bluehost review 2022

Bluehost is a well-known website hosting provider. It quickly gained notoriety in its early days as a driving force behind the open-source community and is now regaining its former glory.

Bluehost is a well-known and well-known company. It hosts millions of websites and offers the full range of hosting services, so it was an obvious choice for one of the first entries in the Hosting Tribunal.

My quest to find the best website hosting provider would be incomplete unless I checked out this well-known host. I've written a couple of Bluehost reviews in the past, but while working on this one, I realized that 2018 has been quite eventful for the company.

Things have changed at Bluehost: shared hosting plans, Bluehost.com, and servers have all been updated.

Is this, however, a natural evolution?

Is it a step toward better service that will re-establish the company as one of the best web hosts?

To purchase hosting click here

What Exactly Is Bluehost?

Bluehost, which was founded in 2003 in Provo, Utah, now manages over 2 million websites. This places it firmly among the world's largest web hosts, and the ranking comes as no surprise.

This US hosting company only needed five years to reach one million domain names. In comparison, Hostinger was founded a year later, in 2004, and took six years to reach that milestone.

Bluehost's impressive growth was a testament to its excellence, and in 2010, the giant EIG acquired the Utah-based website host.

Then the Bluehost issues started. Several major service interruptions marred the Bluehost brand in the years that followed.

I checked out the Bluehost Managed WordPress platform not long ago and was unimpressed, thinking to myself that this was just another EIG brand suffering from the withering affliction of acquisition. (To put it mildly, my Bluehost WordPress review wasn't the most glowing.)

To my surprise, the figures Bluehost provided for this detailed, honest review provide numerous reasons for optimism.

So, is Bluehost a reliable host?

Bluehost Uptime, Speed, and Support – The Essentials

1. High uptime – 99.98 percent

Uptime is the lifeblood of web hosting. Anyone, even on a personal laptop, can host a website; the challenge is keeping it online at all times.

Bluehost is one of the few top website hosting providers that does not provide an uptime guarantee. Every other host I've reviewed has a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee (even 100 percent in the case of Namecheap), but Bluehost makes no mention of it on its website.

This struck me as a little out of date. Nobody offered uptime guarantees or reimbursements for SLA violations a few years ago.

In any case, what matters most is not what is promised, but what is delivered.

And Bluehost performs admirably, with 99.98 percent uptime over nearly three years of monitoring. The lowest it has ever been was 99.97 percent, which is far from low!

In fact, these are rock-solid figures that demonstrate a solid infrastructure and high dependability.

The average uptime in 2018 was 99.97 percent.

The average uptime in 2019 is 99.99 percent.

In 2020, the average uptime is 99.98 percent.

2021 Average Uptime:

• January – 99.57%
• February – 99.98%

Bluehost is a dependable host.

2. Quickness

• 0.46s is a quick response time (8th)
• Quick Load Time – 0.98s (6th)
• 0.65s Stable Under Load (5th)

Please keep in mind that if you run speed tests on my domain, the results may vary slightly. Two tests from the same testing platform would normally produce slightly different results. My Bluehost site is hosted in Utah, so I tested it from within the United States. All plugins as well as server-side caching were turned off

It is possible to argue that speed is more important than uptime. When it comes to online browsing, a slow response is a major deterrent.

Back in 2017, I conducted the first of my Bluehost reviews, and the speed and overall server performance were quite disappointing.

To my surprise, the times displayed by Bluehost shared servers place the company firmly in the top three of the fastest providers I've measured here at Hosting Tribunal.

Bluehost's time to first byte is fast enough to place it in the middle of the pack, while the time it takes for the site to fully load is 0.98 seconds. Overall, these results place Bluehost as the eighth fastest host I've tested thus far.

Not only that, but my small WordPress site performed admirably under load. No fewer than 50 concurrent users put little strain on the company's SSD server, receiving responses quickly.

The speed isn't the fastest, but it doesn't fluctuate much, making Bluehost a dependable hosting provider.

In 2018, the average response time was 0.38 seconds.

2019 response time average – 0.45s

The average response time in 2020 is 0.52 seconds.

2021 average response time:

• January – 0.40s
• February – 0.53s

2018 – 0.96s Fully loaded page

Page fully loaded 2019 – 0.95s

2020 – 1.02s Fully loaded page

Page 2021 is fully loaded:

• January – 0.86s
• February – 1.01s

2018 response time under load – 0.59s

2019 – 0.67s response time under load

2020 – 0.66s response time under load

Response time under load in 2021:

• January – 0.64s
• February – 0.71s

Reasonably quick and long-lasting service.

3. Superior Customer Service

Large hosting companies, in my experience, frequently struggle to provide quality customer service. Bluehost appears to be an exception.

I was pleasantly surprised by the courteous and knowledgeable support during the research phase of my first Bluehost expert review. True, they were a little slow to respond over chat on a couple of occasions, but nothing major.

It is only natural for a company with over 2 million domain names to experience a high volume of customer requests on occasion.

I have to say that the support has impressed me even more for this 2021 Bluehost review. I received more consistent responses, which were delivered quickly and courteously. The knowledge base has also been polished here and there, making Bluehost support fairly robust and useful overall.

Excellent support team that is always striving to improve.

To purchase hosting click here

Bluehost's Advantages

A comparison of Bluehost vs. SiteGround or Bluehost vs. HostGator a year ago would have been extremely one-sided. Bluehost's issues were obvious. Bluehost now appears to be one of the favorites to take the top spot among the best website hosting providers at the Hosting Tribunal. The company's shared hosting platform has received a significant update, making it very appealing.

1. Dependable Infrastructure

One of the things that surprised me the last time I reviewed Bluehost was the fact that the company's servers ran on HDDs. However, only one year later, things have changed for the better.

All Bluehost servers are now equipped with modern solid-state drives, which allow orders to be processed much more quickly. This is a substantial performance boost that is felt throughout. My WordPress site's backend is fast, and the speed tests were very quick.

SSD all the way!

This is not the only upgrade; all servers have at least dual quad cores for information processing.

2. Open Source Pioneer

Bluehost has been giving back to the online community since its inception. The company is one of three official WordPress hosts (the other two are DreamHost and SiteGround), and the open-source spirit is strong.

Bluehost has an in-house development team that works to improve over 80 open source applications. One of the most obvious effects of this contribution is that these applications perform better when hosted on Bluehost servers. WordPress, shopping carts, social network platforms, customer management systems, and other apps are among those available.

The list of available apps is not the most extensive, as nothing can compete with the 400+ apps provided by InMotion Hosting, but the selection is very solid, and performance is guaranteed.

3. Costless Backups

The most important characteristics of a dependable web host are uptime and speed, but having your data secure is also critical.

It is not difficult to configure cPanel to create automatic backups, and it irritates me when web hosting providers charge for backups, restoration of sites, or both.

True, web hosts are service providers and users are service managers, i.e. users are responsible for keeping their files safe, but backing up data automatically is so simple and so important!

Bluehost creates courtesy backups on a regular basis and does not charge for restoration. Users can access the backups via cPanel or contact Bluehost's support team for assistance with the recovery.

Whichever option you select, it is completely free. That's how it should be.

4. Registration of a Free Domain Name

Bluehost is one of the largest domain name registrars, and it's easy to see why; each of the company's shared plans includes a free domain name registration. That's pretty cool, especially if you're just starting out online.

A new domain name typically costs more than $10, so having it for free reduces the initial hosting expense by a significant margin.

Keep in mind that while Bluehost domain registration is free, domain renewals are not.

5. Excellent eCommerce Alternatives

Bluehost's solid infrastructure makes it one of the best ecommerce hosting options.

Online shops are more resource-intensive than non-commerce sites due to their catalogs, but Bluehost servers can handle this.

Every account has immediate access to Zen Cart, Cube Cart, OS Commerce, or Agora Shopping Cart, among many others; there is no shortage of excellent ecommerce solutions that can help your online business grow from a simple concept to a profitable endeavor.

6. No-cost SSL

In relation to the previous point, you do not need to spend any money to begin trading online. Let's Encrypt SSL is included with all Bluehost accounts.

Let's Encrypt is fantastic not only because it is free, but also because it is an SSL that is automatically installed, eliminating the need for manual tweaks and the possibility of human error.

It is now a requirement for any website hosting provider, and Bluehost has it.

7. Money-back guarantee for 30 days

Bluehost is one of the web hosting providers that offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.

This guarantee is available to all clients who purchase shared hosting from Bluehost for the first time. If you are dissatisfied with the service and cancel within the first month, you will receive a refund.

One month is not enough time to thoroughly test a hosting provider, but it is better than nothing.

Bluehost's Drawbacks

The company has certainly done much to reclaim its position as one of the world's leading web hosting services, but it is not without flaws. Here are some of the most noticeable flaws that lower Bluehost's overall rating.

1. Paid Relocations

Bluehost may know how to attract new customers by offering free domain name registrations, but the company can certainly do better when it comes to existing sites.

If you already have a website hosted somewhere else and want to move it to Bluehost, you'll have to pay. You'd have to pay $144.99 unless you have the technical knowledge to move an entire cPanel account and troubleshoot potential incompatibility issues.

That is one of the highest fees I have ever seen. Not to mention that many of the top hosts offer free migrations. This makes perfect sense because it is an excellent way to gain new customers.

On this point, Bluehost obviously disagrees with me.

2. There is no monthly billing.

What is the monthly cost of Bluehost?

It makes no difference because you cannot pay for a single month.

The shortest period of time for which you can pay is 12 months. That's not such a big deal because building a website is a long-term investment, but it's strange and limits your options.

After all, the shorter the period for which you pay, the higher the monthly fee. I can't wrap my head around why Bluehost doesn't let people pay how (and how much) they want.

3. Expensive Renewal Fees

Bluehost's pricing policy, like that of all EIG companies, is to attract customers with extremely low initial fees. The charges skyrocket when the service is renewed. The second of the shared plans increases only twice as much as the other fees, which increase three times on average.

Such an approach is not exclusive to EIG hosts, but it is unmistakably typical of the giant's brands.

4. Mixed User Reactions

Bluehost had been in trouble for a few years, and its reputation had suffered as a result. It takes years to develop a positive attitude, but only a few months to completely destroy it. When I wrote this Bluehost review three years ago, the company appeared to be on the rise: support was improving, infrastructure was being updated, and packages were being modernized.

However, user reviews appear to have returned to the pre-EIG acquisition period, when everyone was disillusioned with the host, in 2021.

Do We Advise Bluehost?

Bluehost's infrastructure and packages have recently improved significantly. Aside from the paid inbound site migrations, there aren't many drawbacks to the Bluehost shared platform.

It is quick, dependable, and versatile. There are a plethora of optimized applications, free SSL, and plans that scale up nicely if you require more resources. Bluehost's partnership with CloudFlare ensures that sites hosted by Bluehost load quickly all over the world.

Is Bluehost a legitimate contender for the number one spot?

The giant from Provo's upward trend appears to have stalled somewhat, keeping the host some distance away from being the number one shared hosting provider.

Nonetheless, after three in-depth Bluehost reviews and analyses of its managed WordPress hosting and other services, I can finally say that this is one of the best hosting companies.

Have you worked with Bluehost before? Drop us a line or two in the comments section below to add to our growing collection of Bluehost user reviews.

To purchase hosting click here