Bluehost review
Mass-market shared hosting with WordPress bundling
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Quick verdict
Widely used and easy to start with, but the renewal pricing and upsell pressure need watching.
A large US shared host owned by Newfold Digital, long listed on WordPress.org as a recommended host. cPanel-based with heavy WordPress onboarding.
Who it suits
- · First-time site owners
- · WordPress sites
- · Tight budgets
Who should look elsewhere
- · No UK data centre, which costs UK visitors latency
- · Renewal pricing is much higher than the intro offer
- · Persistent upsells during signup and in the panel
Hostoholic Score
How this rating is built
Weighted from six dimensions. Affiliate commission is not an input — there is no field for it in the calculation.
What you pay across the full term — including the renewal, not just the headline.
Channels offered, hours covered, and whether the answers are any good.
Staging, email, SSH, Git, database and security tooling included as standard.
Control panel, onboarding, migration and how much you need to already know.
Not yet assessed: Performance, Reliability. These are excluded and the remaining weights renormalised, rather than counted as zero.
What is good
- Very easy WordPress setup for a first site
- Recommended on WordPress.org for many years
- 24/7 phone support
- Large body of third-party tutorials
What is not
- No UK data centre, which costs UK visitors latency
- Renewal pricing is much higher than the intro offer
- Persistent upsells during signup and in the panel
The detail
Features and specifications
Anything marked unknown has not been verified by an editor yet. We would rather show a gap than a guess.
Hosting and platform
- Control panel
- cPanel (customised)
- UK data centre
- Unknown
- Data centre regions
- United States, India, China
- Free SSL
- Yes
- Email hosting included
- Yes
- Free migration
- Unknown
- Money-back period
- Unknown
Performance and tooling
- Staging environment
- Unknown
- CDN included
- Unknown
- Object caching
- Unknown
- Redis
- Unknown
- Automatic backups
- Unknown
- Backup retention
- Unknown
Developer access
- SSH access
- Yes
- Git
- Unknown
- WP-CLI
- Unknown
- Cron jobs
- Unknown
- PHP versions
- Unknown
- Node.js support
- Unknown
Ecommerce and security
- WooCommerce support
- Yes
- Malware protection
- Unknown
- Web application firewall
- Unknown
- DDoS protection
- Unknown
- Support channels
- phone, live chat, knowledge base
Pricing
What it costs
We publish a price only once an editor has checked it against the provider's own pricing page and recorded the date.
| Plan | Type | Sites | Latest checked price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | shared | — | USD 3.99 |
Alternatives
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Sources
Where this information came from
- Bluehost hosting overview· Capabilities and plan structure · checked 17/08/2026
- Bluehost pricing page· Entry pricing · checked 17/08/2026
Spotted something wrong?
Facts drift. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will check it.