Bluehost Pricing: Are Its Low Prices REALLY Worth It? [2024]

You know that phrase: don’t judge a book by its cover? That’s exactly the case with Bluehost. On the surface, you’ll see that prices are low – but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that you have to pay extra for a lot of things other hosts give you for free, like site-based security and automatic backups.

In our tests of more than 3,500 shared hosting providers from around the world, Bluehost’s platform proved to be slower and less reliable than most. And its advanced plans, with optimizations to improve its page loading speeds and reliability, come at too high a price compared to other budget hosts.

For example, you can get much better value for your money with Hostinger’s shared plans. These plans have comparable or lower prices than Bluehost’s, even with term discounts. More importantly, Hostinger’s LiteSpeed web server infrastructure has scored much higher in our performance tests than Bluehost ever has.

Read on to find out how Bluehost measures up to our other recommended vendors.

Bluehost Features and Pricing Overview

Low Base Prices, but Basic Features Cost Extra

Bluehost tries to offer competitive pricing on basic plans. It gives you a free domain name for a year and free SSL from Let’s Encrypt with every plan, but key features like automatic backups and site-based security are usually only available as add-ons. If you don’t want to pay more for these, either uncheck the boxes at sign-up or try one of the alternative hosts I’ve recommended below.

Bluehost caters to everyone from beginners to professionals with high-traffic sites. It offers four shared hosting plans, four shared WordPress plans, three managed WordPress plans, three VPS plans, three dedicated server plans, and two WooCommerce-specific plans.

Depending on the plan you choose, term duration ranges from between 1 and 36 months. You can get discounts on longer terms, but when the initial term expires, your plan will automatically renew at its regular price.

Bluehost accepts all major credit cards, PayPal instant payments, purchase orders, checks (in the US), and money orders (in US dollars).

Canceling a plan is easy, and you should get your refund within 7 days. Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, but it won’t give you a refund on extra services. And it will deduct a “non-refundable domain fee” from your refund for the domain name registration that comes with your plan.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is ideal for blogs, beginners, and startups. As the name suggests, with shared hosting, you share resources on a server with other customers. This helps keep prices low, but it can sometimes mean lesser performance and security.

Bluehost offers four shared hosting plans that you can subscribe to on a 12- or 36-month term. For this review, I’ll focus on its Basic, Choice Plus, and Pro plans.

Basic

Bluehost’s Basic shared hosting plan is only worth considering if you’re looking to start your first website or blog. It allows for a single site, and while you get 50GB of SSD storage, a free domain for a year, and a drag-and-drop site builder, not much else is included.

If you want to launch multiple small websites with a plan that includes more features and resources, you may want to upgrade to Bluehost’s Choice Plus. But neither Basic nor Choice Plus will give you the value for money you get from Hostinger’s shared hosting plans.

Choice Plus

Upgrading to Bluehost’s Choice Plus plan will give you unlimited SSD storage for an unlimited number of websites. Its discounted 12- or 36-month terms aren’t much more expensive than Basic, which makes it a far better deal.

Choice Plus provides you with the same 24/7 support, free domain, and free SSL that Basic gives you, but it also includes automatic backups for a year and free domain privacy. But like all Bluehost shared hosting plans, you have to buy an add-on for site security. This isn’t included with the Pro plan, so the only reason to upgrade is for better performance and a dedicated IP.

Pro

Pro might give you the best performance Bluehost’s shared hosting can offer, but it’s far more expensive than the other plans. And even with CPU optimization and unlimited storage for unlimited websites, Pro is still only suitable for websites with low to moderate traffic.

You get all the same features with Pro that you get from Choice Plus, but the free automatic backups are good for the life of your plan rather than for just one year. And you also get a free dedicated IP address. But at this price point, you can get more for your money from any one of the alternate vendors I’ve suggested below that offer shared hosting.

Is Shared Hosting Right for You?

Bluehost’s shared hosting is the least expensive way to get your blog, personal website, or small business site online. The Choice Plus plan gives you unlimited storage and a decent set of base features, though you have to pay extra for security, and you only get free backups for a year.

Shared hosting’s resource restrictions can become limiting when your website starts to grow – or when other customers’ websites on the same server start to grow – so if you need guaranteed resources, you may want to consider a VPS plan.

WordPress Hosting

If you intend to use WordPress to launch a blog, personal site, or small business site, choosing a Bluehost WordPress hosting plan is a good move. These plans come preinstalled with the latest version of WordPress to make sure you get the latest features.

There are four Bluehost WordPress plans. They’re built on Bluehost’s shared hosting platform and share the same plan names, term lengths (12 or 36 months), and prices. And they come with a drag-and-drop site builder.

Basic

As with the Basic shared hosting plan, WordPress Basic is ideal for one blog or small website. On top of the automatic WordPress install, the only thing it appears to offer that’s different from shared hosting is help with changing your login credentials from the WordPress default to whatever credentials you want.

The 50GB of SSD storage and all other resources are identical to the equivalent shared hosting plan. I’d definitely recommend upgrading to the Choice Plus plan if you need additional storage, have multiple websites, or want a year of automated backups.

But don’t be fooled by Bluehost’s marketing. Things like Microsoft Office 365 are made available for 30 days, but they are not included.

Choice Plus

Choice Plus offers the best value of any Bluehost WordPress hosting plan, but there’s not much more to say about it that I haven’t already said about WordPress Basic or shared hosting Choice Plus. It, like Basic, gives you hundreds of WordPress templates and a drag-and-drop site builder. It also includes a year of automatic backups that Basic doesn’t.

But for the price of Choice Plus, you can get more included features and better performance with the entry-level WordPress VPS hosting plan from InterServer. And InterServer’s WordPress VPS offers many WordPress-specific optimizations.

Pro

The two things worth mentioning about Bluehost’s Pro WordPress hosting are its premium Positive SSL certificates and the CPU optimization. Positive SSL certificates give you an added layer of transaction protection over the free Let’s Encrypt SSL included with other plans.

Bluehost claims its Pro WordPress hosting plan is ideal for high traffic blogs and business websites. However, there’s no apparent difference in resources between it and the shared hosting equivalent. So if you need WordPress hosting for a high-traffic site or blog, I’d consider upgrading to a managed WordPress plan.

Is WordPress Hosting Right for You?

The main reason to pick a WordPress hosting plan is to make it easier and more efficient to use a WordPress site. Bluehost’s WordPress hosting is a good option if you have a small site and are looking for reasonably-priced hosting. Like its shared hosting cousin, Bluehost’s Choice Plus plan delivers the best value in this category.

But if you need more resources and better performance for your growing operations, you may want to consider Bluehost’s managed WordPress hosting instead.

Managed WordPress Hosting

Bluehost’s managed WordPress hosting offers better performance and scalability to meet the demands of surging traffic. With managed WordPress hosting, Bluehost will take care of all the server and application admin, optimizations, and updates, so you can focus on your site’s content.

These plans are aimed at professionals and cost a bit more than shared WordPress plans. There are three plans available, with terms starting at 3 months. All plans are for just one site and include data analytics, a marketing center (to manage things like SEO and social media), and free SiteLock security tools to protect against bots, hackers, and malware.

Build

Bluehost’s managed WordPress Build plan is intended for websites that generate up to 50,000 visits per month. But temporary spikes in traffic that outpace that rate won’t cause your site to crash or slow down as Bluehost’s servers will scale up to meet demand. Though you will need to upgrade if your traffic exceeds this pace over a longer period.

Build gives you a lot more than Bluehost’s unmanaged WordPress plans. You get a staging environment to build and test your site before you go live, scheduled daily backups, and malware protection.

But while Build gives you a decent amount of features for the price, you can get more resources for less money with Hostinger’s Business WordPress plan.

Grow

Grow is designed for a professional WordPress site that expects moderate monthly traffic. Grow gives you double the SSD storage of Build (40GB vs 20GB) and capacity for three times the monthly visitors (150,000 vs 50,000). It also gives you more advanced features.

With Grow you get the Premium version of the Jetpack plugin, which includes tools to help you monetize your site. You also get SEO tools, 10GB of video compression, upgraded Blue Sky ticket support, and tools to let your visitors leave reviews on your site.

At just a few dollars more than Build, Grow is a much better deal. But the Scale plan offers better value for money.

Scale

What really sets Scale apart is that it’s directed at professionals – more so than any other managed WordPress plan from Bluehost. While Build and Grow give you daily backups, Scale gives you unlimited backups and restores. And it’s equipped with the Jetpack Professional plugin with PayPal integration.

Scale also gives you the best managed WordPress support Bluehost has to offer, as well as Elastic Search, a search function designed to run fast on sites with a lot of content or a lot of products.

Bluehost’s Scale plan is quite a bit more expensive than its Grow plan, but it’s the best option if you have a higher-traffic site – it can handle up to 500,000 unique monthly visitors. And it’s about one-tenth of the price of the Kinsta plan that gives you similar resources, though Kinsta’s managed WordPress service is far superior when it comes to performance and reliability.

Is Managed WordPress Hosting Right for You?

If you have a professional WordPress website and want to focus on building your business while someone else takes care of your server admin, managed WordPress hosting is a smart choice.

It’s Bluehost’s most expensive managed WordPress plan, but Scale gives you the most for your money with bandwidth suitable for medium-traffic sites. If you need resource scalability for high-traffic sites, you may want to consider a VPS.

WooCommerce Hosting

Bluehost’s WooCommerce hosting lets you build and customize an online store, specifically with the WooCommerce plugin for WordPress. It’s easy enough for beginners and startups, but also has e-commerce tools and features for experienced users and established businesses.

You can do things like manage inventory and shipping, create discount codes, accept payments without having to go offsite, and much more. There are just two plans to choose from, and you can select a 1-month, 12-month, or 36-month term.

Standard

You should use the Bluehost WooCommerce plan that best suits your budget. Standard is half the price of Premium. In addition to your online store, it gives you email marketing, 24/7 support, and storage capacity for an unlimited number of products.

Once your online operation is up and running, you’ll be able to create discount codes, take manual orders, and process payments. And your customers will be able to leave reviews.

If you need to enable online bookings, subscriptions, or product customization options, you’ll want to jump up to the Premium plan.

Premium

Premium gives you more robust security, more customizability, better marketing tools, and more sophisticated analytics than Standard.

While Standard throws in the free version of Jetpack, the Premium plan gives you Jetpack Premium, which offers several advanced features, like scheduled social sharing, and WordAds network access should you wish to make money off of ads on your own site.

Bluehost’s Premium WooCommerce plan also lets you sell subscription-based services with recurring payments. And you can set up product customization during order placement, like offering various colors or sizes of the product, or gift-wrapping options, for example.

Bluehost will automatically calculate city, state, or country sales tax for you with Premium. It also comes with free domain privacy and protection as well as CodeGuard’s Basic backup service. So while it’s twice the price of Standard, it gives you a lot more for your online store.

Is WooCommerce Hosting Right for You?

If you’re selling multiple products and/or services online, a WooCommerce hosting plan is likely a good idea for you. Bluehost doesn’t give you many plan options, so it really comes down to whether you’re just getting started or you’re in growth mode.

VPS Hosting

VPS hosting is ideal if you need guaranteed resources to serve a steady stream of visitors. It’s a step up from the variable reliability of shared hosting, and it’s a less expensive alternative to a dedicated server if you don’t need control of an entire physical computer.

Bluehost offers three VPS plans with term lengths from one to 36 months. And these come equipped with WHM and cPanel if you’re a developer who wants to host your clients’ websites in individual hosting accounts. But its prices aren’t as competitive as some VPS hosts; you can get more resources and better reliability for less with InterServer.

Standard

Bluehost’s VPS hosting plans don’t vary when it comes to tools and features. As mentioned above, they all have WHM and cPanel, yet they give you root access as well. Your customer account dashboard allows you to add more VPSs, dedicated servers, or even shared hosting plans, and manage them all from one place.

Where Bluehost’s VPS plans differ is in their allocated resources, and of course their prices. Standard is Bluehost’s entry-level VPS offering.

With Standard you get 2 CPU cores, 2 GB of RAM, 30GB of SSD storage, 1TB of bandwidth, and a dedicated IP address. While that is a competitive offering, you can get a similar set of resources from Hostinger’s VPS 2 plan for nearly half the price.

Enhanced

Enhanced is Bluehost’s middle-tier VPS plan in both price and resources. Enhanced is the right Bluehost VPS plan for you if you need more storage than Standard offers but you don’t want or need to pay the higher price for the Ultimate plan.

Enhanced provides 60GB of SSD storage in addition to 4GB of RAM, 2TB of bandwidth, and 2 dedicated IP addresses. But it still only provides 2 CPUs, like Standard. If you need better performance for more complex websites, you may want to think about upgrading to Bluehost’s Ultimate plan.

Ultimate

The Ultimate plan offers more for your money than any other Bluehost VPS plan. Compared to the Enhanced plan, Ultimate gives you double the CPU cores (4), RAM (8GB), and storage (120GB), and a terabyte more bandwidth (3). Predictably, it also costs twice as much.

Despite offering more resources, Bluehost’s Ultimate VPS plan doesn’t provide comparable value or performance to the equivalent FastComet Cloud 3 VPS plan. This is particularly because FastComet’s VPS hosting includes managed support.

Is VPS Hosting Right for You?

You should consider VPS hosting if you need dedicated resources without the unpredictability you often get with shared hosting. Bluehost’s VPS is suitable for mid-to-high-traffic sites, but doesn’t offer the scalability of a cloud-based platform.

You can get better value from other VPS hosting providers, but if you’re set on a plan from Bluehost, Ultimate gives you the most for your money, with double most of the key resources offered by its middle-tier Enhanced plan.

Dedicated Server Hosting

Dedicated servers provide you with the most control of any type of Bluehost hosting. They’re best for complex or high-traffic sites that require tight security, dedicated resources, and the most reliable possible performance.

Of course, being able to build one or more websites and an entire hosting infrastructure from the ground up will require the expertise of a development team, or at the very least, a professional full-stack developer.

You can choose term lengths from one to 36 months for all three of Bluehost’s dedicated server plans.

Standard

Like its VPS plans, Bluehost’s dedicated servers only differ in price and the amount of resources each offers. Standard is the best option if you’ve outgrown a VPS but don’t yet need to scale up to a more expensive, resource-rich plan.

A Standard dedicated server from Bluehost gives you 4 CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, and 2 x 500GB of RAID Level 1 storage. You also get 5TB of bandwidth, 3 dedicated IPs, and you get two little bonuses almost no other dedicated server host gives you: a free domain name and a cPanel license.

While Standard is a solid start if you need a dedicated server, if your online enterprise requires even better performance, you can upgrade to the next tier up: the Enhanced plan.

Enhanced

Bluehost’s Enhanced plan is well-named, as it’s about enhanced performance. It takes Standard’s 4 cores and gives them a boost while also giving you twice the storage, RAM, and bandwidth. Rather than Standard’s 2.3 GHz CPU, 4 threads, and 3MB cache, Enhanced amps you up to 2.5 GHz, 8 threads, and an 8MB cache.

The price for the Enhanced plan falls directly between that of Standard and Premium. Unless you need more bandwidth, RAM, CPU power, and an extra dedicated IP address, Enhanced offers better value overall than Premium.

If you want to choose from a wider variety of server configurations for comparable prices, you may want to have a look at the variety of servers on offer from InterServer.

Premium

If you want the best dedicated server performance Bluehost has to offer, get the Premium plan. It offers the same number of cores as the Standard plan (4). While it doesn’t improve on Enhanced’s threads (8), cache (8MB), or storage (2 x 1TB RAID 1), it comes with 3.3 GHz CPUs and gives you 16GB of RAM.

You also get 15TB of monthly bandwidth, so you’ll be able to handle an enormous volume of monthly traffic. But with just these three plans on offer, Bluehost doesn’t give you much in the way of customization options, except that you can increase your storage instantly if needed.

Is Dedicated Server Hosting Right for You?

If you or your organization need access to fully-dedicated resources and the ability to configure from the ground up, a dedicated server is worth considering. Bluehost’s servers are unmanaged, but they come with a WHM/cPanel license if you want to use it to get a reseller operation up and running.

Bluehost’s Enhanced plan offers its best value for money. It gives you the same number of CPU cores and the same amount of RAID 1 storage as the most expensive package, but costs significantly less. However, none of these plans give you as much for your money as A2 Hosting’s dedicated server plans.

Recommended Bluehost Alternatives

If Bluehost’s range of hosting types and plans doesn’t fully meet your requirements within your desired price range, you might discover a more suitable plan for your project from one of these alternative hosting providers.

Hostinger

Hostinger has lower prices on every type of hosting other than dedicated servers. But that’s only because Hostinger doesn’t offer dedicated servers.

In addition to lower prices, Hostinger uses LiteSpeed web servers, which means it gives you better performance than you’ll get from Bluehost’s Apache servers. And with data centers around the globe, you can choose the one that is nearest to your audience. Bluehost’s single US data center relies on a CDN to boost performance in other parts of the world.

FastComet

FastComet is the Bluehost alternative to use if you’re trying to reach users in Asia or Oceania, as it has data centers in Singapore, Tokyo, Mumbai, and Sydney. It offers every type of hosting Bluehost does, but often at lower prices and always with more features. And you can get full management with its VPS and dedicated servers, if you want.

FastComet is also easier to use than Bluehost – it scored a near perfect ease-of-use score in our FastComet review.

InterServer

A common theme with Bluehost alternatives is that they tend to offer more for your money. And InterServer is specifically a good alternative to Bluehost’s VPS plans. InterServer’s VPS plans are easily scaled up or down by adding or removing “slices”.

While Bluehost only has three VPS plans to pick from, InterServer gives you 16 possible configurations each for Linux or Windows operating systems, with managed hosting included if you pay for four or more VPS slices. And Bluehost’s cheapest VPS plan is three times the price of InterServer’s entry-level configuration.

A2 Hosting

If you’re looking for overall value, A2 Hosting offers a great combination of low price, features, and performance. It’s an especially good alternative to Bluehost for managed WordPress hosting.

A2 Hosting’s managed WordPress platform is built on a proprietary server stack which is finely optimized for WordPress sites. A2 Hosting also allows for multiple sites on all but its entry-level plan, whereas Bluehost only allows for a single one.

Kinsta

The main reason to choose Kinsta over Bluehost is its performance. My colleagues and I have tested all the top web hosts in the world, and Kinsta has consistently delivered the fastest page loading speeds. On the flip-side, Bluehost had some of the slowest loading speeds and was the least reliable in terms of uptime.

Kinsta is all about managed WordPress hosting, and it’s one of the best there is. But you have to pay a hefty price for it, so it probably won’t work if you’re on a tight budget.

GreenGeeks

If you’re a beginner and think you might need a bit of help getting your website up and running, GreenGeeks is a great alternative to Bluehost because it has some of the best support we’ve seen. And it offers competitive pricing with a solid set of free features.

Another thing that stands out about GreenGeeks is that it invests in renewable energy. If you want to do your part to leave a smaller carbon footprint, this is a host worth checking out.

Which Bluehost Plan Should You Choose?

While Bluehost offers low prices, you have to pay extra for features other hosts give you for free.

If you’re embarking on your website or blog journey, consider Bluehost’s WordPress Hosting Choice Plus plan as an economical choice. It provides an excellent starting point with an automatic WordPress installation. If you’re willing to invest a bit more, you can experience enhanced performance through WordPress-specific optimizations by upgrading to the Managed WordPress Scale plan.

If you want the best value on the market, I’d recommend you try Hostinger’s Premium Shared Hosting plan.

FAQ

Why is Bluehost so cheap?

Bluehost is cheap because it only owns and operates one data center (in Utah) and it doesn’t offer many free features. You have to pay extra to add basic things like security and backups – features you get for free with most of our 10 best web hosts for 2024.

Do all Bluehost’s plans include a free domain name?

Yes, all Bluehost plans come with one free domain name. That includes every type of hosting it provides, from shared hosting to dedicated servers. But if you choose a managed WordPress hosting plan, your domain is only free if you pay for an annual plan or longer.

What’s the difference between shared hosting and WordPress hosting?

In Bluehost’s case, the difference between shared and WordPress hosting is that WordPress hosting comes with WordPress installed. Beyond that, they’re identical. But if you upgrade to managed WordPress hosting, you’ll get better WordPress optimization and better performance.

Which gives you better value: Bluehost, or Hostinger?

Without question, Hostinger offers better value than Bluehost. Bluehost has low prices, but Hostinger’s are even lower. Yet Hostinger is still able to give you better performance, more free features, and more global data centers to choose from. Both offer deals on long-term plans, but you should take a look at our coupons page for great discounts on all the top providers before making a final decision.