A web host is essential to your website. They literally host your files and keep your site online. This is important for your SEO and site speed, user experience, and bounce rate. a
If you look up “best web host” on Google, you’ll find tons and tons of articles recommending Bluehost- in fact, even Wordpress.org recommends them.
Before you sign up for a BlueHost plan, please read this. We generally don’t call out other hosts because of conflict of interest and bias, but we’ve had to move hundreds of users from these hosts because of complaints about quality or reliability, and while we enjoy the business, we’d much rather not have you give these conglomerates your money in the first place.
BlueHost (along with Hostgator, iPage, and 80+ other brands) are owned by hosting giant EIG (Endurance International Group). If you haven’t heard of them before, they have a large reputation in the web hosting market of gobbling up and buying out small-medium sized web hosts “consolidating” their infrastructure into one data center, and outsourcing and combining all their support staff.
The result?
Overloaded web servers, downtime (they’ve had a few major outages bringing down millions of sites), slow websites, and lots of support issues. You want to change hosts? Sure. Due to the sheer amount of companies they own, there is a good chance you’ll just move to another host they own. Gradually, many people start to assume all web hosts are the same and that the quality of EIG owned companies are the “norm,” when there are clearly better options.
“XYZ Blogger/Website/Review Recommended BlueHost/HostGator as the #1 WebHost!”
Simple. Money.
Bluehost pays at least $65 per person you refer that signs up. These rates can go up to hundreds per referral, which quickly add up to a lot for blogs and even companies or non-profits like WP.org that need the money. Many people even depend on BlueHost affiliate for their monthly income.
If you read these reviews, you’ll even find a lot of “reviews” aren’t even reviews. They just state what features a host offers and provide commentary on their pricing.
Write something bad about an EIG host? They’ll pay you to shut up, like with the $130 per signup they offered this blogger who wrote a bad review if she took it down.
“I’ve been using BlueHost for X Years. They work fine for me”
Not every plan is the same, and you might get a server that is less overloaded and get decent performance. But, in regards to price to performance ratio, you’ll almost certainly be getting far lower than what you get basically anywhere else.
As a web developer, I’ve had many clients reach out to me in the past saying “My WordPress website is slow! Why?” and the first question I ask is: “Who is your host?”
90% of the time its BlueHost, Godaddy or Hostgator. I’m not saying you won’t get good performance with them (perfectly possible with the proper setup), but the time you spend trying to optimize will be far, far more than what it takes to use with essentially any other web host.
“But they host over 2 million websites! Maybe some just had a bad experience?”
There are hundreds of thousands of other people who’ve been disgusted by BlueHost and moved away. Yet, BlueHost still gets millions of customers because of a few reasons:
- They make you pay 3 years in advanced to get a “special” discounted rate, locking you away for a long time
- Some just don’t know any better
- They switch to another EIG-owned web host and discover it’s no better, and ultimately stay
- They find it too hard to move away, or are scared they’ll lose their work
“You’re A Web Host Yourself. You Are Biased.”
We could be, but don’t just listen to us.
Just look at the Trustpilot reviews for BlueHost.
Or on reddit, here, here and here.
Or various bloggers like Review Signal and Research as a Hobby.
Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here.
Or Twitter.
In fact, you can Google “Bluehost EIG” and see for yourself
Quite frankly, we don’t really even care which host you go with, as long as it’s not EIG-owned or GoDaddy, because, for 95% of people, you’ll be regretting that choice at some point.
GoDaddy and its parent company run a similar scheme of buying small web hosts and providing poor customer service and slow websites, though they don’t own as many companies as EIG.
They do, however, engage in practices like charging inordinate amounts for SSL (basically everyone provides it for free), attempting to upsell service to you at every corner such as “Security” services or upgrades, and also cramming a ton of sites on one server, resulting in slow websites.
Want to start a blog? Do yourself, your visitors, and your developer(s) a favor and use any other web host besides EIG-owned ones and GoDaddy.
We do offer super-fast web hosting with 24/7 support that’ll easily blow BlueHost out of the water for $1.75 month and free migration from any of these hosts with zero downtime, but go with any host, and you’ll probably get better performance.
Semi-full list of EIG hosts here: