Background

Business Name: Bluehost Inc.

Year of foundation: 2003

Location: Orem, Utah, United States

BBB Accreditation: Yes

Market Size: > 1.3 million websites (#2 HRank list)

Growth Status: (by websites quantity): Increasing

Bluehost.com is a web service company from Orem, Utah, that dates back to 2003. Many people regard it as one of the most trustworthy providers.

Founded in 2003, BlueHost is the brainchild of Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth. However, 2003 is the year when it was officially rolled out, whereas the idea of setting up a shared hosting company first came to Heaton’s mind in 1996. He did not proceed to implement it straight away, though. It had two predecessors, namely 0catch.com and 50megs.com, but these projects implied free hosting, which prevented the team from expanding the range of services, and BlueHost became the primary focus of his business endeavors.

In 2007, the company was listed among the fastest growing companies in the world. At that time, the number of domains hosted by them made up 700,000. In 2010, BlueHost became part of the EIG brand family, but it continues to operate under its own name. Shortly after the acquisition, Heaton stepped down as its CEO to work on the platform’s design and systems. BlueHost has several sister companies. With one of them, HostMonster, it shares a large 50,000 sq ft facility in Provo, Utah.

In 2009, the CPU throttling feature was introduced: it enables the hosting provider to prevent customers from using too many server resources.

Over the years, there have been several controversies surrounding BlueHost, such as when they closed a religious website blaming sexual minorities for the 2011 Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand, or when they were accused of censoring websites run by customers from the so-called rogue states as defined by the US government. Today, however, it is one of the major industry players with an audience of over 1,270,000 sites, and together with its sister companies, it hosts over 2 mln domains.

Since 2010, they have become part of the Endurance International Group.

Offers and Pricing

The provider has 4 shared hosting plans currently on offer.

All of them can be purchased either for 1 year, or 2, or 3 years. No monthly payment options are available.

All plans have promo price offers for new customers.

The cheapest offer is $7.99/mo for 3 years of hosting.

It offers a number of options, including

• cloud / shared / WooCommerce hosting,
• also WordPress hosting,
• dedicated servers, VPS and domains.

They also offer nicely 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee, which is always a good thing to know.

The bad news is that migration is not free and cheap offers are available for long-term plans only (36 months).

Support

Instant Technical Live Support: Yes

According to some reviews, users emphasize cases of downtime, low startup prices, reliable customer support, handy user interface, and high security.

What we can resume is that they have got a 24/7 live chat and one can select what kind of consultation with their web experts is necessary right from the start (i.e. no need to wait to be connected to General Sales Questions if you are looking for the Web Security specialist’s support.

They also offer tech support via live chat.

BlueHost Summary Analysis by HRank

All things considered, we would recommend BlueHost for a try, it’s performance was not altogether bad – the 44th position on our 2018 list and 8.1 HRank rating, 58th place in 2019 with 7.3 HRank rating; however, it is hard to say whether all this hype and promotion is really justified.

Our monitoring results with regard to Uptime show that BlueHost was not exactly stable during the monitoring period. Starting from June 2018 to December 2019 there wasn’t 100% uptime; it mostly was in the 99.9% range, however, the worst value was 96.645% on 23 February 2019.

Response time from the domains on Shared IPs can’t be called slow, but we saw better, to be honest (1,000ms – 1,300ms).

The company decreased the number of Shared IPs from June to December 2019, and the number of websites hosted there (which is actually quite large) also increased.

BlueHost is not on our recommendation list.