Bluehost Managed WordPress Hosting Review: Is It Worth It?

Finding the right web host is never easy – especially if you want to find one with a high level of WordPress knowledge. With that in mind, we’re here to help you decide on one of the most popular solutions, with an in-depth Bluehost-managed WordPress hosting review.

Dedicated WordPress hosting has a lot to offer you compared to more general solutions. Like SiteGround, Bluehost is used by so many people that its features are worth a close inspection.

In this review, we take the Bluehost offering apart—outlining its specific features, support, and performance—and then give you our opinion on whether its plans are worth the money.

Bluehost Managed WordPress Hosting Review: Features 

Unlike some other hosts, Bluehost relies somewhat on WordPress-specific features. Let’s take a look at what’s on offer:

• ManageWP Integration : Bluehost offers native support for ManageWP, starting with five websites on its basic plan.
• WordPress Custom Dashboard : Dashboard designed for WordPress users.

Considering that some plans are marketed for WordPress power users, we would expect Bluehost to be a bit more in terms of specific features. Let’s see how landlords fare in other areas.

support options 

Our first stop is support. Excellent support services are the backbone of any hosting provider, and before considering anything else, you need to ensure its quality. First off, Bluehost offers:

• 24/7 support via live chat and phone.
• In-depth knowledge base.

We decided to test their live chat service in more depth. We spoke to two experts at Bluehost and asked them some WordPress-specific questions.

On our first query (right in the middle of the weekday), we were faced with a wait of about twenty minutes – a bit long, but reasonable. A second inquiry on Friday night was answered in less than five minutes. Overall, we found the support specialists to be friendly and reasonably knowledgeable about WordPress and understand what kind of plans users should consider:

performance 

Bluehost’s WordPress-centric plans offer a variety of features to improve performance. Here are their lows:

• Virtual Private Server ( VPS): Each site hosted on a WordPress specific package has its own VPS. This means they don’t have to share resources with other users – a big plus for speed and security.
• NGINX : A leaner alternative to the Apache server, known for its resource efficiency .
• Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) Hypervisor : This is a virtualization technology that isolates specific hardware resources so other users don’t affect your performance.

Data center locations can also greatly affect the performance of a web host – having a low number of locations can lead to overcrowding and long page load times. Unfortunately, Bluehost does not share the location of its data centers with customers. However, there are some tools we can use to test its speed anyway.

Page Speed ​​Test Using Pingdom

For this test, we used a fresh install of WordPress without any customizations, then ran three different Pingdom tests using multiple server locations and averaged the results. Here they are:

• Melbourne : 2.01 seconds
• New York : 2.00 seconds
• Stockholm : 1.69 seconds

Considering that the sites in question are naked – and considering that 47% of users expect a site to load in two seconds or less – these results are worrisome. It stands to reason that more complex websites load more slowly, which means that Bluehost users may face high bounce rates through no fault of their own.

Basic load testing with load effects

This test is a bit more complicated than the previous one. Load Impact measures performance by simulating up to 25 connections in 5 minutes – perfect for testing how your site reacts under stressful conditions. Here are our findings:

• Load Generator : Ashburn, USA
• Test server : Ashburn, USA
• Minimum response time : 1.22 seconds
• Maximum response time : 2.03 seconds

When averaged, these numbers paint a more positive picture than Pingdom. However, they’re still on the higher end of the spectrum for our liking.

pricing 

Bluehost offers multiple tiers for each of their products – here’s what you need to know about each tier:

• Build ($19.95 per month): Designed to support up to 300 million visits per month, this plan is suitable for small businesses with moderate needs.
• Growth ($29.95 per month): This package handles up to 600 million monthly visitors and is suitable for e-commerce sites because a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate is included.
• Scale ($49.95 per month): This plan supports an unlimited number of visitors, making it ideal for larger businesses that need enhanced security and SSL certificates.

Before we go any further, we think it’s important to emphasize our skepticism when it comes to Bluehost’s visitor claims. These numbers are so high that there’s little chance of disproving them – unfortunately, exact figures are hard to come by. With this in mind, we recommend that you start with a build plan and scale up as necessary.

Overall Pros and Cons 

Considering all the points we’ve covered so far, here’s a summary of our findings – the good and the bad:

advantage

Their support team is fairly knowledgeable about WordPress and is available 24/7.

The hardware behind each plan is powerful and scales well.

Bluehost includes advanced security features such as daily scans for malware and vulnerabilities.

Every plan includes a free content delivery network (CDN)  setup.

ManageWP is fully supported.

shortcoming

The support queue can be a bit long.

Their plans have a higher starting price point than other WordPress hosts.

Page load time is long.

in conclusion