Bluehost

This is my first hosting provider I have ever used and I was pretty nervous being a newbie to the whole thing of hosting a Wordpress website.

I have Apache setup on my Windows 10 machine as a test and was able to get everything working, I was hoping it would be as easy on Blue Host using their Control Panel and it was. I already had my .com domain name so I signed up for a shared hosting account and within literally a few minutes I had my account created and I was looking around control panel. Things seem easy enough. I uploaded via FTP my WordPress website I was working on and didn't quite get things working right. I chatted with Blue Host customer service and was told I needed to point my domain to my server. Of course I had forgotten this. After a quick chat they told me what I needed to do (my domain was with Namecheap) and voila everything was working.

It was much easier than I thought at the time and in the 4 months my site has been online I have had zero problems with Blue Host itself. I 've had lots of issues with Wordpress but that is a CMS issue and not a hosting one.

Blue Host is pretty good.  I really haven't had any issues with them.  I haven't been hacked or had any real spam threats so their security must be pretty good. 

Prices are fair for what they offer in their packages.

I switched hosts over 2 years ago and I have not looked back. Blue Host is very fast and offers free SSL and the shared servers now support HTTP/2 which makes my Wordpress site even faster with its concurrent downloading of files. Pingdom Website Speed Test tool gives my site a Grade of "A" in performance and they say it is 91% faster than other sites.

Reliability is really up there to. I use Alertra website monitoring service which checks my website homepage every 10 minutes to see if it is up and if a certain text is present. Well in the past year it shows my site has been up and accessible 99.996% of the time which is really good.

My site gets over 2000 unique visitors a day now so speed and reliability is very important to me in a web host. Price is decent as well so I give it 5 stars. 

Bluehost has a lot of nice features and a good price... at least for the first year but the problem is my web server is really slow. I don't know if Bluehost has too many customers on 1 server or that someone is just monopolizing all the resources but my server and my wordpress site is ALWAYS slow. What good is a cheap price and a website if it delivers content at a crawl. When I try to save an article in Wordpress it can take up to a minute. 

I called tech support about it and they blamed my site and plugins which I have very few. It is the same setup I had on GoDaddy and it was plenty fast enough. I now wish I had not switch hosting providers just for the price.

I have heard some people have problems with their hosting plans being auto renewed after they canceled. I hope this doesn't happen to me as I plan on canceling as soon as I can.

On the few occasions I needed BLuehost tech support the online chat has been the most helpful. It is faster that using the phone and the techs seem to know what they are doing. While the wait times could be improved for chat support they are much better than phones support. I would recommend using them if your issue isn't that big.

Other than that the features Bluehost offers is standard for the industry and so is the price. I like the unlimited domains, bandwidth and storage as I host 4 websites on this account with one of them serving up images. I moved to Bluehost 3 months ago from GoDaddy and so far the experience has been much better.  I found Godaddy nickled and dimed you for every upgrade.