Bluehost India Review – Why Bluehost.com is still the Best?

Bluehost is a famous web hosting company which was started by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in 2003 and is located in Provo, Utah in the United States.

Till date Bluehost has acquired a customer base of more than 2 million and its team of 750+ employees are giving 24/7 round the clock support to its customers. In this article we will see all the parameters by conducting a thorough Bluehost India review. That will help you in deciding better.

The company is now owned by Endurance International Group, which is an IT services company that specializes in offering web hosting services. Very recently Bluehost started its services in India named as Bluehost India, after EIG acquired the Mumbai based web hosting company called The ResellerClub.

Bluehost is trying to capture the Indian market by going local for its audience. If you are living in India, then the best part of this is that the servers are located in your country so you get better speeds and great performance, plus you also get a payment option in your own local currency, i.e. INR.

This article on Bluehost India review is a little long and if you are in a hurry I would recommend you to quickly go through the following tables, which can ease your burden of finding the perfect hosting plan as per your needs.

Bluehost India Shared Hosting Comparison

According to the above chart comparisons between multiple Bluehost Shared Hosting plans, I can say…

• The pricing of Plus and Choice Plus under Bluehost India is the same leaving us with a single difference that Choice Plus offers and that is a Codeguard Basic add-on that will help you in regular site backups.
• The Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro will prevent email spam by spam experts. A technology of Bluehost where they say that it automatically learns, filters, and adapts to new spammer techniques for regularly preventing you against email spam.
• The Pro plan offers higher server performance allowing for a greater compute resource for each user, unlike the other shared plans.
• Choice Plus and Pro plan also offer something called Domain Privacy. Wherein your personal information like name, email address, phone number, and physical address in the WHOIS database is masked by Bluehost’s contact information. Fighting Identity theft, malware, fraudulent domain transfers and many more such rogue activities.
• Having said all of that Bluehost India also offers 1 dedicated IP for its Pro plan users.

Bluehost India VPS Hosting Comparison

Skip if you are looking for shared hosting and jump to Shared Hosting Review

In addition to Bluehost’s Shared hosting Plan. I have made a chart of other parameters you would like to know when choosing a VPS plan that suits your needs.

Remember, that shared hosting is the best choice if you are about to start your blog or a website. You will need VPS hosting only if you have the following requirements.

• Your site needs specific features provided by the plans under this hosting type.
• Your website needs more server resources
• If your site is big and needs additional security
• The traffic level for your website is increasing rapidly
• You need any specialized server software for additional activities

While choosing a VPS plan always keep in mind the server’s cores, storage capacity, RAM, and Bandwidth.

According to the above chart comparison between multiple Bluehost VPS Hosting Plans, I can say…

• You have 6 timely options to go for before deciding on the right service as per your needs. In either of the plans, you can choose from 36 months right up to 1 month. Check the resource availability for a few months and decide whether the plan is right for you.
• There are technical differences between Standard and Enhanced plans other than the server cores, which are 2 cores for both of them.
• The Ultimate plan has high pricing and offers the best technical specifications in this range

I have also included a table that compares Bluehost India’s Dedicated Hosting plans. Before actually starting with the details. So, you get to see an overall picture of all the three segments with respect to their specific plans.

When would you need a Dedicated Hosting?

• You need full control, which is up to the root access to the server
• Your website needs additional performance and security
• You need multiple dedicated IP addresses. For example, many organizations have 1 IP for a hosted Web Server another for a hosted Application Server, and so on.
• If your website receives a lot of traffic.

Bluehost India Dedicated Hosting Comparison

Skip if you are looking for shared hosting and jump to Shared Hosting Review

It includes everything that you saw in the VPS Hosting Comparison and a little bit more you would like to know.

According to the above chart I can say that Dedicated hosting is a little on the higher side. But the company has given the feasibility to try their plans for a shorter period. You can go with either of these super power plans for a short duration.

Now I will discuss the further details which will help you to decide in what you should be looking at when choosing a web hosting service.

Bluehost India Review

As this guide is dedicated to Bluehost India review, we will look into the following areas:

• Hosting Features: Are there enough features for me?
• Uptime & PageLoad Speed: Will my site be up, especially at peak hours?
• Easy for Beginners: Is it easy and quick to navigate and set up?
• Customer Support: Will I get good customer service if in case I had some issues?
• Pricing: Can I find a good plan that not only delivers great performance but is highly secure, and should also be within my budget?

These are the general questions you should be asking yourself before taking your next step.

So, let me answer them one by one.

Hosting Features

Bluehost India Review Shared Hosting Features

Bluehost India basically comes in three hosting segments, Shared, VPS, and Dedicated hosting.

If you are getting started, then Bluehost Shared hosting plans will be very much suitable for you. It is for those who are beginners, wants to list a few things on websites, or perhaps create a website and blog as a part-time hobby.

Apart from the Basic plan under shared hosting, the Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro plans offer

• Unlimited Storage
• Additional Domains
• Parked Domains facility
• Unlimited Sub Domains
• 1 Dedicated IP Address (only available in Pro plan)

With all the features available, as seen above. It is easier for a beginner to start with a plan under Bluehost India Shared Hosting. I would encourage you to opt for Choice Plus.

The reasons are;

• Choice Plus offers all the above mentioned additional features with Spam Experts to fight Email Spam and Code Guard which is used for Site Backup.
• The price you pay for Choice Plus is 299 per month for a 3-year subscription model. Unlike Pro, where you will need to pay 859 per month for a 3-year plan.
• You will not need a dedicated IP if you are just thinking to start a website or a blog.

If you are thinking of creating a small website which would require your visitors to log in for further activities, or if you are thinking of creating a product and selling at the initial stage then you can go with Bluehost India Shared Pro plan which offers 1 dedicated IP address. Your customers would need to know how to get to you (meaning your server). Therefore, a plan which offers dedicated IP is good in such a case.

All the plans are powered by the Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate and are included in your purchase.

The only drawback I see in Bluehost’s Shared hosting plans is that the Bandwidth is unmetered. Meaning that specific allotment of resources like CPU and RAM is not dedicated for your use only. Nevertheless, there are no big issues to that until and unless your site is not visited by large number of visitors. If that is the case then you might want to look into VPS hosting.

Bluehost India Review VPS Hosting Features

Skip if looking for Shared Hosting and jump to Uptime and Page Load Speed

If speed, performance and storage is your concern then Bluehost India VPS offers 3 plans under this belt, which are Standard, Enhanced, and Ultimate.

Bluehost has taken care of its users when it comes to server performance offering 2 to 4 cores and memory of 2 GB to 8 GB RAM.

This is suitable if you are planning to run a web or application server at a small scale, in the beginning. To opt for any of the VPS plan is a good idea if you are planning to host your site for offering products or services to customers at a small scale and want to build an audience for your product.

The control and flexibility to run the server will be in your hands as server resources are allocated to you and it won’t be shared with other users.

Users going with any of the VPS plans get a 1-year free domain registration and 30 days money-back guarantee. Just in case they plan of switching to something else

You also get to create access controls for various roles related to administering the server and FTP to upload, download or modify files.

Bluehost India Review Dedicated Hosting Features

Skip if looking for Shared Hosting and jump to Uptime and Page Load Speed

Just like the plans under VPS hosting, Bluehost’s Dedicated hosting plans also offer a subscription model from less than 1, 3, 6 months upto 3 years.

Dedicated hosting is like owning your own house or in fact I would say, your own Mansion. Dedicated hosting plans normally allocate lots of resources to their users. Be it server cores, RAM or storage.

Bluehost India offers Standard, Enhanced and Premium plans under this hosting segment.

It is useful for organizations, enterprise-level corporates who have resource-intensive requirements, and authority websites that get more than 1 million user traffic each month.

NOTE: If you are a beginner and want to take benefit of speed and performance with very less budget then I would highly recommend you to go with Bluehost Shared Choice Plus plan. You will be more than satisfied with respect to your needs.

Uptime & Page Load Time

The uptime and downtime basically depends upon a few things like;

From the Users Side:

The plan and type of hosting you want to subscribe for

If you’re not a rookie and already have a running website with multiple pages. Plus you are sure that there are going to be further additions to the website with respect to page and content. Then going for basic plans is not right.

In that case you will have to go with plans that fall under VPS hosting and Dedicated Hosting.

The point I am trying to make here is that, choose the plans well if you do not want to see multiple downtimes.

Either way most of the hosting providers claim to offer 99.9% uptime. But just to be on the safer side I would recommend you to thoroughly understand your present and future requirements and then opt for a plan.

From the Hosting Providers’ Side:

• Are there enough servers allotted to you?
• Is the technical team proactive to minimize current downtime?

If you go for a Bluehost India’s VPS and Dedicated Hosting plan, you will get a very powerful server with multiple resources that will not only handle tons of content on your website but also heavy traffic visiting your site.

But, all that happens at a very high cost. If you’re the type of person who is new to this and just wants to try out blogging or trying to make a new website then I would always prefer that you go with Bluehost Shared Hosting plans.

I will share a real example, from which you can get an idea.

Let us look at last month’s uptime with one of my website that is hosted on Bluehost India Choice Plus plan.

Sharing the email snapshots with you…

Snapshot 1 & 2

As per the above 2 snapshots, I encountered drop in the this month.

Counting the number of minutes, the website was down for 2 minutes 53 seconds. Because 3 to 4 times in a month I got these downtime emails. So if on average I consider 3 minutes and 4 times in a month then it will be total of 12 minutes in a month.

But let me tell you more clearly, you may get more downtime events and for longer duration as well. In that case, you have to contact their support team.

Their support team is good and will be ready to help you. In the month of April 2020, I was getting these downtimes very frequently so I talked to the customer support of Bluehost India.

They resolved this issue and told me that “there are queries running under your server”. So they killed these queries by running one database query. When I try to ask how I can do this then their representative told me I have to ask a WordPress developer for this.

I could not really understand why I can’t do this.

Note: I have shared only 2 emails with you, it may increase or decrease.

With my experience and taking Bluehost’s word into account, they claim 99.9% uptime. This is possible in theory but it is not the same in the real world.

Update: After some time these downtime emails increased as my website downtime increased too much and finally I decided to shift to Hostinger India.

Now let us talk about Page Load Time. You don’t want to choose a plan that doesn’t support your requirement. Otherwise, your website won’t load in under 3 seconds in normal conditions. I would also like to show you the page load time of one of the websites which I have hosted under the Bluehost Shared Hosting Choice Plus Plan.

The Page Load Time you see here is 1.64 seconds. It is good until it is below 3 seconds. There may be slight ups and downs in Page Load Time as well.

With all that being said, this justifies that for a beginner it is the best choice to go for the Bluehost Shared Hosting Choice Plus plan.

Easy for Beginners

It is very important to know that is it easy to navigate and set up your account in the beginning, before making the decision to go with Bluehost India hosting.

Well, Bluehost is the official WordPress recommended hosting provider and is the best choice for beginners. Reason being, most of the websites today on the internet are running on WordPress and the combination of WordPress hosted through Bluehost works really good.

With Single Sign-On and full integration users are able to access everything they need from the Bluehost cPanel.  Managing the website, email, domains, billing, etc.

With other hosting providers you will need to log in separately to access builder, email, etc.

While most of the plans include SSL, additional services like opting for security software can be used in the same login. Newbies and beginners will also find the control panel very easy to navigate.

With other hosting providers, when you move from shared hosting to VPS or Dedicated, the control panel will start getting a little complicated and users without technical background might find it a little difficult to access all the features provided. Whereas, with Bluehost India hosting, the control panel in all the plans, is more or less the same with some additional features. That helps the users big time if they are not having a good technical background.

Customer Support

This is the most important factor when considering to choose any Hosting provider. The sole reasons Bluehost launched its services in India was to give better server performance to Indian users and provide easy payments system in local Indian currency.

However, the hosting service that you will receive from Bluehost India will actually come from ResellerClub, which is now owned by EIG. If you are outside of India or your visitors are mainly coming from other countries then you would want to consider the global Bluehost version.

I would like to address some most common questions like;

How well am I backed up by Bluehost India?

Will I get adequate help from Bluehost India Customer Support?

Is there a Bluehost customer service number?

Bluehost is genuine and their customer support model is quite good. Their support team gets into a detailed discussion with the users who are facing problems and tries to locate the source of the problem. Making it very easy for the users to go and adhere to the changes required in order to have a smooth running of the site.

It has been in the market for quite some time now and does understand the importance of good customer service.

As per my experience, I would recommend you one such thing to keep in mind. Always choose the type of hosting and the plan according to scaling your website/business with a long-term vision.

If you are a beginner then there is nothing wrong to start with plans under Bluehost India Shared Hosting. But if at all you know that your efforts of scaling your business by putting lots of content will drive a decent amount of traffic at a much faster pace, then it might be a better idea to opt for plans under Bluehost VPS India.

The main reason behind telling you this is that, you will see users who face issues and have lots of complaints against their hosting provider. It is a very general thing on the internet. No hosting provider is 100% perfect. But by knowing this simple yet effective information, you will know what to exactly look for when thinking about your website/business.

Their customer support team is available 24/7 with a Bluehost customer service number which is actually a toll free number and a local number. Yes, that’s right users in India can contact Bluehost India via a local number as well. You can also use their chat and email service just in case you need to contact them.

Additionally, users can also reach out to Bluehost India on their Facebook and Twitter handles.

Pricing

Having said about all the parameters, this is one of the crucial one. Pricing is an important part for any user to take the ultimate of decision of buying or not.

As we have seen earlier Bluehost India offers three types of hosting;

Shared: Suitable for users starting out with new website or blog. Websites getting lesser traffic.

VPS: Great if you need performance, dedicated IP address, and root access. Also suitable for users who get moderate traffic.

Dedicated: Much suitable for organizations with resource intensive requirements and who need security with performance. Dedicated Hosting plans are bought when the website is getting lot of traffic.

I will wrap up the article over here by giving you an option to choose between Bluehost India and Bluehost Global.

Below I have shared a combination of 2 images. One from Bluehost India and another from Bluehost Global.

From this we can clearly see that there is a minute difference between the features both of them offer. But, there is a significant difference between the prices.

According to me, I would recommend you to go with Bluehost India Shared Hosting Choice Plus Plan for Blogging if you are just beginning.

But with very little increase in budget, you can get a much better option from Bluehost global. If a small increase in cost (approx. Rs. 100 to 200 per month) is not a barrier then you should go with bluehost.com.

There is a difference of approximately Rs 200 per month. If you can afford that in the beginning, then you should go with it. Otherwise, start from the Choice Plus plan offered by Bluehost India.

Or read my Hostinger India Review here.