Bluehost Review: Best WordPress Hosting For Beginners

Are you ready to start a blog or website but are on the fence about which hosting company to go with? In this comprehensive Bluehost review, I’ll tell you exactly why this popular web hosting company is a great choice.

Let me start by saying that Bluehost has been an amazing host for my blog. I totally recommend them and below I’ll tell you why.

But first… let’s take the free hosting question off the table. Just in case you are still unsure why you should go self-hosted at all…

Why do you need to purchase hosting for your blog?

  • It empowers you to take control of all of your content and to have full ownership of your blog. Unlike free platforms where your blog can be taken down at any time if you violate the Terms of Service. Because with free blogging platforms, it’s their name on the line, not yours and the hosting company has to protect itself.
  • You get your own domain name which instantly makes you look more professional and trustworthy.
  • It enables you to monetize your blog any way you want, including by joining a high-paying ad network like Ezoic. This is a huge improvement compared to free blogging platforms that might not allow you to monetize your blog at all. Or might place ads on your site that brings you no income whatsoever or in the best case scenario share only a small percentage of the profits with you.
  • Paid hosting services use faster, more powerful servers and have WAY better uptime. If you’ve been blogging on WordPress.com, it’s easy to move your blog to self-hosted WordPress.org.
  • You can make your blog more secure (the fancy term is getting an SSL certificate). That’s important because not only does this give visitors peace of mind when they enter any personal information on your blog (like their email address when they sign up for your email list or information related to something they buy from you) but this also keeps your blog on Google’s good side.
  • You can use a professional-looking theme that comes with all the bells and whistles you need to grow your brand. While on the free platforms, you are very limited when it comes to your blog’s customization, you can’t supercharge your blog with plugins, you are limited to a handful of themes and your blog comes branded with the hosting platform’s label.
  • You can have your own custom email address that ends in your own domain, like [email protected]. This is essential when building an email list since most email marketing providers won’t let you send newsletters from Gmail or Yahoo emails.
  • Lastly, when you think about it, paid hosting isn’t that expensive at all. And if you want to blog for business, it really makes sense to pay what’s less than a trip to Starbucks for all the benefits and tranquility it brings.

So yes, signing up for hosting with Bluehost will give you complete control over your content and will allow you to grow your blog into a business.

Bluehost review (2020)

Here are 11 reasons why I think hosting your blog or business website with Bluehost is a great idea.

Bluehost is ridiculously easy to use

  • Getting started is super simple and quick. I explain how to set up your account in my how to start a WordPress blog with Bluehost tutorial
  • A few months ago Bluehost made some major updates and now WordPress comes automatically installed so you can start working on your blog right after you sign up
  • Beautifully designed and easy to understand dashboard written in plain English. So you can manage your blog without having to be a tech whiz
  • It closely integrates with WordPress which means you can sign into the WordPress admin right from your Bluehost dashboard

Lightning fast customer support

  • A year ago I used to be placed on hold for up to 30 minutes every time I contacted Bluehost support. But things have changed dramatically in the meantime
  • Nowadays, the tech support at Bluehost is lightning fast and available 24/7. So wherever you are in the world and no matter what time of day or night you need assistance, they will be there for you over the phone (toll-free if you are in the US) or live chat
  • Just recently I messed up my blog (it happens – sometimes I get into this frenzy of experimentation and I’m not the most tech-savvy person). So I got in contact with Bluehost over their live chat and a WordPress expert was with me in an instant. Seriously, I didn’t even have time to panic
  • They will help you even with the strangest of questions. And the silliest ones too. Like how to install the SSL certificate (hint, you just have to toggle a button)

Virtually no downtime at all

  • This one is super important. You want amazing uptime for your blog. Because if it goes down, you could lose readers and potential sales
  • In my own experience, Bluehost has almost perfect uptime scores
  • Below is a screenshot from Pingdom. My blog was down for only 1 minute over the last 30 days. Nothing to worry about, believe me. I used other hosting providers before and none of them had such close to perfect server uptime
  • I use Pingdom to keep an eye on my blog and notify me in case it goes down. They test the status of my blog every single minute, so in case something is wrong it’s almost impossible to miss. I sometimes don’t receive any notifications for months in a row

Super fast servers

  • In 2017, Bluehost upgraded their servers to SSD for better speed
  • This is great, but what’s really amazing is that they also preinstall the Endurance Cache plugins for you (most hosting companies don’t offer this for free). This way your blog can load extremely fast and handle even more visitors at a time
  • They’ve also decided to offer PHP 7 as the default to all WordPress customers. If you don’t know what PHP 7 is, don’t worry. What’s important is that it also comes preinstalled so your blog will automatically run faster without you having to lift a finger
  • This is a big deal because people like fast sites and Google uses page speed as a ranking factor. Luckily, with Bluehost, you don’t have to worry about this
  • When it comes to speed, every second counts. Better speed means higher conversion rates and as you can see from the image below, bylauraiancu.com has average page load times just a little bit over 3 seconds, which is pretty awesome!

Plenty of space to grow

  • You get 50GB of space with the basic plan (starting at $2.95/month) and unmetered website space with every other plan. This is way more space than most hosting companies offer and than you will ever need, to be honest
  • Plus you get unmetered bandwidth with all hosting plans, which means your blog won’t go down when one of your blog posts goes viral and you receive a spike in traffic all of a sudden

Custom email addresses

  • I’m very fond of Gmail (for its simplicity and user-friendliness). But when I communicate with my readers I want them to receive messages from an email address that ends in my own custom domain, @bylauraiancu.com, not @gmail.com. It just looks more professional that way
  • Bluehost lets you create several email accounts ending in your own domain name for free
  • You can easily set up Bluehost to forward all your emails to your Gmail account and check them from the comfort of your Gmail app
  • Or you can set up your Gmail account to send emails using your custom email address. I’ve explained how to do this here

Automated backups

  • Bluehost automatically creates daily, weekly, and monthly backups of your entire account
  • So in the unlikely event that something happens or if you somehow mess up your blog, they can easily restore your complete data for you

Free SSL certificate

  • Until not long ago, most website URLs looked like this http:// www.bylauraiancu.com
  • But recently, there’s been a push for sites to look like this https:// www.bylauraiancu.com
  • The only difference is an ’s’ after the HTTP, but this indicates a website is secure and you are safe to introduce sensitive data, like passwords, email addresses, and credit card info
  • In 2017, Google announced that they will start flagging all unencrypted websites. This means that if your blog doesn’t use HTTPS and hence doesn’t have an SSL certificate, it will display ‘Not secure’ in the URL bar
  • If you have a newsletter subscription form or you sell something through your blog, you’ll want to reassure your readers that their information is safe by using HTTPS and displaying a beautiful green ‘Secure’ text next to your URL
  • Bluehost lets you install an SSL certificate for free. And it’s as simple as toggling a button!

Free domain for the first year

  • All Bluehost hosting plans come with a free domain name for the first year (you save $15.99 like that!)

Bluehost is widely trusted

  • Bluehost powers over 2 million websites worldwide. That many people cannot be wrong
  • They also come highly recommended by WordPress.org – they are the first out of only 3 hosting companies WordPress.org endorses
  • And yes, I use them for all my blogs and I’ve been a happy paying customer for almost a year

Low prices

  • Bluehost offers all of these amazing benefits for as low as $2.95/month.
  • It’s hard to imagine starting a business for less. Actually, most businesses require an initial investment of thousands of dollars, so blogging really is peanuts compared to that!

If you think blogging is something you’d enjoy, I highly encourage you to start TODAY. Because if not today, when? You know as well as I do that someday is not a day of the week.

No more postponing, no more second-guessing because there’s absolutely NOTHING you can possibly learn tomorrow, or next week, or next month that will make this easier. It really is THIS easy!

Here is my step by step tutorial on how to start a self-hosted WordPress blog and here is a direct link to sign up for Bluehost.

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About the author:
Hey there, dream chaser! I’m a writer and designer on a mission to inspire and empower you to create a highly profitable minimalist online business and show up for your dreams in a sustainable way.
xo, Laura


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