If you are planning on setting up a storefront to sell online, you’ll need a reliable and affordable host for your ecommerce site. There are plenty of hosting providers to choose from, and today, we’ll be reviewing one of the most popular providers in the market—Bluehost. In this Bluehost ecommerce hosting review, we’ll take a look at their hosting plans, performance, features and support. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to decide if Bluehost is the right host for your online store, or if you should keep looking.
Bluehost Ecommerce Hosting Comparison Chart
| WooCommerce Hosting | Standard | Premium |
| Â |  | |
| Price | Check Price at Bluehost.com | Check Price at Bluehost.com |
| Sites | Online store (blog + site) | Online store (blog + site) |
| Products | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| WooCommerce | Installed | Installed |
| Jetpack Version | Free version | Premium version |
| Customer Product Reviews | Yes | Yes |
| Traffic Analytics | Yes | Yes |
| Discount Codes | Yes | Yes |
| Online Bookings | No | Yes |
| Product Customizations | No | Yes |
| Tax Calculator | No | Yes |
| CodeGuard Backup Basic | 1 year | Included |
| Money Back | 30 day | 30 days |
WooCommerce Hosting
With WooCommerce hosting, you’ll have an easier time managing your online store.
Bluehost’s WooCommerce hosting is optimized for users that want to use WordPress with their online store. It comes with WooCommerce already pre-installed. With WordPress and WooCommerce, you’ll have access to a huge number of themes and plugins to customize your store or add more functionality.
Bluehost offers two WooCommerce hosting plans—Standard and Premium. The Standard plan is cheaper, and it is best suited for users that are just starting out. It comes with all the basic features that every online store should have. Pricing starts at $15.95/month for a 3-year term. You can pay monthly, annually or every three years. The longer terms will net you a bigger discount.
The Premium plan, on the other hand, is best suited for users that need more advanced features, such as online bookings, managing subscriptions, product customizations and more. Since it comes with more features, it is more expensive, starting at $24.95/month. Same with the Standard plan, you can pay monthly, annually or every three years. Bluehost offers a 30-day money back guarantee for all their hosting plans.
WooCommerce Features
Both plans come with basic features such as free SSL, a free domain, unmetered bandwidth, site analytics and security features. Also, once you’ve signed up with them, you are entitled to a free 2-hour call with one of their agents to help you set up your online store and guide you on how to set-up features like adding products, using plug-ins and more.
As for ecommerce features, you’ll get a store-front theme automatically installed, customer product reviews, manual order creation, discount codes and one-click installation for most of the popular payment processing options. The Premium plan adds even more features, such as online bookings, managing subscriptions, product customization, automatic tax calculator and more.
Since you will be using WooCommerce, you’ll also have the ability to add even more third-party and dedicated plugins to add to the functionality of your store. Some are free, while some will require extra payment. That said, Bluehost offers a free premium plugin bundle for the Premium plan that gives you access to over $200 worth of WooCommerce plugins.
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting is great for small to medium sized online stores.
If you want more flexibility with your hosting, Bluehost VPS hosting is a good option. You are not limited to only using WordPress, you can build your ecommerce site using different platforms and CMSs like Drupal, Joomla and more. However, VPS hosting is a bit more expensive than Bluehost’s WooCommerce hosting.
Bluehost has three VPS plans on offer. The cheapest is the Standard plan at $29.99/month. With the Standard plan, you’ll get 2 CPU cores, 30GB storage, 2GB RAM, 1TB bandwidth and one IP address. This plan is perfect for smaller ecommerce sites that won’t require a lot of resources.
The most popular VPS plan on Bluehost is the Enhanced plan. It starts at $29.99/month and with it, you’ll get 2 CPU cores, 60GB storage, 4GB RAM, 2TB bandwidth and two IP addresses. It offers more resources than the Standard plan, without a huge jump in pricing.
Finally, the most expensive plan is the Ultimate plan. With this plan, you’ll get 4 CPU cores, 120GB storage, 8GB RAM, 3TB bandwidth and two IP addresses. It starts at $59.99/month. This is the plan to get if you are getting huge amounts of traffic, but you want to stick to VPS, instead of upgrading to dedicated hosting.
VPS Features
All Bluehost VPS plans come with a free domain for the first year, free SSL certificate, root access and guaranteed resources. Unlike with cheaper shared hosting, you are not sharing the available resources with other websites on the server. Also, with VPS hosting, your site will be better equipped handling huge amounts of traffic due to more bandwidth.
Additional features include dynamic resources, enhanced control panel, multi-server management, database management and file management. Basically, you’ll have complete control over your hosting environment. You’ll be able to add more resources as you need them, get additional servers, manage your database and more.
When it comes to ecommerce sites or online stores, you have the ability to choose the platform that you wish to use. You are free to use platforms or Content Management Systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and more. Each platform comes with its own advantages and disadvantages, and it’s up to you to choose which one is best for your requirements.
Dedicated Server Hosting
If your site needs more resources, dedicated hosting is a great option.
Dedicated hosting is the most expensive hosting option from Bluehost. It gives you the most guaranteed resources and it also comes with better security, performance, support and features. If you are currently running a high traffic ecommerce site, you will want the resources, performance and reliability of a dedicated server.
Bluehost offers three dedicated hosting plans—Standard, Enhanced and Premium. The Standard plan is the cheapest one, starting at $79.99/month. With it, you are guaranteed 4 CPU cores, 500GB of storage, 4GB of RAM, 5TB bandwidth and three IP addresses.
The Enhanced plan is Bluehost’s recommended dedicated hosting plan, and it starts at $99.99/month. It comes with 4 CPU cores, 1TB storage, 8GB RAM, 10TB bandwidth and four IP addresses. It’s a step-up over the Standard plan, and most mid-sized business stores will benefit from these resources.
The most expensive plan is the Premium plan, which starts at $119.99/month. The guaranteed resources that you will get are: 4 CPU cores, 1TB storage, 16GB RAM, 15TB bandwidth and five IP addresses. This plan is suitable for large e-commerce sites that consistently receive huge traffic.
Dedicated Server Features
Bluehost’s dedicated server hosting comes with all the basic features that you should expect, such as free domain for the first year, free SSL, root access, RAID storage and dedicated support. You’ll be able to manage your database, add more hosting services and have full access and control over your hosting environment.
Unlike VPS, you don’t share your server with other users. Your site will have its own physical server, and this can greatly improve performance and reliability. Also, with dedicated hosting, you’ll be able to configure and customize your server however you like.
As for ecommerce features, it’s basically the same with VPS, but with more guaranteed resources, better security and improved performance. You’ll be able to use any platform or CMSs available on Bluehost to create your online store.
Performance and Support
When it comes to performance, Bluehost offers very good uptime and speed.
Bluehost’s performance when it comes to speed and uptime is generally good. Sites hosted on Bluehost has an average uptime of between 99.95% to 99.98%, which is around industry standard. Anything that is above 99.9% is considered good.
Speed will vary a lot, as it can be influenced by a lot of factors. Generally though, Bluehost has an average speed of 600-700ms for new sites that have minimal content. This is a good baseline when measuring speed. Any site that loads in under two seconds is considered good.
As for customer support, Bluehost offers 24/7 chat and phone support, and you can always go to their knowledge base for simple guides and tutorials. They are responsive and they often solve your issues in a timely manner. Overall, they have good customer support.
Verdict
Bluehost is a reliable host for your ecommerce site.
We highly recommend Bluehost for anyone that wants to start an online store. They have various hosting options available for all types of users. WooCommerce hosting, for instance, is great for people with small or medium sized online stores that want a more streamlined experience. Bluehost’s team will handle everything on the technical side, and you can focus solely on managing and growing your ecommerce site.
VPS hosting and dedicated hosting are great for people with mid-sized to large ecommerce sites that need more resources, as well as complete control over their hosting environment. These options are great for stores that get huge amounts of traffic consistently. All in all, you can’t go wrong with Bluehost if you are looking for a host for your ecommerce business.
FAQs
Bluehost is a great choice for ecommerce sites. They have various hosting options for users with different requirements.
Yes, Bluehost uses a customized cPanel.
Bluehost’s cheapest shared plan starts at $2.95/month, while their most expensive hosting plan can cost over a hundred dollars. The answer is, it will depend on your chosen hosting package.
It will depend on what you want. If you just want to concentrate on your store and not worry about the technical side of hosting, Bluehost’s managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting are the best options. However, if you are more technical, and you need complete control over your server, VPS hosting or dedicated hosting is recommended.
