Our experience with Bluehost

Bluehost was founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton in Provo, Utah. It now hosts more than 5 million WordPress sites worldwide.

It is part of Newfold Digital, formerly known as Endurance International Group or EIG. That group first acquired Bluehost in 2010 and fully absorbed it in a wider merger in 2021. The company is now based in Jacksonville, Florida.

Its story reflects what has happened across the industry over the past decade, with independent hosting brands folded into a handful of large groups.

Bluehost's best-known credential is its link with WordPress itself. WordPress.org has officially recommended it as a hosting provider since 2005, and only a handful of hosts carry that endorsement.

The company backs it up with real work on the WordPress open-source project:

• Engineering contributions to WordPress core
• Sponsorship of WordCamps around the world
• By its own account, "hundreds of hours a year" given through Five for the Future, the scheme that asks companies profiting from WordPress to give development time back

The range covers shared and managed WordPress hosting, VPS, dedicated and cloud servers, and WooCommerce hosting for online shops. There is also a growing set of AI tools, including website builders, domain name generators and an AI receptionist for small businesses.

Plans include:

• Free SSL certificates
• A free domain for the first year on annual plans
• SEO tools through the Yoast plugin, built into the dashboard
• A free CDN and unmetered bandwidth on shared plans

With unmetered bandwidth, a traffic spike from a successful marketing push or a viral listing should not add extra fees to your hosting bill.

You manage the account through a customised version of cPanel. Backup add-ons are available if you want more frequent snapshots than the standard schedule.

Bluehost aims at a wide range of customers. That runs from first-time WordPress users to agencies that want white-label hosting to resell under their own brand, and on to larger organisations that need dedicated servers for busy sites.

The managed WordPress tier includes automatic daily backups, staging sites and malware scanning as part of the plan. That closes some of the gap with the dedicated managed hosts further down this list.

Support is open 24/7 by live chat, phone and ticket on every plan. A first-time site owner gets the same access to help as an established business running dozens of sites.