BlueHost Review 2024 | Web Hosting Services

Bluehost is one of the three web hosting services that tie for the top spot in our rating of the Best Web Hosting Services of 2024, along with HostGator and SiteGround. The service emphasizes its WordPress and WooCommerce offerings, including managed WordPress hosting packages. It also offers full-featured shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting plans, but doesn’t sell cloud hosting or reseller hosting packages. Among Bluehost’s ancillary services are domain registration, professional design and marketing services, Google Workspace plans, and fee-based support for your site via the company’s Blue Sky service.

Bluehost has been selling web hosting services since its founding in Provo, Utah, in 2003. The company has partnered with WordPress for more than 10 years and proudly has an in-house team of dedicated WordPress experts, including engineers who work full-time on WordPress CORE development. Now headquartered in Orem, Utah, Bluehost offers shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and virtual private server (VPS) hosting in addition to its WordPress packages.

Along with hosting services, Bluehost provides domain registration for dozens of top-level domains (TLD), professional website design and marketing services, and the Maestro WordPress management console for site designers and developers. Its hosting plans integrate with Gmail and other Google Workspace apps. Missing from Bluehost’s lineup of hosting services are plans for cloud hosting and reseller hosting.

While Hostinger and other leading hosting services tout their WordPress expertise, few companies have committed to WordPress hosting to the extent that Bluehost has:

Bluehost’s hosting options aren’t limited to WordPress, however. The company’s four shared hosting plans cost from $9.99 to $28.99 a month and include a free domain for one year, a content delivery network (CDN) to speed page loads, and a free SSL certificate. Dedicated hosting packages from the company cost from $119.99 to $209.99 a month and come with 4 CPU cores, from 4 GB to 16 GB of RAM, 500 GB to 1 TB of storage, and 5 TB to 15 TB of bandwidth.

Bluehost sells three VPS hosting packages that range in price from $29.99 to $119.99 a month and feature 2 or 4 CPU cores, 30 GB to 120 GB of solid state disk (SSD) storage, 2 GB to 8 GB of RAM, and 1 TB to 3 TB of bandwidth. The company’s domain registration services support dozens of TLDs and country domains at prices as low as $5.99 a year for .us domains and $9.99 a year for .org and .biz domains.

While most competing hosting services let you pay on a month-to-month basis, all but a handful of Bluehost’s shared hosting and WordPress hosting plans require a 12-month or 36-month contract. For many small businesses, this won’t be a deal-breaker, but with only a 30-day money-back guarantee, some potential customers may balk at committing to a long-term agreement.

One advantage Bluehost offers over competing hosting companies is its many support options. The company provides 24/7 live chat support and toll-free telephone support for its hosting service customers. VPS and dedicated hosting packages receive 24/7 telephone support. Bluehost customers can also access a searchable knowledge base and FAQs on hosting-related topics.

When you’re ready to take your online operation to the next level, Bluehost’s fee-based support services provide guidance on website design, online marketing, SEO services, and website migration via consultation with the company’s area experts. You can also get expert advice on building and growing your website and WordPress skills via Bluehost’s fee-based Blue Sky support services.

Any small business planning a WordPress site should consider the well-supported and easy-to-use hosting packages available from Bluehost, which are priced comparably with competing services and match them feature-for-feature. The company’s VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, and domain registration services will comfortably meet the needs of most small and midsize businesses, making Bluehost one of our No. 1 choices for the Best Web Hosting Services for Small Business of 2024.

Bluehost sells four types of hosting plans:

Bluehost’s 30-day money-back guarantee applies only to the company’s hosting services, but not to its domain name registration or add-on services such as AppMachine, Site Backup Pro, and Pay Per Click Marketing. If you signed up for a plan that includes a free domain name and wish to cancel before 30 days but retain the domain, the cost of the domain registration will be deducted from your refund automatically.

Bluehost’s standard prices are comparable to those of competing hosting services for similarly configured packages. However, not many hosting providers can match Bluehost’s WordPress expertise or quality support services.

HostGator is a Texas-based company that has been selling hosting services for more than 20 years. It ties with Bluehost and SiteGround at the top of our website hosting rankings. HostGator’s lineup of hosting types is similar to Bluehost’s offerings, but HostGator sells three packages for resellers in addition to plans for shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS, and dedicated hosting. Bluehost doesn’t offer reseller hosting packages, and neither HostGator nor Bluehost sells cloud hosting plans.

While HostGator doesn’t sell any WooCommerce-specific hosting plans, its WordPress packages let you create a WooCommerce online store. The company recommends its Standard or Business plan for WooCommerce stores because the entry-level Starter package lacks the storage your store will need. By contrast, Bluehost’s WooCommerce hosting packages have WooCommerce pre-installed and let you install popular payment processing services with a single click.

HostGator’s WordPress hosting packages start at $14.95 a month, while WordPress plans from Bluehost range from $9.99 a month to $28.99 a month, and the company’s WooCommerce options are priced at $29.95 a month for the Standard plan and $49.95 a month for the Premium package. However, HostGator’s plans rely on plugins for many e-commerce functions built into Bluehost’s WooCommerce plans.

For dedicated hosting, Bluehost’s plans cost from $119.99 a month for the Standard package to $209.99 a month for the Premium plan. HostGator’s Value dedicated offering is priced at $159.99 a month and the company’s high-end Enterprise package costs $249.98 a month. HostGator’s most expensive dedicated hosting plan comes with 30 GB of RAM and uses 8 core, 16 thread CPUs, while Bluehost’s high-end dedicated offering uses a 4 core, eight-thread CPU and includes 16 GB of RAM.

Both Bluehost and HostGator include a free SSL certificate with all of their hosting options, as well as a free domain for one year ( HostGator requires an agreement of 12 months or longer to qualify for the free domain). Each service also provides a built-in website creator and free domain transfers.

The biggest difference between the hosting plans sold by Bluehost and HostGator is the former’s strength in WordPress and WooCommerce hosting, and the latter’s inclusion of reseller hosting in addition to its shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting options.

SiteGround is noteworthy for the international aspect of its hosting services – the company has offices in the U.S. and Europe and operates data centers on four continents. SiteGround’s hosting plans include shared, WordPress, WooCommerce, cloud, and reseller packages, but unlike Bluehost, SiteGround doesn’t sell VPS hosting plans. Bluehost excludes cloud and reseller hosting from its product lineup but does offer dedicated hosting, which isn’t available from SiteGround.

SiteGround touts its server technology as an asset that distinguishes its hosting plans from those offered by competing firms. Among its innovations are a custom PHP setup and a SuperCacher to speed page loads, and the use of Google’s Brotli compression technology to compress your site’s data, reduce its storage footprint, and improve transmission speeds.

The least expensive of SiteGround’s shared hosting packages, StartUp, costs $19.99 a month, or $14.99 a month with a one-year contract and $10.49 a month with a three-year agreement. It comes with 10 GB of storage and a free SSL certificate but no free domain name for one year. Bluehost’s Basic shared hosting plan is priced at $9.99 a month and includes 30 GB of storage, an SSL certificate, and a free domain for one year.

Bluehost’s WooCommerce plans, Standard and Premium, cost $29.95 and $49.95 a month, respectively, but are priced at $12.95 a month and $24.95 a month with a 12-month agreement. By contrast, SiteGround’s three WooCommerce hosting packages cost from $19.99 a month ($14.99 a month with a 12-month contract) to $44.99 a month ($39.99 a month with a 12-month agreement and $27.99 a month with a three-year contract).

The SiteGround WooCommerce plans come with 10 GB to 40 GB of storage, while Bluehost allows “unmetered” storage for your site, limited by what the company’s terms of service define as what’s required for “normal use of a personal or small business website.” Bluehost’s WooCommerce plans include CodeGuard backups (for only one year in the Standard package) and email marketing, while SiteGround’s plans for WooCommerce have WP-CLI pre-installed and include the SG Optimizer WordPress plug-in to boost your store’s performance.

SiteGround offers the full range of hosting options, apart from dedicated hosting, while Bluehost’s strength is its WordPress and WooCommerce expertise. Bluehost also provides a higher level of support via its design and marketing services and Blue Sky support options, although these add-on services require an added fee.

Bluehost’s web hosting plans include four categories of WordPress hosting:

The company also offers shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and VPS hosting, as well as domain registrations, professional marketing services, and the Blue Sky fee-based support team. You can also purchase one of three Google Workspace plans from Bluehost.

Bluehost’s shared hosting, WordPress websites, and WordPress hosting plans require a 12-month or 36-month contract. The company’s WP Pro hosting packages can be purchased for three months, six months, 12 months, 24 months, or 36 months. WooCommerce plans are available for one month, 12 months, or 36 months.

The service offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for hosting services only. The guarantee doesn’t apply to domain registrations, but if you cancel within 30 days and your plan includes a free domain, Bluehost deducts a non-refundable domain fee of $15.99, which ensures that you won’t lose the domain name and helps the company recover some of its costs.

Whether you want hosting services for a site that already exists or one that you’ll create yourself, you start by selecting one of Bluehost’s four hosting plans. Then you choose a new domain name or enter an existing domain, enter your account information, and select any extra services you want, such as CodeGuard Basic for the Basic and SiteLock Essential, both of which are preselected when you sign up for a shared hosting plan. Enter your credit card information and note the automatic renewal terms of the agreement.

After you sign up, Bluehost sends you information about the account via email so you can start to upload files and get your site ready to publish. According to Bluehost, new domains are generally accessible within one hour of registering them.

Once your account is active, you can use the Bluehost control panel to purchase or transfer domains, assign domains to your account, and modify DNS records. You can also set up email accounts, use the Website Builder to create a site, install WordPress, and manage your billing records.

Prior to 2021, Bluehost offered its subscribers the Builder standalone express editor that lets you create a site by dragging and dropping elements into a site template. Plans bought after 2021 feature the company’s Website Builder that integrates with WordPress. Bluehost continues to support Builder for customers who signed up prior to 2021, but only for existing sites.

New sites must use the new Website Builder, which doesn’t yet allow you to create an online store (a feature that is present in Builder). You can’t migrate sites from Builder to Website Builder, but you can move back and forth between Website Builder and WordPress’s own site-building tools and plugins.

Website Builder includes more than 300 design templates, blog management, hundreds of preloaded images, and the ability to upload your own images with no storage limits. While you can’t create an online store from within Website Builder, you can use Bluehost’s WooCommerce plugin to add e-commerce features to your site.

Bluehost’s domain registration service supports dozens of top-level domains (TLD), including the most popular TLDs and nine country codes. These are the prices for registering some common TLDs with Bluehost:

You can add a level of privacy by hiding your public domain registration information for an additional $15.00 a year per domain.

Bluehost promotes two add-on services specifically for its shared hosting plans:

The company’s other add-on services are available for all of its shared, WP Pro, WooCommerce, VPS, and dedicated hosting packages:

In addition to these add-on services, Bluehost offers professional website design and marketing services to help with SEO, pay-per-click, and website migration, as well as the Blue Sky support services for WordPress that give you advice and support on how to build and enhance your site. For web designers and developers, the company’s Maestro dashboard for WordPress sites simplifies the management of multiple sites and clients, including one-click access to the WP admin and cPanel control panels.

Two WooCommerce hosting packages are available from Bluehost:

Both of Bluehost’s WooCommerce plans feature customer reviews, analysis of your website traffic, manual order creation, custom discount codes and promotions, and the CodeGuard Backup Basic (free for only one year with the Basic package).

All Bluehost hosting accounts include an SSL certificate and a free daily malware scan of your site using SiteLock Lite, which examines your sitemap and alerts you if it detects any malware. SiteLock Lite scans only five to 10 pages. Bluehost also sells and supports three paid versions of SiteLock that scan an unlimited number of pages:

SiteLock Essentials will respond to any discovered malware vulnerabilities within 12 hours, Prevent will do so within six hours, and Prevent Plus within four hours.

Bluehost’s Standard and Pro accounts are limited to one dedicated IP address and one SSL certificate, while VPS, dedicated, and reseller accounts can create multiple dedicated IP and SSL certificates. You can also purchase a Private SSL certificate from Comodo via your cPanel account, or buy one from a third party.

Bluehost provides 24/7 chat and email/ticket support with all its hosting plans. It also has telephone support from 7:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. EST. The company offers a knowledge base of guides, how-tos, and other articles, as well as information on setting up and using email, registering for domains, user authentication, and payment options. Also provided are FAQs on dozens of hosting-related topics, including SEO tools, Google Ads, site transfers, and domain renewals.

For more information about web hosting services, see the following guides:

In addition to our ratings of web hosting services, you may be interested in these guides to other business services: