Things You Wish You Knew Before Signing up with Bluehost

You’ve scoured the internet for a hosting company and finally settled with Bluehost. An award-winning web hosting company, Bluehost has often been touted as the best choice for beginner bloggers and website owners based on reviews.

While we do recommend them as a hosting company if you’re a beginner, there are a few things that you should know before you sign up with Bluehost.

They have a comprehensive hosting plan

If it’s your first time starting a blog or a website, odds are you’ll be opting for their shared hosting plan (which comprises of a Basic, Plus, Prime, and Pro Plan).

A shared hosting plan is when they host your website with other websites on the same server to cut down on costs. It’s the cheapest option but probably the best plan to for a new website as you’ll probably won’t be overloaded with traffic.

Beyond the shared hosting plans, Bluehost offers comprehensive hosting services if you’re looking for something specific. As of this moment, Bluehost is able to provide the following plans:

Cloud hosting — An upgrade to shared hosting, cloud hosting offers better security and performance as it allows you to use different cloud servers which can switch to different servers at any moment in case your website suffers high traffic or hardware failure.

WordPress hosting — As one of the official hosting partners of WordPress, Bluehost offers a hosting plan that’s specifically designed and optimized to run WordPress to give you the best performance.

WooCommerce hosting — Similar to WordPress, the WooCommerce hosting plan is designed to provide all the features and optimize it for use with the popular eCommerce store plugin.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting — VPS is basically an efficient version of a shared hosting server. Bluehost VPS comes with 100% manage support. With VPS, you won’t have to share your server resources with other websites as they’ll be divided into separate virtual servers.

Dedicated server hosting — Dedicated hosting is the most expensive hosting plan on Bluehost but it is also the most powerful. With dedicated hosting, you’ll have an entire server for yourself and can manage its resources however you see fit.

When you’re first starting, you probably won’t have to worry about heavy traffic overloading your website. However, it does help to have the option to upgrade your hosting plan when your site eventually grows.

Affordable starter plans, expensive renewals

The starter plans that Bluehost offers are fairly cheap and are priced competitively. However, when it comes to renewal, you’d better prepare for an increased price of up to 90%.

Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for hosting companies to attract first-time customers by using a very low introductory price and hiking up the price when they choose to renew.

Bluehost is no exception and their price hike can be a shock for most people if they didn’t research on the company’s renewal rates.

If you are going to go with Bluehost, stick to the 24/36 month period plan as you’ll be paying it with the discounted introductory price.

They offer refunds and money-back guarantees

Starting a website or an online store can be an expensive endeavour. Web hosting services are usually one of the main culprits, but with Bluehost, you can reduce those costs with their 30-day full refund policy.

How it works is that, if within the first 30 days of service you decide that Bluehost is not suited for you, you can opt for a full refund from them. Any domain name that you registered with them, you still get to keep, however, if you used their free domain name registration, they will deduct $10 from the final refund to cover the cost of registration.

You can still go for a refund after 30 days, however, it will be a prorated amount based on your plan. Thankfully, you won’t be charged for penalties or any other hidden fees.

Professional migration service with a fee

Hosting companies don’t like it when you choose to switch hosts but they generally offer some sort service for it. Bluehost does offer a site migration service but they charge a fee for it.

Using their professional migration service, you can transfer up to 5 sites and 20 email accounts for the sum of $149.99. Compared to most other web hosting companies, which charge a smaller fee or offer it for free, Bluehostfeesare basically a bit expensive. However, the good thing is you’ll have a team of professionals taking of the entire process, making sure that nothing goes wrong with your site.

So, if you do commit to Bluehost, you might want to pay a fee for it or learn how to manually migrate your site.

Committing to Bluehost

There is no perfect hosting company in the world. What you might want in a hosting company might differ from another person. While Bluehost do have their flaws, they are still a solid choice for people and business owners who are making their first website or blog. Hopefully, we’ve helped you to determine whether or not Bluehost fits your needs.

Got your website down? Then it’s time to focus on marketing your website to the audience that matters and we have just the tools for it!