BlueHost Joomla Hosting Review – Is it a Good Joomla Web Host?

BlueHost has been in business since 1996, serving many customers and hosting millions of websites across the globe. It is obvious that BlueHost is one of the well-established and largest web hosting providers you can think of today. This host has an array of hosting plans such as virtual servers, shared hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated servers and WordPress optimized hosting among others.

Despite being popular and the most preferred web hosting provider, BlueHost is also affordable and reliable, offering the highest quality of hosting services possible. On top of that, BlueHost boasts of unbelievably the lowest pricing plans, easy-to-use interface and a 1-click installer for software on the market today.

As if that is not enough, BlueHost is known to offer lower-tier users with state-of-the-art features as well as excellent customer support for all users. Most significantly, BlueHost can help you get the best out of Google and Bing through advertising in addition to offering in-house services via its own data centers, fiber connections and Linux kernel on custom servers.

There’s more than meet the eye when using BlueHost web hosting provider and this review will take you through BlueHost’s performance and uptime, customer support, plans and pricing, how it runs Joomla and finally highlight its merits and demerits. Let’s find out more.

BlueHost Joomla Hosting Review

So, in the following I will show you few reasons why you should choose BlueHost for your Joomla projects. When choosing a web host for your Joomla website, it is important to consider the following factors: uptime, performance, online support, plans and pricing. Below you will find an extensive overview of each:

BlueHost Performance and Uptime

When choosing your hosting provider, you will definitely look for a fast web hosting company. And BlueHost is one such company that will give you what you are looking for. Bluehost shows great performance with each of its hosting plans thanks to its 99.99% uptime which is well above the standardized 99.94%. Apart from that, this hosting platform shows a staggering 9 minutes of the downtime out of our 400 days logged period.

With a fast page loading of 424mns, Bluehost comes in the second position among the top ten best-performing Joomla web hosting providers and it has continuously been showing tremendous improvement in its load times by nearly 300%. This feat was achieved after BlueHost Company took drastic measures to upgrade their Bluerock server park in a bid to improve their customer experience. For that reason, BlueHost performance and uptime are the two main factors that have made this web hosting provider to become increasingly popular as more and more people discover its existence.

BlueHost Customer Support

BlueHost – Online Customer Support

As a customer, it’s your right to get some help and support when necessary. Therefore, it’s a good idea to choose a web hosting provider that is able to give you support at any time and when you need it. And one of the hosting companies that are dedicated to ensuring its customers get the best from their support services is BlueHost.

Apparently, BlueHost maintains a large library of step-by-step guides, articles and video tutorials rich in extensive knowledge on web hosting. This is quite a noble step that the company took, especially for beginners. With all these useful materials at your disposal, you can easily solve common issues through simple research.

If that is not helpful, you can also talk directly to an expert in order to get first-hand help. That is the reason BlueHost provides a 24/7/365 customer support system that allows you to speak with the relevant customer support representative through phone calls or live chats. This is important, especially when looking for help from the technical staff.

Sadly, BlueHost got rid of the ticket-based customer support system to focus mainly on personal approach via phone and live chat-based support. While this was done to save time, for some users, the ticket based customer support system was quite reliable particularly for issues that cannot be resolved through phone or live chat sessions.

BlueHost Plans and Pricing

BlueHost – Joomla Hosting Plans & Pricing

When it comes to hosting plans and pricing, BlueHost offers a number of plans for all sizes and budgets. The plans include VPS, shared hosting, dedicated server, WooCommerce hosting, cloud hosting, WordPress hosting and so on. Let’s have a look at individual BlueHost web hosting plans and their features:

Shared hosting: This is a perfect way you can start a new site with low internet traffic volume. Normally, a shared hosting environment means that the websites share server resources among themselves.

Cloud hosting: This is the most reliable upgrade to a shared web hosting plan because it lets you make use of the multiple cloud servers available, allowing your sites to automatically switch to another server in case of high traffic or hardware failure.

WordPress hosting: It is designed primarily for your WordPress powered websites. In other words, this hosting plan is optimized to run WordPress while protecting the site against any threats.

WooCommerce hosting: This is the most popular and commonly used eCommerce plugin for WordPress that allows you to start an online store so easily with WordPress. It offers essential features to help you start with your eCommerce store without a problem

VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting: It is an upgrade to the shared WordPress hosting and it lets you access the virtual dedicated resources within a shared environment.

Dedicated server hosting: This plan allows you to have all the necessary resources of the server to yourself. The only downside of this hosting plan is that you will have to handle the servers on your own.

Generally, all the hosting plans under BlueHost have an easy to use web hosting control panel that allows you to have full control of your hosting, develop databases and many more.

Each hosting plan has the following features when it comes to pricing:

• Basic: It only lets you host just one website. In addition, it hosts 1 domain and 25 subdomains, 5 email accounts (with each having 100MB of storage) and 50 GB storage space. For first timers, the payment is $3.95 per month and when renewing it the payment comes to $7.99 per month.
• Plus: This plan comes with unlimited websites and unlimited web space including bandwidth. On top of that, you will also have unlimited email accounts. For starters, the price is $5.95 a month but when renewing, it comes to $10.99 per month.
• Prime: It includes all features under the Plus Plan and on top of that you will have domain privacy with Site Backup Pro worth more than $80 per year. When paying for the first term, the price is $5.95 a month and $14.99 when renewing it.

Running Joomla on BlueHost

BlueHost prides itself in offering an optimized hosting for WordPress but sadly, this web hosting provider does not have any hosting plan dedicated especially to Joomla. This statement, however, should not discourage you given that there is at least some light at the end of the tunnel for those looking to use Joomla now and in the near future.

Therefore, if you are planning to host your Joomla websites using BlueHost, the good news is that you still have several options to achieve your goals. This is due to the fact that the host’s script installer tool will allow you to do the installation of Joomla 2.5 or rather a 3.x version faster and easily more than you ever thought. This way, you will enjoy using Joomla on BlueHost hosting plans.

What is important at this stage is to know that Joomla uses far more resources compared to other software such as WordPress. This means if you are quite sure that your site will generate internet traffic exceeding 500 visitors on a daily basis, it is wise of you to consider settling for a VPS hosting plan instead of the shared ones.

Pros and Cons of BlueHost

In as much as a lot has been said about BlueHost, you need to realize that there are positive and negative attributes that come when using this web hosting platform. It is equally important to know the negative side of this host so that you can always prepare yourself adequately to handle any eventualities just in case. Here are the pros and cons of using BlueHost that you should always have at your fingertips:

Pros – Why Should you Choose BlueHost?

• BlueHost has web hosting plans that are built for both speed and great performance
• Every hosting plan under BlueHost comes with a free domain
• There is free marketing credit, SSL with several plans and dedicated IPs
• BlueHost lets you have multiple domain hosting
• It has an enhanced cPanel with all necessary industry-standard features
• An affordable cloud web hosting provider with solid performance and reliability
• There are unlimited storage and bandwidth
• You will enjoy free add-ons when using BlueHost
• Excellent customer support
• Money-back guarantee
• Different options for hosting services
• Uptime guarantee
• Good reputation

Cons – What is the negative side of using BlueHost?

• There is no Windows hosting or an option to choose the preferred OS
• Even though there are affordable starting prices, there are high commitment periods as well as high renewal rates
• The basic web hosting plan only permits you to host just a single website
• Limited CPU usage
• Seller accounts experience slow sites
• There is a single set for the default DNS
• There are charges for website migration

Conclusion

Will you choose BlueHost for your Joomla Websites? Your answer should be “yes” now that you have first-hand information regarding the use of BlueHost to host your Joomla websites. At least you know how this hosting provider performs, its hosting plans and prices, how you can use it to run Joomla as well as its positive attributes in the long run. In this case, it is a highly undisputed fact that you will recommend BlueHost for Joomla websites to your friends and customers alike. And if you are out there building your Joomla blog or setting up your website, you can be pretty sure that BlueHost won’t let you down whatsoever!