites, but NetSol charges $65 an hour to troubleshoot WP sites. None really can match the support at Bluehost. If I did have speed issues… as I did on one site… I’d call. They found I was right and within thirty minutes had improved the situation (they said the logs noted high load and they’d fix it, which they did.) Anyway, I won’t be moving any time soon. I count on them at 2 in the morning when I have a WP problem on a deadline.
Nate Silva
I’m considering moving to BH.
Speed is one of my primary concerns. I’m curious though … do you get good speed with the standard plans? Or do you need to purchase one of the “higher performance” options?
Thanks much for any and all help.
Editorial Staff
Speed depends on the size of your site. If your site is really big, then it will be slow and chances are that they will ask you to upgrade. But for smaller sites, the speed is just fine.
Also speed has other factors as well (such as site design, plugins you are using, etc).
Admin
Nate Silva
Right on, thanks for the help.
Drew
We were quite happy with Bluehost except for the past 3 months. Page load time is on average 9 seconds where it use to be 1.5 seconds. Am truly considering an alternate service.
my rating: 3 stars
Marc Whelan
I concur with this writer. I went from Godaddy to Bluehost about a couple years ago, based on top notch reviews of the time. Then a few months ago the power outage, and just last night my site was down for an hour or so. Granted, when I called tech support they stated they were already onto the issue because they had identified the issue, but, my chief complaint is server performance. It is not impressive at all. Yes I know I am on a shared host, but, the reviews I read at the time were singing the praises for this hosting company. I believe the lack of server performance for my site is impacting the number of return visitors. I too am looking for alternatives (hence coming here). I believe the author of this article/website should frequently re-evaluate the hosting companies listed. I am searching for an up to date listing of QUALITY hosting companies, that have servers built SPECIFICALLY for Wordpress sites.
Editorial Staff
Hey Marc,
Power outages can happen with other hosts as well. We do try to keep our list updated. In our opinion, Bluehost still is by far one of the best ways for users to get started. We are still using them for our smaller sites. They host over 850,000 WP sites more than most other hosts.
Yes, there are other hosts that cater specific to WordPress users for ex: WPEngine.
https://www.wpbeginner.com/hosting/wpengine/ << You can read user reviews here. However, their pricing is a bit on the high end. You can also try InMotion or HostGator. Their services are fairly comparable. WPBeginner is located on HostGator Dedicated Server plans.
Admin
Cagri Oner
Stay away from Bluehost. I’ve been using them nearly two years now. They have this policy of increasing their prices after one year. Also they are so slow, it takes minutes to load a simple page (that particular page, by the way, is a page from a website which has Grade A in terms of page speed grade)
Editorial Staff
Rather interesting complaint. Did you have caching on your WordPress site? How much traffic were you receiving? Sometimes, a bad plugin can cause the site to load super slow. Page speed only grades the output of the code not load time. It assumes that if the output is good, then the load time will too. Try using a tool like Pingdom to determine what is causing the speed issue.
Admin
david off
Bluehost puts an asterisk on all their prices, but they don’t explain anywhere what the catch is.
Allan_Vancouver
I’m using Bluehost at the moment, and not as happy with them as I had hoped. Support helpline answers quickly but their migration process, tools or procedures from a competitor, Godaddy, had problems requiring my calling many, many times.
I’m also finding performance to be an issue from time to time using wp-admin while creating and maintaining my new site that has only my traffic. 20 seconds to update a page is unacceptable.
Richard Miles
I’ve been on Bluehost for over 3 years, but it’s time to move. I’ve upgraded my package from them but still have speed issues. They say you get unlimited web hosting, but there’s a file limit. If you have a site that starts to get a lot of traffic, you get throttled, but they don’t tell you. I’ve liked them, I’ve liked the cPanel, I’ve liked the customer service, but the speed issue is killing me.
Editorial Staff
Ofcourse there is no such thing as unlimited. If you read our description of shared hosting here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-hosting/ it clearly tells you that. Imagine if $3.95 per month offered real unlimited hosting, then facebook and google will just use Bluehost rather than spending hundreds of million on server cost. To further elaborate on the wordpress hosting page, we wrote an entire page just about this:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/the-truth-about-shared-wordpress-web-hosting/
Shared web hosting option is created for smaller websites which includes new bloggers, small businesses, etc. If every site used their quota, then shared hosting would not work. But since only very few do, it works out very nicely for everyone. Users get a very affordable deal, and hosting companies make a good profit. As your site grow, you will HAVE to get better hosting (i.e move to VPS, or even a dedicated server).
Admin
Brenda Bourne
I have only just started building WordPress websites and immediately ran into problems with the hosting company which I had been using for html sites, without incident, for several years. I checked around, found Bluehost, and moved one of the hacked domains there. I was blown away by the tech support – which had been non-existent with the old service. If this keeps up, I’ll never go anywhere else. Bluehost gets 10 out of 10 from me!
saif ullah butt
I have been using blue host from many years and it seems that they are good. I have had never any problem with their hosting and for me the are 100% up always.
Thanks
Paul Pehrson
I’ve been using WP for about seven years and Bluehost for just under one year. Wordpress and Bluehost are a great combination, because they both give you powerful flex ability at an unbeatable price. I’m very pleased with Bluehost, and look forward to keeping my Wordpress site here for a LONG time to come.
AbuBakar
I have been using bluehost for more than 2 years now, I have never had problem with them. Cant say about support coz I never ran into serious trouble where I contact support.
Mark Christianson
I switched over to BlueHost a few months ago after having some issues in performance on another host and have been very pleased. Fast setup, standard cpanel offerings, easy to work with customer support all created a solid platform I could count on and then focus on building my business. As a web developer I have since put a few other clients on bluehost and would recommend them for anyone looking for a service that does their job so you can do yours.
Steve Steiner
I’ve been using BluHost for several years and have had no problems whatsoever. The couple of times I’ve needed support (usually my mistake), they were easy to reach and resolved my issue quickly and correctly. I’d recommend them to anyone!