Bluehost Reviews

Bluehost Shared Hosting Review

Bluehost Shared Hosting Plans — Mostly Unlimited in Nature, but with varied features

Bluehost offer four different plans for their shared web hosting, with all but the Basic Plan offering Unlimited Space, Bandwidth, and websites. You should, however, check their Acceptable Use Policy for any other restrictions.

In addition to the standard plans, Bluehost advertise specialist WordPress hosting and Woocommerce hosting. The WordPress hosting is based upon their VPS plans, and as such you will find commentary on it there. We discuss the WooCommerce plans in more detail below.

There are a couple of features mentioned in the above plans that are useful to point out in particular:

• Email Storage — On all but the Basic plan you get unlimited email storage and email accounts. With the basic plan, you only get five email accounts, with a maximum storage of 100 MB.
• Pro Backups — All plans have basic backups (Daily Weekly and Monthly), but that with the Pro Backups you can restore specific directories or databases, rather than having to restore the entire account. We cannot stress how important it is to have independent backups, and as such we would recommend VaultPress rather than your hosting providers premium backup service (this advice applies to every single hosting provider). Pro Backups cost $2.99 per month.
  
• SpamExperts — This is an incoming Email Filtering Service. It is specifically designed to eliminate spam, viruses, phishing, harvesting and other email-related malware attacks by botnets and spammers. 
• No Free Site Migration — While many other web hosting providers will offer the migration of your cPanel (all websites, emails etc.), or at least one website free of charge, with an additional fee of between $25 and $50 for additional websites, Bluehost charge a massive $149.99 for a single website migration. If you need help migrating your website, then this host becomes cost prohibitive.

We will discuss some of the other features and add-ons later in this review.

Bluehost WooCommerce Plans

The WooCommerce plans appear to be based on their shared hosting platform but provide WooCommerce preinstalled, Ecommerce Security, free SSL and Dedicated IP. They also appear to have a dedicated support line.

At the time of writing, the "?" next to "Ecommerce Security" and "Dedicated support line" on their WooCommerce hosting page does not reveal any additional information, even though we suspect it should pop up with some details. As a result, we opened a sales chat with Bluehost to query what they meant by this, and after a wait of 6 minutes (!) and a conversation lasting 10 minutes they told us the following:

1:35:43 PM — Brent A
Thank you for contacting the sales department. Please keep in mind that I am on multiple chats, so there may be a slight delay in response. How can I help you today?
1:37:01 PM — The Webmaster
What does e-commerce security and dedicated support line mean for woocommerce plans
1:37:54 PM — Brent A
So that is a SSL cert and Dedicated IP address so you can take credit card on your website.
1:38:54 PM — The Webmaster
And the dedicated support line?
1:41:19 PM — The Webmaster
What is the dedicated support line?
1:41:45 PM — The Webmaster
That is what I am asking you. It's one of your woocommerce plan features.
1:44:09 PM — Brent A
It goes to a higher level of Tech Support.

It was quite a frustrating conversation, taking a total of 15 minutes to obtain somewhat vague replies. If you are wanting specialist WooCommerce hosting, then we highly recommend SiteGround, who not only have a special plan, but it comes with various premium features such as Akismet anti-spam, VaultPress Premium backups, free SSL, NGINX, Memcached, PHP 7 and OpCache.

Bluehost Control Panel

Bluehost use one of the most popular control panels currently used for shared web hosting, namely, cPanel. You can see a screenshot below:

Bluehost have applied their own styling, so while it may look a little different to the default cPanel styling, the majority of options are the same. There is one thing you should be aware of:

The Bluehost cPanel backup functionality has been removed

 The backup functionality in cPanel has been removed. This means that you cannot make on-demand backups, and should you wish to move to a new host in the future that uses cPanel, the process cannot be automated.

You would, therefore, need to manually move your files and databases across, although you may be able to use a WordPress migration plugin to assist if you used WordPress.

Furthermore, it significantly restricts the ability for you to take your own, off-site, backups. For example, most hosting providers will allow you to take a backup, and then download this to your own computer for safekeeping. Therefore, you would need to do this manually by downloading your files, and database separately. Alternatively, you can use a third-party service such as VaultPress or codeguard, or some other service or plugin.

Add-ons

Bluehost offer a number of add-ons at additional cost. Some of these can be purchased during the order process, whereas others can only be obtained from within the account area after you completed your sign-up.

• G Suite — This will add the premium version of the Google Apps to your hosting, including the ability to use Gmail with your own domain name. If Bluehost manages your DNS, then the configuration will be completely automated. It costs $5 per user per month.
  
• SiteLock — Depending on the plan chosen (pricing ranges from free, to $20.83 per month), this provides a content delivery network, dynamic content caching, Web Application Firewall, and daily scanning \ blacklist monitoring.
  
• SpamExperts — By default, some of the plans come with SpamExperts as part of the hosting package. If you have multiple email addresses you can order additional SpamExperts services at a cost of $2.99 per month. 
• PaymentSphere — This is a third-party payment solution that enables you to accept credit cards.
• JustCloud — With Bluehost, you get 1 GB of free cloud storage that enables you to save and sync files from your desktop. We do not know why you would use this over Google or OneDrive, but the option is there.
• SoloSEO — This is quite an interesting service designed to help you with Search Engine Optimization. It includes things such as Rapid Indexing, Site Checkup Report, Keyword Research Tool and DIY SEO E-Book. Higher level plans include more keyword research available, plus other tools and even Reputation management.
  
• CloudFlare — If you point your domain to the Bluehost nameservers, then you can setup CloudFlare in just a few clicks. You can read more about CloudFlare here, or follow our in-depth WordPress Tutorial to make the most of it here. While the automated setup can be appealing, you may wish to configure setting up CloudFlare directly to make the most of all the features, including Anycast DNS.
• SSL Certificates — Bluehost offer Premium SSL certificates starting at $4.17 per month. This appears to be a little on the expensive side, with other hosting providers usually charging a yearly fee for this. Furthermore, with Let's Encrypt becoming more and more popular, many providers now offer free SSL (although these don't come with Warranty/Insurance).
• Site Backup & Restore Pro — We touched on this near the start of our review, but in a similar way to R1Soft (another advanced backup system seen in shared hosting), it allows you to restore databases or individual files and directories. At just $2.99 per month, this seems quite good value, but we would stress this does not negate the need to have your own off-site backups! (Here is an example of why!)
• Dedicated IP — Dedicated IP's are $5.99 per month. With SNI technology, you no longer require a dedicated IP to install an SSL certificate, but occasionally there are reasons why you may want your website to use a dedicated IP, such as concern over email blacklisting, or third-party SEO products inability to crawl over SNI (i.e. Moz). Unfortunately, you may require an SSL to justify a dedicated IP (ARIN rules).
• Constant Contact — This is a premium email marketing product, that starts at $10 per month for up to 500 contacts. You may be better off using a free \ premium solution like MailChimp.
• Site Migration — If you need help migrating your website to Bluehost you can purchase a website migration of $149.99. This is, quite frankly, extortionate pricing. Many hosts will migrate your first website, or your entire cPanel for free, with subsequent websites at a third of the cost.
• Design Services — This is Bluehost's own design team that will produce a website for a one-off fee of $799.99. The website does not include custom images, logo, or content. Unfortunately, there are is no showcase of the kind of website you would receive, to we recommend proceeding with caution, and asking them plenty of questions before proceeding. The only indication of the quality is a small image we have included below:
  
• Site Doctor — The problem with Bluehost is that if your website is hacked they will literally turn off the switch and put your account offline. The only way to get it back online is to pay for their Site Doctor service that will remove the malware. This costs $249.00, which is fairly expensive for a one-off fix. The problem you have is that it may take several days for them to get around to cleaning your website. You can read an interesting account of this service in action here.
  
  Ideally, we would have migrated a backup (you are keeping off-site backups right?) to a new host, and if necessary paid for Sucuri. This would have got you back up and running within the day.

Bluehost Support

This is perhaps where Bluehost perform really badly. You will see from our user's reviews that it is the support that they have been complaining about. Furthermore, their Twitter account is full of complaints, with slow live-chat response times, or tickets that haven't been replied to in days making the top of the list of complaints. You can see a few examples below:

Slow Chat times:

Will you @bluehostsupport? It's been 45 minutes and you're losing a customer here. pic.twitter.com/XlTgdnQTcF

— Liz Squires (@loud_introvert) February 5, 2017

And of course, the irony of Bluehost saying users should be able to get through to support chat with a 30 minute wait (as if that is the norm!):

@dorabadger Currently our shared support chat team has a queue of less than 30 minutes so you should be able to get through now.

— help.bluehost.com (@bluehostsupport) January 31, 2017

General complaint about the support:

.@bluehostsupport is literally my least favorite thing in the world to deal with. Really just want to change hosts because of the headaches

— James (@JamesMontour) February 3, 2017

Ticket Support

While updating our review and fully expecting to find many complaints on Twitter of Ticket response times in the days or weeks we found something even more interesting.

It would seem that as of December 2016, Bluehost has discontinued Ticket support.

With their ticket support so terrible it actually makes a great deal of sense to get rid of it. GoDaddy, for example relies primarily on Telephone-based support and does ok. This also explains the high wait times on live-chat support.

While this is likely to improve the responsiveness of the support team in dealing with issues, clearly from Twitter, and our own user reviews they still have not improved their support service sufficiently. Having to actively wait for up to an hour to speak to someone about an issue is much more frustrating than waiting passively for a ticket response. If they can get their live-chat wait times down to a few minutes we may change our mind, but for the moment, and from looking at their Support Twitter account, it looks horrendous.

Performance

There are a number of things we look out for when it comes to the speed and performance of a web hosting provider. This includes the hardware (such as SSD, Raid, Network), server configuration (PHP7, OpCache, NGINX (or as a reverse proxy), CloudLinux) and whether it appears to be overloaded based on user feedback. We will go through all these points in turn:

Hardware and Network performance

Details of the hardware used by Bluehost is detailed below:

A couple of things really jump out:

• This is clearly old information, as we know Bluehost offer PHP 7, and they advertise a very old version.
• They have their databases on SSD storage for increased performance.
• They are (or at least were) using AMD processors, which are slightly inferior to Intel Xeon servers, but this should have minimal impact.

Server Configuration

Bluehost use CentOS operating system with Apache, PHP 7, MySQL as standard. Also available is Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL,

Overloading

This one is very difficult to assess, and having a look around the web there are some reports of slow websites (here and here are just a couple). With a very popular web host, such as Bluehost, there are bound to be more complaints than a smaller host, so it is difficult to draw too many conclusions there.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to determine the exact cause (a website using significant resources on a web host that throttles high usage could give the same end result as an overloaded server). Equally, a complaint of a slow server might be caused by bad bots bombarding the website (you can't see these in Google Analytics), or a badly configured website.

Ultimately, you should rely on the user reviews at the end of this article for their impressions.

Value for Money

Bluehost pricing is very reasonable, especially if you sign up for three years in advance. However, with SSD Hosting coming as standard on many web hosting providers who charge a similar fee, and who do not make you sign up for three years to get that great price, you may want to make some comparisons before buying.

Refund Policy

Bluehost offers a 30-day money back guarantee. This means you can try them out for 30 days risk-free, and you will receive a full refund (minus any domain fees or any extra add-ons). If you cancel after 30 days you will receive a prorated refund as

If you cancel after 30 days you will receive a prorated refund as credit to your account.

Do we recommend Bluehost?

Almost everything on paper makes Bluehost look like a great provider. They have decent hardware (except no SSD Storage), the latest software, the ability to throttle user resources to prevent resource hogs. They have a great upgrade path to either Cloud Sites, VPS or Dedicated, and even have special plans for WooCommerce users. There are a large number of add-ons that you can purchase to help with security, marketing or even website design.

The problem is, is that all of these great things are overshadowed by the elephant in the room; dubious support and service. This is not just an intermittent problem but has been going on for several years, with some of the parent company's brands (i.e. Arvixe as an example) having significant problems that have caused lost data, weeklong delays for a response to a ticket, and more.

As a result, and primarily due to the reports of lackluster and slow support on many EIG brands, we would advise against signing up with them or any other EIG hosting provider. If you need help choosing, you can follow this link to pre-filter our web hosting reviews to remove EIG-owned hosts.

We also highly recommend reading our readers reviews below.