Bluehost Review 2016 – Is It The Best Web Hosting Service?

For years, us website owners have always had to deal with hosting companies to keep our sites up and running. The problem is, there are tons of different services to choose from.

One popular hosting company that has been around a long time is Bluehost. We see them everywhere being promoted on blogs, advertised in search engines and giving out coupon codes left and right.

But, the reason you are reading this post right now is because you want to know if the popularity and mass advertising of Bluehost means they have a high quality service. Are the features and benefits of their services right for YOU?

Let's break them down one category at a time…

CPanel

Bluehost uses CPanel to manage your web hosting. It includes one-click WordPress installation, which of course will help a lot if you plan to start a blog.

Their CPanel dashboard should look very familiar as it is similar to other hosting companies.

Customer Support

Customer support is one of the main things website owners look for, as you probably know. Bluehost prides itself on providing some of the highest quality, most accessible support in the industry.

Here are the details of their customer support system:

• 24 hour, 7 days per week, 365 days per year US based phone support.
• Live chat support from 5 AM to 12 AM MST.
• Email support tickets are available.
• They also have self-help support pages with step-by-step instructions on their website.

As you can tell, Bluehost takes customer support very seriously.

Related: LeadPages vs Optimizepress – Best Landing Page Service?

Pricing

Another great thing about Bluehost is their affordable prices. Their prices compare very closely to those of HostGator, their main competitor.

Here is a table comparing their prices and HostGator's:

They are also doing constant promotions and discount offers that you can find through their website, other bloggers, online ads, etc.

Uptime

You don't have to worry about your website shutting down too often with Bluehost. Their uptime is around 99.9%.

Speed/Performance

Although numbers can vary because of the contents of websites being hosted on servers, Bluehost still tends to have a slightly better server response time, page load time and time to first byte than many of its competitors, including HostGator.

SEO Integration

SEO (search engine optimization) plugins tend to work well with Bluehost. Obviously, good SEO is a must in today's search engine dominated world.

Yoast SEO and W3 Total Cache, two of the most effective and popular SEO plugins available to WordPress users, gave me issues when I had HostGator.

They were the only ones that ever gave me problems with SEO plugins. I've never seen these issues occur with Bluehost's services.

Email Features

WIth Bluehost, you get unlimited email accounts, email access from any device and email forwarding for your website's domain.

This is definitely essential if you plan on building a larger brand and having a staff of employees that will need company email accounts.

Using the included email services with Bluehost can actually save you quite a bit of money.

Extra Features That Save Money

Bluehost actually does something that is very helpful for new users, by offering you a free domain.

On top of that, you get free, automated, weekly backups where you might have to pay an extra $10 or $20 a month to get those from many other companies.

And of course, as I mentioned above, they have some of the most coupon codes, promotions, and deals that I've ever seen. They really make hosting affordable, especially for new clients.

Related: Getresponse vs Aweber Comparison Of Email Services

Trustworthiness

Another reason you need to do your research on your web hosting companies is to figure out who you can trust.

Some competitors of Bluehost, I've noticed, have actually disabled sites that had a slow load time or other technical problems without any warning to the website owner.

This especially happens on shared hosting plans where multiple websites are on the same servers. And, people on shared hosting plans tend to not have as much wiggle room if something happens to their website.

In my opinion, this is just immoral. Many of us depend on our business websites and a shutdown with no warning of any kind can be pretty devastating, no matter how long it lasts.

Luckily, I've never seen anyone complain about these things happening with Bluehost.

Conclusion

For the most part, I have nothing but positive things to say about Bluehost and the hosting services they offer.

They have great customer support, uptime, prices, and always have ways for new users to save money by switching to them.

However, I can't say they deserve a 5 star rating because there are hosting service companies that have much better load time records, SEO support, WordPress functionality, as well as some more advanced options for bigger brands.

They are not a premium service and appeal more to beginner bloggers and small businesses. But, of course that covers a lot of people and this is completely fine.

If you fit into the category of beginner blogger, small business owner, etc., Bluehost is one of your best options.

What are your experiences with Bluehost and their competitors?