Bluehost has been hosting websites since 2003 and has worked closely with WordPress since 2005. It is owned by Newfold Digital, the company behind HostGator, Network Solutions, Web.com, and Yoast.
Its range covers shared and WordPress hosting, WooCommerce, managed cloud, self-managed and managed VPS, and dedicated servers.
Bluehost's clearest strength is the WordPress guidance around its hosting. Our current best WordPress hosting guide names it the best option for beginners, making the beginner experience the standard Bluehost has to meet.
For a quick run through what Bluehost is like to use check out our article One hour with Bluehost.
Cheapest Bluehost Shared Plan | $11.99 $1.99 p/m | 75% off
A fantastic bargain for TechRadar visitors, Bluehost has cut the price of its Shared Plan (regularly $11.99 p/m) down to a mere $1.99 per month for the first term only.View Deal
Bluehost: Pricing & plans
Bluehost provides some of the best website hosting in the shape of shared, VPS hosting, cloud, and dedicated hosting plans. These plans are good for everything from blogs to ecommerce sites of all sizes.
The shared plans come in four flavours: Starter, Business, eCommerce Essentials, and eCommerce Essentials Premium. You'll find yourself directed to these plans if you click through from WordPress Hosting, WooCommerce, and Web Hosting. The only difference is that if you click through from WooCommerce you'll only be offered eCommerce Essentials, and eCommerce Essentials Premium.
The shared plans are ideal for up to 400K visits but those figures are based on the average site and don't specify a performance level for the sites. You should consider the number an estimate and safety net. If your site gets a lot of visitors, you'll likely need to use one of the VPS, cloud, or dedicated plans.
The VPS plans come in three flavours: Standard NVMe 4, Enhanced NVMe 8, and Ultimate NVMe 16. Plus, a bonus custom flavour. The number in the name corresponds to the amount of RAM you get with each plan. You get a 1:2 ratio of CPU cores to gigabytes of RAM. As for site visits, you're on your own here when it comes to estimated levels but support will help you make the choice on which one is best for you.
The cloud plans also come in three flavours: Cloud 10, Cloud 25, and Cloud 50. Plus, the additional custom plan. The number in this name corresponds to how many sites each plan supports. The cloud plans are ideal for 300K - 23 million site visits a month.
It's the same pattern with dedicated hosting plans: Standard NVMe 32, Enhanced NVMe 64, and Premium NVMe 128...and the custom plan. These plans have a CPU core to RAM ratio of 1:4.
Bluehost shared & WordPress hosting
Starter costs $3.99 a month on a 36-month term and renews at $9.99. It supports 10 websites, 10GB of NVMe storage, and an advertised 40,000 monthly visits. Business is $6.99, renewing at $13.99, with 50 websites, 50GB, and an estimated 200,000 visits. eCommerce Essentials costs $14.99, renewing at $21.99, with 100 websites, 100GB, and an estimated 400,000 visits. These are monthly equivalents, not monthly payments: Bluehost's terms say the full selected term is charged in advance.
All three include a free domain for the first year, SSL, CDN, managed WordPress updates, migration, staging, SSH and WP-CLI, caching, malware scanning and removal, a web application firewall, DDoS protection, and weekly backups. Starter has chat but no phone support.
Business adds phone support, first-year domain privacy, and AI-powered malware detection and removal. eCommerce Essentials adds WooCommerce and selling tools. I like that staging, caching, and weekly backups are included even with Starter, although professional email is only a one-month trial and then renews at $2.99 a month.
The advertised visit limits compare plans rather than guarantee performance: a brochure site and a plugin-heavy store can consume very different resources at the same traffic level.
Bluehost VPS, cloud, and dedicated hosting
Bluehost's self-managed VPS range is the biggest change. NVMe 2 starts at $4.69 a month for 24 months and renews at $5.69, with one vCPU, 2GB of RAM, and 50GB of storage. NVMe 4 costs $9.49 and renews at $11.99, with two cores, 4GB, and 100GB. The 8GB and 16GB plans start at $12.99 and $25.99, then renew at $28.99 and $49.99. All include root access and unmetered bandwidth, but buyers administer the server.
Managed VPS starts at $49.99 a month on a 36-month term and renews at $68.99. Its entry specification matches NVMe 4 but adds cPanel, management, and two dedicated IP addresses. I would only pay that large premium if I genuinely needed Bluehost to maintain the environment.
Cloud is much more expensive. Cloud 10 is $65 a month on a 36-month term, with 10 sites, 125GB of storage, 20 vCPU threads, edge caching, real-time backups, priority support, and a 100% data-center-network SLA. Dedicated hosting begins at $144.19 and renews at $191.79, with eight cores, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and three IPs.
Bluehost: In use
Bluehost's Portal handles most everyday hosting tasks, while cPanel remains available for managing websites, databases, FTP accounts, and other technical settings. Bluehost Cloud is the exception and does not include cPanel.
WordPress installs automatically, and the onboarding flow asks about the site's purpose and the user's experience before generating a starting design. Advanced tools remain available, but beginners do not have to confront them immediately.
The AI builder produces a usable first layout, while WonderBlocks supplies ready-made page sections. In our one-hour hands-on test, WonderBlocks was the standout: adding a prepared section was faster than wrestling with WordPress's standard block editor.
Gutenberg can still feel unintuitive, and choosing the wrong onboarding level may mean starting again, but Bluehost's guidance makes WordPress easier than on many generic hosts.
Read our full Bluehost website builder review.
Bluehost: Speed
Our shared-hosting test used a basic plan with a small WooCommerce store. The WordPress Benchmark plugin returned an overall server score of 7.9, with particularly strong filesystem, database, and network results. Persistent object caching scored zero in that test. Bluehost now lists object caching with Starter, so the result records the earlier configuration rather than the current advertised feature set.
Siege testing simulated 5, 9, and 15 concurrent visitors. Availability remained above 95% at each level, while average response time rose from 0.41 seconds to 2.61 seconds at the highest load. This was adequate for a modest site and supported the 7.9 benchmark result. These results apply specifically to the shared plan.
Bluehost now advertises a 99.99% uptime SLA for shared hosting. If measured uptime falls below that level, customers can claim a single 5% monthly credit within 30 days. Cloud plans carry a separate 100% data-center-network SLA, with a 5% credit for every 30 minutes of qualifying downtime, up to the affected server's monthly fee. Those commitments are a material improvement, as shared hosting had no formal uptime guarantee when we last reviewed it.
CPU & Memory | Operations with large text data | 8.8 |
Random binary data operations | 5.14 | |
Recursive mathematical calculations | 6.13 | |
Iterative mathematical calculations | 7.2 | |
Filesystem | Filesystem write ability | 8.82 |
Local file copy and access speed | 9.36 | |
Small file IO test | 10 | |
Database | Importing large amount of data to database | 8.68 |
Simple queries on single table | 10 | |
Complex database queries on multiple tables | 7.7 | |
Object Cache | Persistent object cache enabled | 0 |
Network | Network download speed test | 10 |
Overall | Your server score | 7.9 |
Concurrent users | 5 | 9 | 15 |
Transactions | 1086 | 2110 | 1473 |
availability | 95.6 | 96.7 | 95.71 |
elapsed time | 299.22 | 299.87 | 299.11 |
Data transactions | 13.96 | 25.95 | 19.45 |
response time | 0.41 | 1.17 | 2.61 |
Transaction rate | 3.36 | 7.04 | 4.92 |
throughput | 0.05 | 0.09 | 0.07 |
concurrency | 1.49 | 8.22 | 12.87 |
sucesful transactions | 1086 | 2110 | 1473 |
failed transactions | 50 | 72 | 66 |
longest transaction | 19.77 | 19.93 | 20.21 |
shortest transaction | 0.11 | 0.11 | 0.1 |
Bluehost: Support
Support remains available around the clock, but the channel depends on the plan. Starter includes live chat only, while Business, ecommerce, managed VPS, and other higher tiers include phone support. Bluehost provides US and international phone numbers, and its support and knowledge-base material is primarily in English.
I contacted Bluehost's pre-sales chat to check the current backup policy. After around five minutes, an agent confirmed that weekly backups are included with all shared plans at no additional cost. I would call that a solid rather than exceptional response time, but the answer itself was direct and useful.
In our hands-on testing, support responded clearly when the WordPress onboarding level could not be changed, saving time looking for a non-existent setting. WordPress Academy and the knowledge base are also useful for beginners.
Bluehost: Final verdict
Bluehost makes a stronger case than in 2025. Shared hosting has gained an SLA, weekly backups, and object caching, while self-managed VPS is genuinely inexpensive. The main reason to choose it remains the beginner experience: guided setup, AI assistance, WonderBlocks, WordPress Academy, and a clean dashboard form a coherent path to a functioning site.
Three-year upfront billing weakens the headline prices, renewals rise, email becomes another subscription, and weekly backups trail competitors with daily schedules. I think Bluehost still deserves its best-for-WordPress-beginners position, and I would recommend it most confidently to someone building a first WordPress site who values guidance over the absolute lowest long-term price.
Experienced users should compare the self-managed VPS range, while high-traffic businesses should weigh Bluehost Cloud against specialist managed WordPress providers.
Bluehost FAQs
Is Bluehost good for beginners?
Yes, particularly for people who want to learn WordPress rather than avoid it. Automated installation, guided onboarding, an AI-assisted starting design, WonderBlocks, staging, and WordPress Academy reduce the initial learning curve. Our current best WordPress hosting guide names Bluehost its best WordPress host for beginners, although the WordPress editor itself can still take time to master.
Does Bluehost have an uptime guarantee?
Yes. Shared hosting now has a 99.99% SLA, with a single 5% monthly credit available when qualifying uptime falls below the threshold. Cloud hosting has a separate 100% data-center-network SLA and a different credit schedule.
Where are Bluehost's data centers located?
Bluehost now says its global data-center range covers North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, and that customers can select a preferred location during checkout. This replaces the older arrangement described in the live review, where bluehost.com customers were automatically placed in the US.
Does Bluehost offer refunds?
Eligible hosting purchases carry a 30-day money-back guarantee. Most add-ons are excluded, and if a plan includes a free domain, Bluehost deducts a non-refundable domain fee when the customer keeps it. No refunds are offered after 30 days.
What is my Bluehost IP address?
Finding your website server's IP address can be handy, especially if you need to point a domain hosted elsewhere to your website.
There's no single way to manage this on Bluehost - it depends on your product and control panel - but if your plan has access to cPanel, it only takes a moment.
Log into your Bluehost account dashboard (my.bluehost.com).
Click Advanced in the left-hand sidebar.
Browse the General Information box on the right. The server IP address is displayed as 'Shared IP address.' (If you don't see a General Information box, look for and click a Server Information link).
What are Bluehost's nameservers?
Bluehost's nameservers are:
ns1.bluehost.com 162.88.60.37
ns2.bluehost.com 162.88.61.37
If you need more help, the support site has several useful articles on nameservers and DNS
How do I cancel Bluehost?
Bluehost customers can disable automatic renewal in the Renewal Center. For terms of three months or longer, payment is taken 15 days before the term ends, so users must opt out at least 16 days before expiry to avoid the charge.
Check out the latest Bluehost promo codes.
