BlueHost reviews

making migrations harder than ever

Nothing wrong with our VPS for years, I leave them alone, they leave me alone. Centos 6 went end of life, and their option for me was to download a copy of my sites, format the entire server to Centos 7, and then upload the sites again. An impossible amount of downtime.

Rather than order another server and perform a migration, I downsized to a managed Wordpress plan instead. but, since i have a VPS account, there's no way to add managed Wordpress; I need to make a new account. confusing, convoluted, and now I get two bills, but OK.

I set up the site on a temporary domain to copy data and ensure functionality. No problems with the managed Wordpress platform or interface. Great! I try to update the domain name to the real domain name we will be using on this account.

And everything starts to unravel.

There is absolutely no way to perform a migration between two bluehost accounts with no downtime. Not because of any technological barrier; this is entirely possible with most any other host, or between two VPSes. But since the managed wordpress product requires that the domain name be assigned to the account before renaming, and since the VPS account will not relinquish the domain before it is unassigned from the VPS and replaced with a different primary domain, I had to perform a several hour long dance routine with the support department to figure out how to get this domain registration moved.

The support team really tried their hardest, but because I encountered a few befuddled reps, the downtime kept on going

All in all, I should not HAVE to have the domain name pointed towards the managed Wordpress product before I change its domain. And, I should not HAVE to bend to the billing system at bluehost for my VPS's domain name assignments. For all the billing system should care, I ought to be able to put google.com or anything else as a cPanel account on my server, and change my managed Wordpress domain name to match. It won't work, since I don't control DNS, but you should not validate that for me.

I should not have to make ANY changes to my VPS in order to move a domain registration. And most importantly, I should not have to needlessly change the primary domain name of our website to satisfy a requirement for apparently 25 year old CGI billing software, just so I can change it right back afterward, causing needless downtime.

And on a proper billing system, completely disjointed from the content of the products it services, I would not. Because of these issues, I pointlessly added 4 hours of downtime to a 10 minute migration.

We will be shopping around.

Biggest Pro: very very inexpensive
Biggest Con: outdated billing system

BlueHost Review

I’ve used Bluehost since 2017. Most of my experience with them has been positive. First, I’d like to mention their pricing. Though their first-year price is reasonable, the renewal price becomes double. It is one of the more expensive shared hosting services on the market.

Secondly, their support. Their live chat takes time to connect to an agent, but they quickly solve the problem. In my experience, creating a support ticket is more efficient and issues are solved within a day.

Bluehost charges a $149.99 migration fee, where most hosting providers offer migration services free of charge. This is beyond my understanding.

Their uptime is relatively better than most of the other low cost shared hosting companies. But the server response time is not that great. I did not find any significant increase in speed to my sites.

They maintain strict security for the hosting accounts, including offering a free SSL certificate for each domain. However, sometimes widely used plug-ins get flagged, and the site gets blocked. After contacting the support, they unblock the site, but it can be annoying.

In addition to the security features mentioned, Bluehost also provides access to a wide range of different applications and APIs.

Overall for shared hosting performance, Bluehost is one of the top choices.

Biggest Pro: Security
Biggest Con: Higher Renewal Fee

Bluehost always went above and beyond

I remember the day I decided to host my new digital agency's website on Bluehost for the first time. I was frustrated because I had no idea what I was doing.

I had multiple technical issues on my website in the first week because I was trying to activate the SSL certificate, but I couldn't do that. I also tried to activate my professional email account and spent around 12h trying to fix the server names and other advanced settings using public support websites. Again, I failed! My last option was to contact Bluehost’s technical support by live chat.

The first agent took care of my SSL certificate in no time; he even spent some time fixing other settings I previously messed up.

The second problem was the most difficult one because it was related to a third-party email provider I had contacted earlier and failed to get help. My Bluehost chat agent really went above and beyond while fixing my email issue. It took him about 5-7 minutes to take care of that and he promised my email would be good to go in 72h, but I noticed that it was already working right after I ended the chat session with him.

I just wish I didn't spend so much time trying to fix things by myself and I contacted Bluehost right away. The whole experience proved to me that I was at least right when I didn't hire an expert to take care of that because they would charge me more for something I could get for free with Bluehost.

Biggest Pro: Speed, great technical support
Biggest Con: More expensive than the average market price

Complicated hosting ever

I am a web developer and deal with various hosting providers to manage my own and client's websites. The domain mrahil.com was initially hosted on Bluehost in the hopes that it provides better solutions to small business owners and freelancers. However, during a year or so while my domain was hosted on Bluehost I received numerous complaints from my clients and co-workers about the site being down.

Initially, I thought the problem could be on my end because I was using the Gmail service as my email client for the domain. However, after speaking to Google Mail support it was clear that there was no problem with the DNS settings and pointing my MX records to use Gmail was not causing the problem with the website being down.

Further to my several requests to the technical support department at Bluehost, the technical support kept on insisting to move my MX records to Bluehost. The support team did not realize that the problem was not with DNS pointing, the server simply did not respond most of the time.

After facing this issue for a long time and having a bad experience with the technical support department, I decided to move my hosting because it started to hurt my credibility and my business too.

If you are looking for a stable website and do not want your clients complaining about the website not working, you might want to move away from Bluehost.

Biggest Pro: Cheap options available for startups and freelancers
Biggest Con: Uptime reliability and incompetent technical support

Bluehost web hosting

I've been using Bluehost as my web hosting provider for almost 2 years and have multiple hosting accounts with them. I use Bluehost for all of my WordPress projects since Bluehost is one of their recommended web hosting companies.

The dashboard and cPanel are very straightforward and easy to use. Technical and billing support is very responsive and they really know the ins and outs of their business. If I ever encounter issues or if I have questions, Bluehost is very easy to contact since they have live chat support. Their live support is available 24/7 and it only takes a few minutes to reach a human being. SSL certificate for your site is also free and it makes access to your website secure. Since I'm using the Plus package, I can create unlimited websites with unlimited SSD storage and bandwidth. Bandwidth is unmetered, which means I will not be billed based on the bandwidth and storage that I'm using. They also offer unlimited email accounts with unlimited storage. My favorite part is Bluehost's one click feature for WordPress installation, which is especially helpful for people that do not have any background on developing and building websites.

Overall, I highly recommend Bluehost if you're looking for a reliable web host. The company has been in this business for more than 20 years and they still continue to enhance their services. You may check their website for the hosting plans that they're offering.

Biggest Pro: Unlimited web hosting, email, storage and bandwidth

Bluehost Reseller - High Quality Hosting

So, I have been using Bluehost Reseller hosting for about 7 months now and I can say that I will never look for a new provider, because they are, by all means, the best option for me so far.

Bluehost provides a handy set of plugins to help you run an optimized and secure website, regardless of your skill level. For instance: I have WHM and Cpanel with all options unlocked and many gigabytes of space for a really small amount of money per month. This is the biggest plus for me when I compare Bluehost with other host providers.

In addition to this, Bluehost offers a great set of features. All things that are important, such as SSL certificates, domain registration, and WHOIS privacy, as well as CDNs and performance-enhancing security tools.

One more thing worth mentioning is that Bluehost offers amazing live chat support. They solved many issues for me, every time I contacted them, for free and really fast. I mean this is just incredible. The fact that you always have a couple of guys waiting online, in case anything goes wrong for me is golden.

To sum up, I am more than confident to suggest Bluehost hosting provider to anyone having second thoughts with choosing the right provider. These people are doing the business best way possible, especially in these times when a lot of providers don't give Cpanel and WHM for small amounts of money.

10 out of 10 for Bluehost hosting company!

Biggest Pro: WHM + Cpanel Reseller Hosting for a couple of dollars per month

excellent servers and support

I have been with the service for a few weeks and I have requested support about 30 times, but most of these are due to doubts and small issues, a couple of big things that have been resolved very effectively is the perfect hosting provider!

The support chat is immediate and very effective, the custom cpanel is excellent! I hired PRO hosting and it is wonderful, I love it!

Biggest Pro: support and speed

Affordable WordPress Hosting for Beginners

I had used BlueHost in the second year of my Blogging career. Grabbed their dedicated Web hosting in one of the Black Friday Sales so got it in pretty cheap. Earlier, my blog was hosted on one of their other Web hosting service Hostgator. Bluehost and Hostgator are both owned by Endurance International Group.

I had used their service for around a year as after that I've changed the host as traffic on my blog increased and I moved to a better host.

Now, BlueHost isn't that bad for the small beginner sites which get low-traffic. If you're creating website for your own business or starting with a blog, you can go ahead with their service. BlueHost is one of the web hostings which is recommended by WordPress.

It has some of the essential features like FREE domain name with any hosting plan, One-Click apps installations, FREE SSL included, Site builders, and same user-friendly Cpanel like the others have in this class. If you ask me about the support, I didn't like it much as you've to wait for hours in the chat queue to get your query answered.

If you're going for Bluehost, grab the dedicated IP Shared Hosting as almost all types of sites hosted on this web hosting because it's cheap. It's best for landing pages and micro-niche smaller sites.

With minor technical knowledge, BlueHost could be a choice.

I have about One-year hosting experience with BlueHost. During the journey, we have got both some great time and some worst time.

Firstly let's start with a few great things about BlueHost. I was really very happy with their uptime. Besides that, I must say their server speed was great! The value and packages they are offering, I believe those are really a very good deal. I never faced any issue with billing and customer support peoples are really friendly and try to do their best. In my opinion, by considering Uptime, Reliability, Server & Connection speed, Price and Customer support, BlueHost could be a great option as your hosting partner.

Now, I would like to share some worst things which couse me to move forward to another service provider. The issue was always technical support. They don't have an automatic backup system. Another issue was migrating a site from a different provider. They asked for a few hundred bucks where we were able to freelance the service at $35 only. Also, they always try to upsell their professional services.

Overall if you could do some technical task like site back and migration BlueHost could be a choice. That's all I can share with you. And I will glad if my share could help you to make your decision right.

Biggest Pro: Price and Uptime & Reliability
Biggest Con: Technical support are paid.

Better than others

I like BlueHost because of following reasons: I have faced no serious issue so far in my website for more than 2 years. Also, the admin cpanel account is much easy and user friendly. Its easier for me to increase memory limit using that cpanel. Additionally, its quite easy to create subdomains and make necessary changes through cpanel. The best part is that its customer support is responsive and they are more than happy to help with sense of responsibility.

The bad thing about BlueHost is that its prices are too high. Although the service is better, but pricing plan should also be a bit low for a beginner who want to start an online business but has less money. Secondly, I have faced slow speed of my website at some time. Although other websites including google was opening speedily, but my site was slower. This happened only for few days, but still that was the bad thing about this hosting provider.

Finally, I would definitely recommend everybody to get hosting service from BlueHost, especially those who are frustrated from several hosting issues such as "Error Establishing Database Connection". Actually, I faced this issue several times on a different hosting provider, and that's why, I'm feeling much happy with BlueHost being most reliable.

Biggest Pro: Customer Support and Reliability
Biggest Con: Price too much