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An Honest Review of Bluehost Web Hosting
If you’ve landed on this Bluehost review, you’re likely trying to quickly and effortlessly set up, customize, and go live with your upcoming web venture in no time.
Here, we aim to dig deep into what gives Bluehost an edge over Canada’s best web hosting services. You’ve probably already heard how popular and affordable it is. But does it offer what you’re after, or should you consider a different provider? Keep reading this Bluehost review to uncover its deciding factors and what each brings to our table.
Bluehost Review: A Quick Overview of What They Offer
After carrying out my own thorough research of Bluehost, I came up with this quick breakdown for you to get a better understanding of the provider’s hosting features:
Bluehost Hosting Features | Info |
Domain Hosting | 1-year free domain registration |
SSL Security | Free SSL certificate included with all plans |
WordPress Hosting | 1-Click WordPress Install |
Website Builder | Drag-and-drop tool with custom templates |
24/7 Hosting Support | Available via chat, phone, email |
Average Response | Less than 1 minute |
Content Delivery Network (CDN) | Free Cloudflare CDN with Argo Smart Routing for quicker load times |
Firewall Protection | All plans include a web application firewall for security |
Website Hosting | Capable of hosting up to 100 websites |
Storage Options | SSD storage available from 10 GB to 100 GB |
Ease of Use | AI-driven tools make site creation exceptionally user-friendly |
Satisfaction Guarantee | 30-day money-back policy |
Starting Price | $1.99/month |
Official Site | https://www.Bluehost.com/ |
Bluehost Review: A Closer Look
Let’s explore how Bluehost web hosting stacks up in Canada.
The Pros and Cons of Bluehost Web Hosting
Every web host has its ups and downs, and Bluehost is no exception. It successfully shines through its balance of innovation and usability with powerful features. However, there are a few areas where it might fall short.
Reasons to Buy | Reasons Not to Buy |
Free domain for 1 year | Renewal rates are higher than competitors’ |
User-friendly interface | Basic plan lacks advanced features |
Reliable customer service | Storage limits on all packages |
Free SSL certificate | Upsells during the signup process |
Handy WordPress site creation tools | No monthly shared hosting plans |
High uptime reliability | |
Integrated Cloudflare CDN | |
Budget-friendly | |
Free site migration |
Everything You Need to Know: Hosting Types, Costs and Features
Bluehost offers a broad specialized selection of web hosting plans to choose from, which includes:
Shared Hosting
This is the most popular type of web hosting, and it allows multiple sites on a single server. It’s also Bluehost’s lowest priced service for obvious reasons—economies of scale make it feasible to spread the infrastructure and operational costs across numerous websites, which significantly reduces the price per user.
Thanks to it, Bluehost made it among the best cheap web hosting for Canadians.
Though, as expected, it comes with several limitations, such as limited scalability and customization options, potential server crashes, and a restricted number of resources. While it’s good enough for beginners with low traffic, load times are relatively slow and the server can easily be strained.
1-year Plan | Price |
Basic | $1.99/month |
Plus | $3.99/month |
Choice Plus | $3.99/month |
Pro | $9.99/month |
3-year Plan | Price |
Basic | $4.95/month |
Plus | $6.95/month |
Choice Plus | $7.45/month |
Pro | $18.95/month |
Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting
VPS hosting enables fully allocated server resources, so you can build your site with no limits, perfect if you’re expecting high traffic volumes. Bluehost web hosting stands among the best VPS hosting providers in Canada for delivering three comprehensive tiers based on your preferred DDR5 RAM size:
- Standard NVMe 4
- Enhanced NVMe 8
- Ultimate NVMe 16
You can benefit from unmetered bandwidth, 1 Dedicated IP, cPanel (cPanel license fee is included), storage starting from 100 GB NVMe, and much more.
1-year Plan | Price |
Standard NVMe 4 | $56.99/month |
Enhanced NVMe 8 | $70.99/month |
Ultimate NVMe 16 | $101.99/month |
3-year Plan | Price |
Standard NVMe 4 | $46.99/month |
Enhanced NVMe 8 | $65.99/month |
Ultimate NVMe 16 | $94.99/month |
Dedicated Hosting
All the server goodies—CPU, memory, and storage—are reserved just for you and your site. No sharing, it’s all yours thanks to the single-tenant server. It’s pricier than shared hosting, but worth it for high performance, growth, and strong security.
Bluehost features up to 32 CPU cores, 128 GB RAM, 3000 GB NVMe storage, unmetered bandwidth, and cPanel management software.
1-year Plan | Price |
Standard NVMe 32 | $154.79/month |
Enhanced NVMe 64 | $238.79/month |
Premium NVMe 128 | $343.79/month |
3-year Plan | Price |
Standard NVMe 32 | $141.19/month |
Enhanced NVMe 64 | 217.19/month |
Premium NVMe 128 | $312.19/month |
Cloud Hosting
Bluehost offers a WordPress cloud hosting service. It’s a fully managed WordPress platform for superfast load times and guaranteed 100% uptime, with multi-regional backup that scales with your website’s needs.
A few of the features that stood out to me the most were performance monitoring, a global CDN, 1-click staging/cloning, automated WordPress updates, built-in WAF security, DDoS attack mitigation, daily backups, and multi-site management, all included across their plans.
1-year Plan | Price |
Cloud 1 | $29.99/month |
Cloud 10 | $49.99/month |
Cloud 25 | $89.99/month |
Cloud 50 | $109.99/month |
Good to know: WordPress actually recommends Bluehost as its top hosting provider—pretty impressive considering how many hosts they’ve worked with.
In all of the above, I’d have loved to see a middle-ground option of 2 years, or better yet, a one-month choice. However, This way, there’s at least one plan that will get you exactly what you need, whether that’s growing the next 8-figure ecommerce store or running a travel blog.
For more details on plans and costs, feel free to visit Bluehost’s pricing page..
Performance and Reliability
The robust infrastructure that Bluehost web hosting offers, plus its stress on efficient and consistent performance, allows for a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and they even promise 100% when it comes to cloud hosting.
I tested the site myself to check its speed and uptime, and although it’s not the fastest hosting service I’ve ever tried, it’s quite hard to beat, especially considering the price.
Read on: Compare Bluehost vs. HostGator
Bluehost Web Hosting Control Panel
The Bluehost Linux-based control panel is as user-friendly and intuitive as a dashboard can get. It allows you to operate all things correlated to the web hosting and accounts, including overseeing your domain names and visitor analytics, restoring backups, and installing your favourite themes as well as plugins you might be interested in.
I could do all this using any of its seven tabs: Home, My Sites, Marketplace, Email & Office, Domains, Marketing Tools, and Advanced.
Bluehost ecommerce Tools
I also believe Bluehost web hosting is excellent for any ecommerce business out there. And it’s economical, too.
You can set up your online store with WooCommerce and host it on WordPress, all in one place, with Bluehost as your one-stop shop. Pricing goes as follows:
1-year Plan | Price |
Online Store | $7.45/month |
Online Store + Marketplace | $12.95/month |
3-year Plan | Price |
Online Store | $12.95/month |
Online Store + Marketplace | $19.95/month |
Among the features, some of my favourites are the free WP migration tool, the Yoast SEO and email campaign creator tools, the ability for you and your customers to benefit from secure online payments, unlimited products, and gift cards, along with product search and filtering. Plus, you can manage appointment bookings.
Bluehost Hosting Security Features
Honestly, I wouldn’t be writing this Bluehost review if I didn’t have great things to say about its security features.
The provider takes safety very seriously and offers even their most basic users free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates, one-click CloudFlare integration that effectively shuts down any inbound DDoS attacks, three layers of spam protection—Apache Spam Assassin, Spam Experts, and Spam Hammer—and block IP address features.
Furthermore, you can have filters on your email accounts, password-protect directories, and easily manage digital certificates and private keys. I’m always happy to see SSH access—it gives admins a secure way to reach important configuration files.
Bluehost Hosting Help and Support
Bluehost web hosting delivers quick, friendly, and responsive customer service. I’d only heard great things about it, and much to my surprise, it lived up to the hype when I tested it out myself.
When I started the chat—I guess for efficiency purposes—a bot greeted me with questions like, ‘Do you require support with existing products, or are you looking to renew/purchase services?’ and then provided me with a few preset answers to choose from. If I had common questions, like about the process for setting up SSL on my WordPress site through Bluehost, I could have just used the automated chat and got to the answer pretty quickly.
However, whenever I had more complicated issues, I could always ask to speak to a human representative. Doing so typically took me less than a minute. Plus, it’s 24/7, so you’re free to reach out at any time of day or night, or even contact them via email.
Bluehost Review: Key Takeaways
Bluehost hosting ranks first overall while outperforming giants like HostGator and GoDaddy, especially in VPS, dedicated WordPress hosting, and ecommerce management. It does come with a few hidden costs, especially when it comes to add-ons and a minimum 1-year commitment, but it also makes up for it with a 30-day money-back guarantee, feature-rich plans, outstanding uptime stats, reliable support, and affordable pricing.
All in all, the bottom line is that if you’re after a fast, secure, and easy-to-use web hosting service, Bluehost has got the right tools to help you design and launch your website in no time.
Bluehost is the perfect web hosting service for anyone starting their first website or blog.