Bluehost, established in 2006, is an experienced and trustworthy web hosting service; for a website to be stable, the website host must be hard-core in providing the basic services. We have tested Bluehost for all the must-haves in a web hosting server, and we have tested our website on Bluehost repeatedly over one year to gain the exact results for this review.

To better understand whether or not Bluehost is suitable for your website, you need to first understand what a website requires, what types of websites are, and which hosting is meant for which type of website.

Website Requirements:

To function correctly, a website needs a domain name, the website hosting server, primary data or script to be inputted into the website, storage, security measures, funding, and a set targeted audience. Most of the website hosting is paid and needs to be purchased from a registrar to be hosted. A website can also be developed on a personal server, but that would require a license, effort, and maintenance and will be very expensive. Even the largest websites with massive traffic, such as Facebook and Amazon, have their hosting on some hosting platform. Bluehost has hosted the most prominent clients and has proved to be their successful web partner for years.

Types of Websites:

The basic types of websites as per their nature of business and operation are:

E-commerce website

E-commerce websites are preferred to have dedicated hosting as they need specified space, root access, and controls. A new e-commerce website can also function successfully on a shared hosting plan without any issues. The scale of products, traffic, and nature of the business makes a dedicated host preferable for e-commerce.

Most often, a woo commerce plugin is necessary for an e-commerce website which makes it easy to affiliate buy and sell transactions.

Business Website

A typical business website with basic information about the business, which is mainly set up for information broadcast and contact options, is best hosted on shared hosting. This website is created only to show online presence; hence the best way is to choose the cheapest hosting plan available.

A business could be any business, but the website is generally plain with minimum pages and meager traffic. A wordpress hosting makes these kinds of websites more manageable and easily operatable without hiring professionals.

Social Media Website

Social media websites are typically high-traffic websites where millions of users connect to the website daily. Here the users’ data privacy is also crucial, and hence it is best to host a social media website on a VPS. VPS is a virtual private server that is in between a dedicated server and a shared server. Here the physical server is shared, whereas a virtualized version is set private for the user. Social media websites can also be held on shared networks, but the choice is always open. Social media websites also see a lot of images and high-quality videos being uploaded for interaction between users. There is often a chat or message option offered. These websites need near-perfect uptime with no glitches or bugs.

Professional Services Website

There are some point of differences between a business website and a professional service website. When a website is a dynamic website that is created to provide online functions, contains payment gateways, and has transactions through the website, it is a professional website. The professional website also hosts team emails for a group of people working and utilizing the organization’s resources. A cloud hosting is the best option here as the data is available on the go from any part of the world. It is fast, it is reliable, and it is the new age combination of physical and virtual servers.

Information Website (Educational)

Websites like educational websites, schools, colleges, or any institution website often have heavy data such as student forms, links, syllabi, notes, books, and many more. Such websites need full storage capacity, regular site backups, and good traffic handling at times of surge. Even the government websites where the users interact with the website, there is uploading of forms on a regular basis needs a strong hosting service. In such cases, shared hosting may not be able to justify the server requirement, and a VPS or dedicated host is advisable.

Personal Webpage or Blog

A personal website or a blog website is a very simple website with very few elements. Depending on the blog, the website may receive good traffic, but the number of pages is very light and just have comments interactions. A personal blog could also be hosted on free websites, newsletters, or wordpress hosting. Other than this, a shared hosting plan is the perfect option for these websites.

Entertainment and Media Websites

Entertainment websites like OTT, news broadcasts, and live streaming websites, which are specifically made for showcasing videos or ones that apply tools like video editing and video capturing, require a fast server and reliable storage. For this category of websites, a dedicated host or cloud hosting does just the right job.  

Now that we have an idea of what is suitable for each type of hosting, here are the features of Bluehost hosting server:

Bluehost offers shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, and wordpress hosting. Bluehost holds good in all types of hosting without any complaints in any type of hosting. 

Following are the features and comparison of plans of shared hosting and various hosting plan as per types for 12 months by Bluehost:

Shared hosting plans:

	Dedicated hosting enhanced plan	VPS hosting enhanced plan
Price	$119.88/mo	$39.99/mo
Core	8 core/16 thread	–
CPU	Intel Xion-D	–
RAM	16 GB	4 GB
Storage	2 TB HDD	165 GB SSD
Bandwidth	Unmetered	Unmetered
Software	Linux only	–
control	cPanel with root access	cPanel

Other features of Bluehost web hosting plans:

99.99% Uptime

This is the claimed uptime, but we did experience a hitch here once or twice. On average, in reality, the uptime can be measured as 99.98% Time lost is money lost, and 2 seconds delay is enough to drive away a potential customer in case the website does not function. Bluehost has produced a 1.48ms average loading speed during normal load capacities as per our tests and we are completely satisfied with the speed.

Unmetered Bandwidth

An unmetered bandwidth means you can use it to full capacity, and the uploading and downloading data usage is not considered. But here, the traffic consumption is definitely tracked. Here the payment is based on speed rather than traffic. Bluehosts unmtered traffic is cost-effective.

cPanel Hosting

CPanel is a specialized control panel software developed to make web hosting easy. It provides automation tools and graphical interfaces that assist in developing a website with a standard plugin available to most of the web hosts. Bluehost can be used without cPanel as well, but the use of cPanel only makes it smoother to operate. Bluehost has mastered wordpress combined with Cpanel hosting.

Cloudflare CDN

Cloudflare provides a global content delivery network (CDN) that is responsible for reducing web traffic, reducing bandwidth, and creating a better user experience. The website will be available at the fastest speed irrespective of the physical location of the server. Data is maintained at local servers with accelerated performance. We have tested our website on Bluehost at different locations across the globe, and the Cloudflare CDN makes Bluehost amazingly fast.

24/7 Live Chat, Phone and Email Ticketing

For beginners 24/7 support is very important as there is no fixed time when a problem might occur. Our experience with Bluehost support is commendable as their response time is quick and actually informative.

Sitelocks

Sitelock is a cloud-based security tool that scans, detects, and fixes your website for vulnerabilities and malware continuously. Bluehost does not include sitelock security but can be purchased during sign-up. 

30 Days Refund Policy

30 days is not really enough time to judge a web host’s performance. But 30 days is the industry standard. You can understand if the cpanel hosting is comfortable or not, if the features are useful or any feature is missing, if any plans need to be switched, and how the overall website is turning up in the 30 days period.

Site Migration

When switching a website from one host to another, the site migration tool is used. Do not try site migration on your own, even if you have to pay to get your website migrated. Even a single mistake could make your website crash. It is better to let the experts handle it. Bluehost offers free site migration and does a satisfactory job.

WordPress

Bluehost is recommended by wordpress and has specialized features and settings supporting wordpress hosting. Bluehost even offers dedicated WordPress hosting. 100 plus wordpress themes and equally variant iStock images make building a website a cakewalk. This feature definitely brings out the best.

SSD

An SSD storage is upgraded, lightweight, resistant, and highly durable storage and is preferable over SDD. SSD also means less power consumption, and faster reading and writing of Data. SSD storage is recommended by us, and Bluehost has it. 

Downside:-

1. Bluehost does not offer cloud hosting, and it could be disappointing for a company so popular.
2. After a year, the renewal rates for a domain name and the website are unexpectedly high.
3. The dedicated server hosting is operational using only LINUX.
4. Bluehost provides email and SEO features but does not offer website emails on the base plan.

Bluehost WordPress hosting is ideal for beginners and small websites, at the same time large businesses. I can say it is a good hosting platform for any kind of user and accommodating all kinds of websites.

It can be said that Bluehost has lived upto our expectations and continues to impress our website with all that is required for a good host. We would recommend Bluehost website hosting without any reservations.

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