Bluehost Review: Is it Good for Newbie Bloggers?

When researching web hosting providers for your blog, you probably saw a few names over and over again. Most likely, Bluehost was among them.

As one of the largest website hosting providers, Bluehost powers over two million sites and is officially recommended by WordPress.org. Driving Bluehost’s popularity is its affordable pricing, extensive documentation and support, and reputation for high performance and reliability among bloggers in the WordPress community.

Bluehost particularly appeals to beginners because it offers the basic necessities for getting a WordPress site live. With plans starting at $2.95 a month, 24/7 live chat support, and a free SSL certificate and domain name included for the first year, bloggers and small businesses can get their blog started.

To help you decide if Bluehost is the right hosting solution for your blog, we’ll look at its key features below.

Key Features of Bluehost

While Bluehost offers a range of hosting services specific to WordPress, its shared WordPress hosting packages are a good option for new bloggers looking to keep their costs down.

There are three different plans with resources that scale up at each price point. While other hosting service providers limit the storage and bandwidth available on shared hosting, Bluehost offers unmetered bandwidth across all three plans. Meaning, you are not billed according to the amount of bandwidth, or data transfer, you use.

Bluehost also provides unmetered storage with these plans, save for the lowest tier. That way, anyone — no matter what hosting service they can afford — has the resources necessary to build an online presence.

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Say you start with the basic shared hosting plan and need to move to another tier as your website grows. With Bluehost, you can upgrade in just a few clicks.

If your traffic and storage needs increase, then you may consider moving to one of Bluehosts’s managed hosting plans. That’s because while you won’t be charged for the amount of bandwidth you use on a shared hosting plan, you are constrained to the amount of data transfer required for the “normal” operation of a personal or small business website. According to regular statistical analyses by Bluehost, 99.95% of customers fall into this normal range.

However, if you do exceed this range by using your account for storing large media files or file sharing, for example, then you’ll receive an email asking that you reduce your usage. At that point, you can either make the necessary adjustments or upgrade to one of Bluehost’s managed hosting plans for unlimited bandwidth and storage.

Upgrade options like these are an important feature to consider when shopping for a hosting service. By offering them, Bluehost can support your growth over time — no matter how you choose to host your blog.

If you’re a blogger or small business just starting a WordPress blog, then one of Bluehost’s shared WordPress hosting packages can provide you with enough resources to begin growing. Below we’ll take a closer look at some additional advantages of choosing Bluehost as your provider.

Security Measures

With over 90,000 attacks against WordPress sites happening every minute, keeping your site safe is a top priority. While you can take steps to protect your site by choosing a secure username and password and regularly updating your theme and plugins, you share the responsibility with your hosting provider.

With over 40% of websites being hacked because of a vulnerability in their hosting service, it is imperative that you choose a secure host that provides monitoring services and other security add-ons.

To help protect your blog as well as your visitors’ data, Bluehost offers SSL certification, daily automatic WordPress updates, and built-in tools to prevent spam on your site. You can also use the Site Backup Pro tool in your control panel to create and restore backups made of your account's files to help prevent malware attacks.

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Optimized Load Time

The speed of your site matters — to both visitors and search engines. According to a KISSmetrics report, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, and 40% abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Recognizing this consumer demand for speed, Google uses load times as a ranking factor for search.

To help ensure your site is optimized for visitors and search engines, you need a high-speed hosting provider like Bluehost.

According to an analysis by Hosting Facts, Bluehost delivered average page speeds at 406ms, which places it among the top four fastest providers in the industry. Shown below, these response times over a sixteen-month period demonstrate the speed and reliability of sites hosted by Bluehost.

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99.9% Uptime

Any downtime on your site can not only damage your brand credibility but also cost you visitors and money. We’re not talking pennies either. An unexpected outage in Amazon Web Services, which lasted for about three to four hours in early 2017, cost companies an estimated $150 million.

Choosing a hosting provider like Bluehost that guarantees as much uptime as possible can help you avoid downtimes that disrupt the visitor experience and cost you potential customers.

In another analysis by Hosting Facts, Bluehost had an uptime of 99.99% over a sixteen-month period, which is .05% better than the industry average. That means you won’t have to worry about any unplanned outages on your site, even during peak traffic. You can take a look at the uptime statistics of the demo site below.

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Final Word

Price, security, performance, and upgrade options are important features to consider when selecting a hosting provider for your WordPress blog. With competitive prices, robust security features, and uptimes and load times that outperform the industry average, Bluehost will suit small businesses and individual bloggers who are entering the space.