An Honest Review of Bluehost

An Honest Review of Bluehost – Everything that you need to know about starting a blog with Bluehost! Is it really worth it? (Spoiler: yes!)

Tell me if this sounds like you…

You finally decided that you wanted to start a blog, but you have no idea how to start. The anxiety of not knowing what to do gets overwhelming and you quit before you even start.

Sounds like you, right?

That was me too not too long ago before I started my blog. I read an income report for $20,000 and decided right then that I would make blogging my job. But I am not technologically savvy. I lack all but basic computer knowledge (I can turn the thing on and off and open tabs), but nothing about coding or websites. How could I make it as a blogger if I had no idea what I was doing?!

Thankfully, I came across another blogger’s post detailing how to start a blog for profit and she mentioned that she used Bluehost for her “hosting.” I don’t want you to have the same kind of confusion that I did, so let me try to break it down for you.

What is hosting?

“Hosting” is basically paying for where your website will live on the internet. Think of it like rent. You need to pay for it in order to have a blog for profit. There’s no way around it.

You don’t need to have $30/month hosting when your first start out (and frankly, you might not be able to afford it, like me).

What’s Bluehost?

Bluehost is a hosting site. Once you get onto Bluehost, you get your domain name included in the price of your hosting (which is $2.95/month if you buy through this special discount link). It’s a pain, but you do have to pay for it all upfront. BUT I have a super special way to get almost $200 off the purchase price (read that later in the post).

Why should I choose Bluehost?

Bluehost makes is super easy and very user-friendly to use. All you need to do is go here and they will literally walk you through using baby steps to get you from having no idea how to start to be able to start writing on WordPress.

Bluehost has a “one-click WordPress install” feature that really takes the guesswork out of figuring out how to get past the “well now what” moments.

What do I do if I hate it?

One of the reasons that I chose Bluehost, other than how easy it was to set up, was because of their 30-day money-back policy. If you hate them or decide that blogging isn’t for you, you get all of your money back, no questions asked.

Even if it’s more than 30 days, you will still get a prorated amount back. Meaning that if you only used 6 months out of the 36 months that you paid for, you will get the cost of 30 months returned to you.

Even if you grow so much in a year and need a bigger host, they will still give you your money back.

Is it a bad service and that’s why it’s so cheap?

This is where the jury is really out. I can only tell you from my experience with Bluehost.

I used Bluehost for a full year before I had any trouble at all. And the trouble was that I was on the basic plan, which is set up to cover about 10,000-25,000 monthly pageviews… and I had 161,000 pageviews in a month. My site crashed because I exceeded the amount that I had paid for on that plan.

And that was honestly the only time that I ever had trouble with my site. I messed up something on my page when I tried to update a sidebar (that was a bad decision on my part) at 1 am on a holiday weekend and I still got someone in the tech support to give me a hand in fixing what I did and restoring my not-broken site.

Here’s the brutally honest truth:

If you’re getting hundreds of thousands of pageviews each month, you will need to get a bigger and better host (for which I recommend BigScoots). But when you’re just starting out as a blogger, I’m still going to recommend Bluehost to you.

Bluehost helped me to get started when I had no idea what I was doing. They made it easy and definitely not scary to make the decision to jump into blogging with both feet.

Will I need to upgrade?

Eventually, yes! If you are determined to make blogging for profit work for you, then you will need to move to a bigger host one day in the future.

But when you start out, those few precious pageviews that you get each day (it could be 5 or it could be 100 or more) aren’t going to be enough to crash your servers.

How much is it?

So with this special code that I got just for my readers, you can get Bluehost for $2.95/month. The only downside is that you need to pay for it upfront.

BUT… I have a way for you to get it for less than $100 for 3 years.

Go to Bluehost and click “Get Started”
Select the “basic” plan (trust me – you won’t need any more to start off with)
Enter your free domain name and go to the next page (if it’s not available they won’t let you move on until you get one that is).
Once you get to the payment page, scroll down and unclick all of the options for domain privacy and backups…
Then move your mouse like you’re going to leave the page.
A box will pop-up with all of those options for free and with an even better deal.

Doing this trick saves you $192 and leaves you with paying $95 for 3 years of blog hosting. But it only works when you do this through this link.

What can I do if that’s still too much for me?

I know that the whole “$2.95/month… but you need to pay for the year upfront” is a pain. And I think it’s kind of deceptive, honestly. But if that $95.40 is too much, then there is a cheaper option with GoDaddy and that’s $1/month with $0 hidden fees or anything. So, it was $12. And that’s it.

But, and this is a big but, I can’t really endorse them.

I have no personal experience with GoDaddy and so I can’t tell you if they are a good company or not. I’d hate to tell you to use a company that I really know very little about.

But if you just want to get your blog started and only have less than $20 to spare, I say go for GoDaddy and upgrade as soon as you can. I’m 100% all for people starting their blogs as soon as possible!

You can find the full step-by-step tutorial to set up a blog with Bluehost here.

More AMAZING blogging resources:

Did I answer all of your questions about starting a blog on Bluehost? Let me know in the comments!

Comments

Rebecca @Surviving Student Loans says

October 14 at 5:22 PM

I am just starting out and Bluehost is working for now. I know I will have to upgrade at some point but it is great for newbies like me until we gain a following (and maybe some income) 🙂

Albert Rogers says

November 1 at 9:42 AM

can’t agree more the BLUEHOST is savior for the new bloggers like us 😛 I tried GoDaddy but they are very costly so I moved on to BlueHost. Though BluHost is not for millions of visitors traffic site but, it surely suits for the blogs with thousands of traffic. Thanks for the Honest review Caroline. 🙂
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