Bluehost Shared Hosting Review

Bluehost is one of the recommended hosting companies by WordPress from 2005 and offers different types of hosting plans. Shared hosting plans are popular among webmasters due to nominal price range. In this article we will discuss various features of Bluehost shared hosting plans with pricing comparison and important things to be considered before go for low end shared hosting with Bluehost.

Related: Review of SiteGround shared hosting.

Bluehost Shared Hosting Plans

Bluehost offers three shared hosting plans – Starter, Plus and Pro. Features and pricing of the plans are given in the below table:

Feature	Basic	Plus	Choice Plus	Pro
Hosted Sites	1	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Storage in GB	100	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
MySQL Databases	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Database Tables	1000	1000	1000	3000
File Count Limit	50K	50K	50K	300K
Network Bandwidth	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Free Domain	1 Year	1 Year	1 Year	1 Year
Subdomains	No	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Domain Privacy	No	No	Yes	Yes
Dedicated IP	No	No	No	1
SSL Certificate	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
CloudFlare CDN	Basic	Basic	Basic	Basic
Site Backup Pro	No	No	Yes	Yes
SpamExperts	No	1 Domain	1 Domain	2 Domains
Email Accounts	Office 365	Office 365	Office 365	Office 365

All plans include Microsoft Email with Office 365 license valid 30 days. You have to renew separately to continue the email plans with Microsoft. After running sites on Bluehost shared servers below are some of the things we noticed and think worth of sharing here for you to consider before purchase:

cPanel

Bluehost cPanel has lot of features to control the behavior of your site. You will like the one click installer allowing you to install packages like WordPress in less than 5 minutes. You can manage files with “File Manager” or use FTP account to download or upload files to server remotely.

Overall we do not see any specific issues in using Bluehost cPanel and more comfortable in using FTP for quicker file management.

Support

We would rate the overall support as “Very Average” and some examples are below:

• Support ticket – we raised couple of tickets and got the response after two days.
• Live chat – average waiting time varies from 5 – 15 minutes and more in some time.
• Surprisingly the tickets or chat history can’t be completely tracked from your account.

So do not expect one on one support just because you are paying for the shared hosting. We also have sites hosted with other platforms, bought many themes and plugins from various providers and the support for sure is faster than Bluehost regardless of services.

Pricing on Renewal

Though the starter plan cost around $3.95 with the offer always available from Bluehost home page the renewal will happen at different rates. Here is where most of the site owners got disappointed due to lack of patience and understanding on the initial pricing offered by Bluehost. Any offer or discount is ONLY valid on initial purchases and the renewal will happen as per the prevailing rate which is generally multifold than the initial offer. For example, if you have got an initial deal of $3.95 per month for 1 year contract the next renewal will happen with the prevailing rate at that point which is currently at $7.49.

Contract Term	Starter	Plus	Pro
12 Months	$7.49	$11.99	$24.99
24 Months	$6.99	$10.99	$22.99
36 Months	$5.99	$9.99	$19.99

In general the deal is only applicable for the first month of contract and remaining months will be charged at full rate.

Site Speed

Shared hosting is good for sites with less traffic and less server load but may not be suitable for many other type of sites especially updated frequently with multiple authors. Shared servers will host up to thousand sites resulting in reduced speed at any point of time. If you have concern on site speed then it’s a good idea to go for upgraded plans like VPS or dedicated servers from the start though the cost will be high.

Site speed on Bluehost shared servers will also get affected with more number of files on your site due to plugins you install.

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Downtime

With our experience we noticed Bluehost shared servers will be down frequently without any prior notice causing unpleasant user experience. Sometime this may also cost loss of customer or sale for you. Even we have sites hosted with free hosting companies like Weebly for years without much downtime like Bluehost.

Plugins

Though plugin installations are not restricted you may need to be careful in choosing heavyweight plugins especially for caching. For example, below is the cPanel warning message from Bluehost when we installed the popular W3 Total Cache plugin and activated both database and object caching.

Any plugins adding lot of folders and files on server should be avoided on Bluehost shared hosting environment to ensure the site speed. Learn more about Bluehost file count limit.

Buying Add-ons

We noticed other scenario among webmasters spending less money on shared hosting and spending too much on add-ons. For example if you buy a starter plan and then buy add-ons separately for dedicated IP, SSL certificate, Site Backup Pro, SiteLock, etc. the total amount spent will be nearer to pro plan or optimized WordPress hosting or VPS hosting.

Plan / Add-ons	Approximate Price per month
Shared hosting basic plan	$7.99
Dedicated IP	$3.99
SSL Certificate	$5.00
SiteLock Security	$1.99
Site Backup Pro	$1.99
Spam Expert	$2.99
Total	$23.45

Shared hosting pro plan costs $19.99 / 22.99 / 24.99 per month for 1 / 2 / 3 years contract including all these features with additional life time free domain, increased file count, unlimited domain hosting and improved speed. Since the pricing always changes, verify your final pricing before purchase.

Summary

If you have a simple site with less than 1000 visitors per day then we would recommend going with low end Bluehost shared hosting starter plan without much expectation on speed and support. If your site has considerable traffic and expected to grow in time or have an ecommerce site then it is better you can add some more amount and go for upgraded plans which will provide better speed and additional features start from the beginning.