Blue host Review | guide for beginner | Start your online store at low price | is it good for beginners
BLUE HOST ( beginner guide and it is good or not )
Before we move into the details, let's spend a moment talking about what a base plan really is. All websites are not created equal.
While you might be able to pay under three bucks a month to run your website.
A base site is designed for a business or individual who wants a basic online presence. That's a bunch of pages, some product or service images, and a lot of text. If you want to run complex web applications, or you expect a lot of traffic, a basic site is not for you.
If you're just trying to get started with an online presence, starting simply is a good way to go. In this series, we're reviewing the least expensive program each hosting provider offers. That's going to be what the majority of buyers will want, and it will give us a good insight into the company.
Bluehost offers a number of pretty feature . The base plan includes 50GB website space, five email accounts, 100MB of email storage (which is pretty low if you're active), up to 500 emails sent per hour, one free domain registration (for a year), 25 subdomains, a basic SSL certificate, and what they describe as unmetered bandwidth.
Be careful, though. In practice, if you push your account near the limits, or use an excessive amount of bandwidth, it's likely that the service will throttle you back. to institute server throttling when "unlimited" resource usage got to be too much.
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The company does have 24/7 chat and phone support, and Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. It's not as long as some of the company's competitors, but it is a fair amount of time for you to get a simple site up and running and see how things work.
GETTING STARTED
Once your account is created and you log in you see this image
i like this. while I always like to go it on my own , i've gotten panicked calls from too many friends who log into their hosting providers for the first time and have no idea what to do . i was a little surprise to find that even though i hit " no help needed , " l was presented with a choice :
Again, though, I can't really complain about guidance. After all, I didn't hit "Skip this step" on the first screen. I did now. I'm still in a wizard, even though I did select "Skip this step."
I hit "Skip this step" again, and once again I'm presented with a wizard. However, once again for basic users, I like that there are helper choices and even a solid FAQ for folks not sure what to do next.
I hit the "Limitless customization" option. From this point on, there were more selection options. I just kept hitting "Skip this step." Finally, I reached a page with some more options. Most important to me, initially, is checking out the Advanced tab.
Yes! We finally have cPanel. I did a little happy dance (in my mind -- I don't actually dance, jump, or run, but I can celebrate running the gauntlet in my head, can't I?).
DASHBOARD ACCESS
The first thing I like to do when looking at a new hosting provider is exploring their dashboard. Is it an old friend, like cPanel? Is it some sort of janky, barely configured open source or homegrown mess? Or is it a carefully crafted custom dashboard? These are often the ones that worry me the most because they almost always hide restrictions that I'm going to have to work around somehow.
I got rid of the welcome message and started to look around. I like how Bluehost has the normal cPanel interface, but also provides access to Bluehost services on the left. That's convenient.
BASIC WORDPRESS ACCESS
I thought about nuking WordPress and installing it myself, but I wanted to see what most users would be presented with when they started the service. So I hit the My Sites button with the WordPress logo icon -- and was presented with upsell city:
Once logged in, the WordPress dashboard is filled with a lot of stuff that's not traditional to the WordPress dashboard, but it seems more helpful than egregious.
Ooh, this is interesting. Bluehost provides a staging site, even in the base plan. They get some big points for that. It's always nice to having a staging site, and many more expensive plans don't come with one. Granted, this is a staging site managed inside the main WordPress install but it's still a great feature for a bottom-level plan.
The Plugins dashboard is quite busy, but that's mostly because Jetpack takes up a lot of space and has a lot of upsell action -- I received an email from Jetpack before I even got Bluehost's login credentials. Fortunately, it was easy to dismiss the banners and get on with work.
Unfortunately, after I dismissed them, I discovered they came back whenever I returned to the Plugins dashboard. That was annoying. The easy solution was to delete the Jetpack and Creative Mail plugins, which I did.
HOW TO DO WORDPRESS UPSELLS
I have to admit, Bluehost did this right. There were the few upsells I pointed out as we moved into the WordPress part of our review, but nothing that made using the service unpleasant. More to the point, Bluehost has its own plugin install and while it does offer upsells, it does so in a surprisingly non-intrusive way.
That first welcome page I showed you back when we first logged into WordPress is part of the Bluehost plugin, but it's mostly pointers to how to get work done. We already talked about the staging feature, which is also provided by the Bluehost plugin.
A key page provided by the Bluehost plugin is the Settings page. Notice that there is not a single upsell on this mission-critical page.
So where are the upsells? They are conveniently tucked into the Themes, Plugins, and Services tabs of the Bluehost plugin:
I have nothing against upsells. Businesses need to pay expenses and salaries. What I often complain about -- and did so vociferously with Hostgator -- is when upsells get in the way of using the product already purchased. These Bluehost upsells do not get in the way. The Bluehost plugin is useful enough and non-intrusive enough that I'm not going to uninstall it. That's a pretty ringing endorsement.
QUICK SECURITY CHECKS
Security is one of the biggest issues when it comes to operating a website. You want to make sure your site is safe from hackers, doesn't flag Google, and can connect securely to payment engines if you're running an e-commerce site of any kind.
While the scope of this article doesn't allow for exhaustive security testing, there are a few quick checks that can help indicate whether Bluehost's most inexpensive platform is starting with a secure foundation.
This is MFA. It's way too easy for hackers to just bang away at a website's login screen and brute-force a password. In the past, many of my sites have been pounded on by some hacker or another, but because I have some relatively strong protections in place, the bad actor hasn't been able to get in.
Bluehost picks up another win with dashboard-level MFA, which supports Google Authenticator and those compatible. Bluehost also supports email authentication, but does the right thing by pushing its customers to smartphone Google Auth authentication as a safer choice.
Bluehost includes a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate, which is configured and enabled by default. While there are some overhead issues with Let's Encrypt (the certificate needs to be renewed more often than commercially-sold SSL certificates), Bluehost automates that renewal process, so it's not something site operators need to configure.
PERFORMANCE TESTING
Next, I wanted to see how the site performed using some online performance testing tools. It's important not to take these tests too seriously. We're purposely looking at the most low-end offerings of hosting vendors, so the sites they produce are expected to be relatively slow.
That said, it's nice to have an idea of what to expect. The way I test is to use the fresh install of WordPress with the standard theme TwentyTwenty. I then performance test the "Hello, world" page, which is mostly text, with just an image header. That way, we're able to focus on the responsiveness of a basic page without being too concerned about media
SUPPORT RESPONSIVENESS
There's not much to say here. I had only one interaction, late on a Sunday night. I did get connected with human via chat within about five minutes. The individual was nice and clearly wanted to help. I particularly liked how they let me know that some of the information would take a few minutes to dig up, so I wasn't left hanging, wondering if they'd gone home for the night.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, the accuracy of the answers left a little to be desired. That said, being able to reach a support person who is responsive and who tries to be helpful late on a Sunday night is a good thing.
Overall conclusion
I was very pleasantly surprised. It's almost impossible to believe that Bluehost and HostGator are part of the same company. HostGator slapped spammy upsells on everything, making the use of their service an annoyance. On top of that, nearly all their key security components were woefully out of date to the tune of 8 years, 7 years, and 11 years.
Bluehost, by comparison, is pretty much up to date. Their portal and even their implementation of upsells in the WordPress dashboard show a great deal of thought and consideration of the overall user experience.
Even though Bluehost is slightly more costly than HostGator ($0.20 per month) in the initial term and considerably more after term renewal ($2.00 more per month), I would definitely recommend Bluehost over HostGator.
In fact, I'd put Bluehost into the running against the other base level plans I've reviewed. It offers a basic staging server mechanism, reasonably fast page loads, current security libraries, multi-factor authentication, and a low-key approach to upsells. It's not bad at all. Now, maybe they can teach their siblings as HostGator to play nice with others.
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