If you are looking for a Monthly Plan I am assuming you are looking for an affordable but good hosting service, you have probably run into Bluehost. For some various reasons, Bluehost is a very popular hosting company. It is even one of the best web hosting.
Bluehost is one of the few hosting services endorsed by WordPress.
Let’s see what Bluehost monthly and yearly offers and services.
Recommended by WordPress®. Sign up today and launch your website in minutes! Enhanced cPanel. Free Domain. 1-Click WordPress Install. 24/7 WordPress Support. Free SSL. Types: WordPress Hosting, Shared Hosting, Dedicated Hosting.
Table of Contents
Bluehost services
- Shared Hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- WordPress Hosting
- eCommerce
- Domains
There are many services offered by Bluehost, however here we will focus on Shared Hosting which is the most popular.
Bluehost Monthly Plan and Prices
You can choose between four plans:
- Basic – an ideal regular plan to start a small website. You have 50GB available in SSD storage, free SSL certificate, bandwidth is not measured and 1 domain is allowed and up to 5 to park.
- Plus – is a plan that extends what is offered by the Basic plan, making everything unlimited, in addition to the Spam Experts service to protect your mail from advertisements and spam. An Office 365 mailbox is also offered free for 30 days.
- Choice Plus – here you will have everything offered by the Plus plan but additionally, you will have domain privacy (so that your registration data cannot be seen publicly) and backups of your website.
- Pro – the largest shared hosting plan available on Bluehost. It offers everything from Choice Plus plus a dedicated IP.
Bluehost plans comparison
In all these plans, the cheapest called Basic costs $ 3.95 per month. While both the Plus and the Choice Plus cost $ 5.95 per month and the most expensive plan only $ 13.95 per month. However be careful, because each of these promotional prices is adjusted to a period of 36 months.
Bluehost does not have short plans, nor of extension greater than 36 months. In other words, you will not be able to try their services without committing yourself for at least one year and you will not be able to extend it for more than 3 years.
With that said, BlueHost does not offer a month-to-month payment option. To get the discounted rates, you’ll need to choose a 36, 24 or 12-month plan.
- 36-Month Plan – $3.95/month
- 24-Month Plan – $4.95/month
- 12-Month Plan – $5.95/month
* Prices include VAT.
To get started, use this link to enable our exclusive $3.95/month discount at Bluehost.com and click the “get started now” button to get the lowest pricing and a FREE domain name.
Bluehost Plans
You must pay for three years at a time to enjoy the advertised price for your shared hosting plans. It will cost you much more if you choose a shorter duration, and the minimum duration you can afford is 12 months.
- Free domain? Yep.
- SSL Certificate: Free
- Ease of registration: Easy two-page registration process.
- Payment methods: Main credit cards and PayPal.
- Charges and hidden clauses: The initial rate falls for a minimum of three years (with renewal plans that jump). And all that, we will delete your account if you exceed 1,000 database tables or the total database of 3 GB.
- Additional sales: Some additional sales … But it is common in the web hosting industry, so don’t worry about it.
- Account activation: Instant activation for most users. If the information is inaccurate or there is suspicion of fraud, the activation could be delayed.
- Control panel and dashboard experience: Simple and easy to use control panel.
- Installation of applications and CMS (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Mojo Marketplace makes installation of the application quick and easy.
BlueHost Information
What is Bluehost? It is currently responsible for hosting more than 2 million websites worldwide and is one of the most popular and accessible (in cost) shared web hosting services today.
Founded in 1996 by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Provo, Utah, they have a staff of 750 employees who work 24 hours a day to ensure the best possible quality of service.
And while the company’s long history and dedicated support staff provide a certain degree of confidence in their services, we have noticed a serious problem with most Bluehost reviews …
They make brilliant recommendations for the service regardless of objective data or metrics (such as loading time and activity time).
But in this review of Bluehost we do it differently …
So what was our experience with Bluehost?
Let’s dive and discover what it was …
Pros
- Excellent speed
- Excellent “uptime”
- Low prices
- Good security options
- SSL included
- Optimized for WordPress
- Web creator with Weebly
- Many integrations, applications and features of electronic commerce.
- Official “WordPress.org” Hosting recommended.
- Easy to use.
- 30 days free trial and money-back guarantee.
- Excellent support.
Cons
- Much additional sale
- 12, 24 and 36 month plans only
- Site migrations are not free
Is Bluehost a good web host?
Low Price
In the past, it was difficult to justify the use of Bluehost services due to their exorbitant prices and services.
However, in 2018, Bluehost has not only improved its uptime and load time by hundreds of percentage points but has also positioned itself as one of the most economical web hostings on the market.
Although they are not the cheapest provider compared to other hosts, the improved servers and their reduced prices make them an excellent option for even the most economical users.
While we are not evangelizing BlueHost in any way, we managed to negotiate a fairly stellar deal for readers. By clicking on this link, you can get approximately 65% off the retail price of Bluehost and host your website for only $3.95 per month.
Easy to use control panel
Bluehost is very suitable for beginners. Not only for the low prices but also for the ease of use of its administrative panels.
Once you register with the host, you can log in to your custom control panel.
It may seem a bit unusual, but in fact, it is a normal cPanel with a custom template. Everything is easy to find and the search bar proved to be quite useful. If you have used cPanel before, you will have no problem using it.
The Bluehost control panel is equipped with everything to manage your website easily. If you need to install any type of application you have a one-click auto-installer and also the automatic WordPress installer is on the main screen very handy.
There is also a creator of Weebly premium websites, installed applications, design tools and extensions in one place.
When it comes to using hosting services, you will hardly find anything much simpler than Bluehost.
With the simple Bluehost interface, you can access all of your websites and email addresses from one place.
In addition, you can customize the way in which you want to place the cPanel to suit your specific needs so that you can quickly reach the functions you use most.
Official ‘WordPress.org Host recommended
When the world’s largest CMS recommends a hosting provider, it is usually a good idea to listen.
The official WordPress site (WordPress.org) recently re-created its hosting page and listed its 3 favorite hosting providers. Among those included are SiteGround, Dreamhost and, you guessed it, Bluehost.
Good security options
With a large number of cyber attacks and the main data breaches that have proliferated in the market, finding a web host with enough security options is now more important than ever.
Fortunately, Bluehost offers some excellent tools to combat and prevent some of the most common attacks and risks.
For example, you can avoid spam with tools like SpamAssassin, Spam Experts, and Spam Hammer. They are also compatible with Cloudflare, which helps prevent annoying DDoS attacks that can end a site by sending an overwhelming amount of “fake” traffic from different sources.
They also offer direct link protection (which prevents people from stealing your images and content), blacklists of IP addresses to block problematic people, SSH access for secure web sessions.
You can also password protect your directories, create blacklists for IP addresses and manage digital certificates and private keys directly from Bluehost.
But they don’t stop there …
Bluehost has also integrated several layers of security to protect it at the account level.
You can enable two-factor authentication with your Bluehost account, and they have created the entire site with the token account validation.
With token validation, you can prove your identity when you contact customer service by providing a six-digit code to verify your identity before you have to provide your password to a customer service agent.
All in all, Bluehost is packed with security features that will keep you, your audience and your website safe.
Many integrations, applications and features of electronic commerce
In addition to the many security features mentioned above, Bluehost also comes equipped with an application-rich control panel that allows you to integrate different services, such as Google Apps and the aforementioned CloudFlare, directly into the cPanel.
By integrating Google Apps into the Bluehost platform, you can bring all the advantages of Google to your business from the heart of your hosting account.
Cloudflare, on the other hand, is a free and popular CDN service that can increase the speed of your site and help keep it protected from possible attacks and violations.
In addition, Bluehost has radically simplified its e-commerce features, allowing customers to seamlessly set up an online store with endless shopping cart options. Simply click on “Install” and get going.
Bluehost also says that you can use MOJO Marketplace to install the shopping cart software, install the software manually on your own or hire a developer to install and/or manage it for you.
Bluehost Customer Service
You can contact Bluehost customer support 24/7, via online chat, phone or ticket.
In case you need to contact via online chat, the time to access an agent is very short, and in less than a minute they will contact you with one.
However, all the support you will get will be only in English. You will kindly be asked to use a Google translator if you don’t have skills in this language.
It is a shame since many other hosting services offer an automatic translation system incorporated into online chat so you don’t waste time and be able to offer services to many locations.
However, I have nothing to complain about the behavior of the agent who has contacted me.
Agents are very professional and responsive.
30 days free trial and money-back guarantee.
Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, allowing you to take advantage of its services before committing your hard-earned money.
30 days is more than enough to determine whether or not Bluehost is the right provider for you.
However, it is important to keep in mind that some terms apply if you wish to claim your refund:
- The money-back-guarantee does not apply to complementary products such as domains.
- If you cancel within 30 days, but your plan includes a free domain, Bluehost will deduct $15.99 from the total amount of your refund as a domain fee. The company claims that this is to “cover your costs” while ensuring that your chosen domain name is not lost. It is important to note that newly registered domains cannot be transferred until a 60-day registration period has elapsed.
Evaluation Performance
Server Speed
The speeds of the Bluehost server where our website is hosted are impressive. And although they are located only in Utah, United States, we obtained excellent results when testing from different locations.
We did multiple load tests on our website hosted with Bluehost. The first location from which we tested for this Bluehost review was Ashburn, United States, and the response times were excellent, they remained at around 20 ms even with 50 virtual visitors.
As expected, the results of a more remote location were worse but not bad at all. Performing tests in Sydney, Australia, we obtained stable results of around 650 ms. That’s pretty good, considering that Bluehost only has servers in the United States.
All in all, Bluehost managed to get better results than the industry average of 553 ms. And that is incredibly impressive.
A Google report last year found that the vast majority of mobile websites are too slow.
This is a problem for two main reasons. The Google index for mobile devices can raise or hide your site so that it is not based on its “speeds.” And studies show that slow websites almost always translate into lower sales.
Therefore, after the uptime, the loading times of your hosting page can literally make your site a success.
Server Availability
The availability time (uptime) is another factor to analyze in a hosting service. How long can the server remain uninterrupted?
Bluehost offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee, which means that the server should not be down for more than a minute every week.
It really is that? Let’s see:
Apparently not so much. During the last month, Bluehost averaged 99.78% uptime without fulfilling its promise.
We can see that there are small cuts or constant falls with an average of one minute each. Often, several of them happen per day. This demonstrates some degree of server failures.
While this type of cuts can go unnoticed by the main user on a high traffic website or a popular online store can result in a great loss of money.
Cons
I have some questions to analyze regarding the additional features in Bluehost.
And what I want to highlight is the low inclusion of functionalities that you might normally find in other services. For example, none of the plans offer protection against DDoS or malware.
DDoS or malware
It is a problem not to have anti-DDoS protection. Here according to our Bluehost opinions although you can use outsourced services like SiteLock but the fact that they are not included in any package is quite disappointing. Even more so if you consider Bluehost a giant company and can easily provide this type of service in one way or another.
While it compensates for having 50GB of space on SSDs in a basic plan and free domain in all plans in Bluehost, it would be nice to have automatic backups that you won’t find here.
Upselling
A negative issue is the number of features offered as additional payments when you buy a plan.
You must be very careful since a hosting plan can end up costing twice if you are not a retailer and you look at the sections that are branded and their costs.
Site migrations are not free
Most of the hosting providers we have reviewed with pleasure will help you move an existing site from your current location to your service.
After all, it is a quick procedure for you to change companies and become “ your” loyal customers over the next few years.
Unfortunately, Bluehost is not one of those companies.
They charge a ‘migration fee’ of $ 149.99 to do something that most provide for free. And they will not transfer more than 5 sites and 20 email accounts.
Speaking of additional fees, a simple 45-minute introductory tour of your services will cost you $ 79.99.
Again, something that most hosting providers are happy to offer you for free because you are subscribing to their long-term service.
However, if you are creating a new website and not migrating anything from another hosting, this is not an issue for you. You can do it yourself or can hire someone to do the migration at a lower price.
Conclusion of the Bluehost Review
We have seen that Bluehost is a hosting service aimed exclusively at those who begin to have their first website. That is beginners. Offering cheap services with good speed and outstanding customer support.
However, it has some mistakes such as a very aggressive additional sales policy that can lead a customer to buy a product that is worth twice as advertised without realizing it.
And the availability times are not the best for those who require services that should be online as long as possible.
Thus and all Bluehost has become a reference hosting provider for those looking for good and accessible services.
Do we recommend Bluehost?
Yes, in spite of not having any monthly payment option.
In the Bluehost Review, we conclude that it is the best in uptime and reliability and the speed is not bad either.
They are cheap and easy to start. We are suggesting people to start their blogs using Bluehost.
In general, Bluehost is our TOP 1 web hosting and you shouldn’t go wrong.
