Choosing the right hosting service for your blog needs time and even testing, but if you follow this post, you’ll find your way. Indeed, creating a WordPress blog with popular companies should be your first step, however, some providers offer good quality while others slow down your site and even risk your total content ranking and security.
Bluehost is one of these hosting companies, they worked hard to establish a good relationship with bloggers and site owners, but nothing is perfect.
So, for beginners especially, there is confusion between Bluehost as a provider for web hosting, WordPress optimized hosting, and their regular shared hosting. Let’s focus on these types of services and make things clear for all.
Bluehost
Bluehost is a web hosting company owned by a group Called EIG Endurance International Group that owns a long list of other companies. In reality, the growth of its business revenue is based on a large number of acquisitions of small hosting companies.
Actually, the EIG company has over 2500 employees and it’s located in the United States. The list of sub-companies includes HostGator, JustHost, A Small Orange, HostMonster, iPage, and more.
Bluehost offers different types of services for blogs and websites in general. In fact, there is shared hosting, I’ll talk about it later, WordPress optimized web hosting, VPS, and also dedicated servers for large sites.
With Bluehost, you can create a blog on CMS or any kind of other sites. Even more, you can install content management systems like Joomla, Drupal, and eCommerce applications such as PrestaShop and Magento. So, all in all, Bluehost is a web hosting service provider that you can use to start with and also grow with.
- Realated: HostGator vs GoDaddy
No matter what size of the website you want to build, you can start for cheap plans, and later upgrade. It’s a scalable hosting you can use.
Of course, Bluehost is not the best of the best as many others think, there are downtimes and problems that customers reported. But overall, it’s an affordable hosting that makes its profit basically from bloggers and sites built on WordPress.
For example, back in 2014, there was a big outage that caused lots of confusion among site owners. In our experience with Bluehost, we don’t find it really as good and fast as Liquid Web, but it’s still a low-cost hosting that you can use for a small blog or website.
Shared hosting offered by Bluehost
This type of hosting is suitable for hundreds of applications and tools. As it’s a shared web hosting, everything as resources is shared between all the domains hosted on the same server. For example, your website speed will be affected directly by the overall RAM and CPU usage by other sites on the server.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the hosting will protect your site usage and resources. That’s why they don’t allow high traffic usage on their servers, but things happen, and a cheap shared hosting should only be your choice for a small blog.
If you want to migrate an existing blog to Bluehost, then, there is a bad surprise, the cost is over $100 and that’s really surprising. What beginners, with no resources, have to do in that case?
So, our recommendation is to stay away from Bluehost, the reason is that you can get better quality hosting and free migration with HostGator. Why should you spend all that money on migration when you can get it completely for free and from professional customer support?
Bluehost vs WordPress
The fact that WordPress recommends Bluehost as a hosting should never mean a good service for your blog. In reality, we’re talking about a company that’s owned by Automattic, and it makes a profit from its hosting and marketing services.
In addition, they make money by referring customers to Bluehost, so, it’s a business in the end, and you should keep that in mind. It’s like owning shares in a company or partnering with it or even investing in it.
So, WordPress does not recommend Bluehost because it’s the best hosting in the World, but because they work together.
WordPress optimized hosting by Bluehost
Now we come to the Bluehost optimized WordPress hosting, it’s the next level of service offered specifically for bloggers. So, expect faster servers, more resources, and better quality in total compared to their shared hosting.
That’s all good, but for pricing, things are different. Bluehost blog hosting is expensive and not affordable if you compare the speed of the server and the security to managed hosting providers that are faster like WPEngine.
Also, the renewal prices for hosting plans offered by Bluehost are expensive and it’s as much as twice the regular promotional plan you sign up for the first time. So, don’t be surprised next time you find the double cost of your previous hosting plan you subscribed to with them.
- Read also: Tips and tricks to save money on web hosting
Final word
Bluehost is a cheap hosting for WordPress, but I only recommend it for starters. If you have a blog that you just started or that receives a little traffic, then, go with them. But if you want to go big and choose a better hosting that’s faster and more secure, then, HostGator is the right choice. The company uses SSD fast servers with great caching and fast network connectivity.