Bluehost is one of the largest hosting providers and probably the most popular WordPress host. It has more than a few plans geared towards businesses.
Here’s what it offers.
Bluehost Ease of Use
The website layout is clean, and you can navigate it easily.
Bluehost accepts credit cards and PayPal. You can even mail them a check if you’re prepaying for a year of hosting or more.
You also get standard cPanel hosting, so managing your website is a breeze.
Bluehost can also migrate an existing website for $149.99. Many web hosting companies, good for small business sites, throw in migrations for free. You can find a better deal if you already have a website.
Features
Bluehost has a variety of plans, many of them business-optimized.
All plans come with a free SSL certificate. This is a must-have for businesses, as it secures your website, makes you appear more legitimate, and even boosts your SEO.
You also get free ad credits with each plan, which helps promote your business. You have to buy $25 of credits to get the extra $100, but the investment can pan out pretty well.
The largest shared plan includes a dedicated IP address and extra resources—ideal small business hosting features. The resources make it easier to run a powerful website while the IP address adds legitimacy and ensures emails get delivered properly.
If you go with one of the other plans, a dedicated IP address costs $72/year, which is a bit pricey. For reference, HostPapa can sell you one for $48/year, while Namecheap charges $24/year.
WooCommerce-optimized plans are useful. WooCommerce is probably the most popular ecommerce platform out there—it’s the go-to choice for many users who need business web hosting for ecommerce.
The server configuration and security features will make your store fast and secure.
The largest WooCommerce plan also includes Bluehost’s custom SEO tools to help you promote your business.
All hosting plans come with a small email inbox. The smallest plan limits you to 100Mb of storage and 5 email accounts.
Other plans offer “unlimited” accounts/storage. Bluehost doesn’t state the actual limit on the plans.
If you really want the capacity to store several GB of emails, though, Bluehost offers a separate email hosting service.
Apart from small business hosting and email, Bluehost offers an array of other helpful services. Its team can do an SEO overhaul of your website or create full marketing campaigns for you. These are incredibly useful if you want to expand your business, and the prices are negotiable.
All in all, Bluehost has a fantastic offer for business owners.
Support
Bluehost has a knowledgeable, courteous, and, most importantly, effective support team. The agents take their time to understand your needs and give you the most appropriate solutions.
If you go for the ecommerce-optimized plan, you’ll get a two-hour setup call with one of the agents. They will explain the basics of managing a WooCommerce website.
Bluehost’s knowledge base is respectable. You’ll find a variety of tutorials about using web hosting for business and fixing common issues.
Performance
Although the support assured us Bluehost provides great uptime, there is no official policy to back this up. It’s strange, since most hosts offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
According to our monitoring tools, the actual uptime averages around 99.95%, though, which is decent.
The average server response time of 0.37s is impressive. 0.96 seconds to fully load a basic page puts Bluehost into the top five fastest hosting providers.
Despite the lack of an uptime guarantee, Bluehost has respectable performance overall.
Verdict
Bluehost has fantastic solutions for all types of business owners. You get more marketing tools than with any host, and it offers relatively affordable web hosting for small business.
If you want to sell products online, the WooCommerce plans are definitely worth a try.