Bluehost Review

Bluehost has been around since 2003, founded by Matt Heaton in Provo, Utah, and now hosts more than 5 million WordPress sites worldwide. It's part of Newfold Digital (formerly Endurance International Group, or EIG), which first acquired Bluehost in 2010 and fully absorbed it as part of a broader merger in 2021. The company is now headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, reflecting the broader consolidation of independent hosting brands into a handful of large groups that has played out across the industry over the past decade.

Its most notable credential is its relationship with WordPress itself: WordPress.org has officially recommended Bluehost as a hosting provider since 2005, one of only a handful of hosts to carry that endorsement, and the company backs it up with real involvement in the WordPress open-source project — engineering contributions to WordPress core, sponsorship of WordCamps globally, and, by its own account, "hundreds of hours a year" of contribution through WordPress's Five for the Future initiative, which asks companies that profit from WordPress to give back development time to the project.

The product lineup spans shared and managed WordPress hosting, VPS, dedicated and cloud servers, WooCommerce-focused e-commerce hosting, and a growing set of AI tools including website builders, domain name generators and an AI receptionist product for small businesses. Plans include free SSL certificates, a free domain for the first year on annual plans, and integrated SEO tooling via the Yoast plugin bundled into the dashboard. Account management runs through a customised cPanel interface, and backup add-ons are available for customers who want more frequent snapshots than the baseline plan includes rather than relying solely on the standard backup schedule bundled with hosting. Its shared plans also include a free CDN and unmetered bandwidth, so traffic spikes from a successful marketing push or a viral listing shouldn't trigger unexpected overage fees on top of your regular hosting bill.

Bluehost targets a wide range of customers, from first-time WordPress users through to agencies wanting white-label hosting they can resell under their own brand, and larger organisations needing dedicated infrastructure for high-traffic sites. Its managed WordPress tier specifically adds automatic daily backups, staging sites, and built-in malware scanning as part of the plan rather than as separate purchases, closing some of the gap with the dedicated managed hosts further down this list, and its 24/7 support is available via live chat, phone and ticket across every plan tier rather than being reserved for higher-priced customers only, so a first-time site owner gets the same access to help as a larger established business running dozens of sites on the platform.

The main thing to be aware of, and the reason it doesn't top this list despite its official WordPress.org endorsement: being part of a large hosting group means Bluehost ships some of the same built-in caching and account-management layers that generate the support complaints seen across other Newfold/EIG-family brands, including HostGator further down this list. It's worth testing thoroughly with your specific PremiumPress theme — particularly around Elementor editing and cache clearing — before committing to an annual plan you can't easily walk away from.