Bluehost Managed Hosting

Bluehost Managed Web Hosting Review 2017

In this review, we’ll take a look at Bluehost’s managed WordPress hosting plans. In a separate review, we also reviewed Bluehost’s shared WordPress plans, which are by far their most popular offering. So if you’ve found yourself in the wrong place, head on over to the shared hosting review.

Bluehost is an EIG-owned host with a massively popular affiliate program, which is the main reason you see them recommended so often.

Despite the poor performance of Bluehost’s shared plans, Bluehost’s managed WordPress hosting plans actually performed surprisingly well in our tests.

Keep reading to learn more about the features and performance of Bluehost’s managed WordPress hosting.

Overview of Bluehost Managed Hosting Features

If you’ve already read our review of Bluehost’s shared plans, you may or may not be happy that Bluehost’s managed WordPress hosting scraps the “unlimited” claims, opting instead for a more transparent structure with clear traffic and storage limits.

With the dedicated WordPress hosting, you get:

• Automatic backups
• VPS with NGINX and custom PHP-FPM configuration for better speed
• Enhanced cPanel for easier WordPress management
• Dynamic upgrades – upgrade CPU, RAM, or storage with a single click

Want to know how all those fancy acronyms affect performance in the real world? We’ll dig into our testing data next.

Bluehost Managed WordPress Hosting Performance – Real Testing Data

To figure out how Bluehost’s managed hosting performed, we set up a test site at their Provo, UT data center and ran it through three different metrics.

For Time to First Byte, a basic measure of how quickly a server responds, Bluehost’s managed server responded in 0.31 seconds, a massive improvement over their shared hosting and good for the sixth fastest time of any host that we measured.

Our test site’s average page load time was 2.16 seconds, which was about middle of the road for the hosts that we tested. For the price, we think this speed is competitive.

Finally, the uptime of our test site on Bluehost’s managed hosting was a disappointing 99.805%. Maybe we were just unlucky, but we can’t see any reason why the uptime for Bluehost’s managed hosting would be lower than its shared hosting. No matter what, 99.8% uptime is unacceptable.

Bluehost’s managed WordPress hosting is definitely competitive when it comes to speed, but the disappointing uptime concerns us.

Bluehost Data Center Locations

Choosing a data center near your target audience is a major boost to your site’s performance. Because data still has to follow the laws of physics, you want the physical location of your site’s data to be as near as possible to your visitors.

Bluehost has a number of data centers around the world…but they don’t make this obvious. Your data center location actually depends on where you sign up from.

For example, If you sign up through Bluehost.com, your site will be hosted in Provo, UT like our test site. But if you sign up through the a localized version of Bluehost (say, Bluehost India), Bluehost will stick your site on an Indian data center.

Keep this in mind when signing up for Bluehost.

Bluehost Support and Knowledge Base

Bluehost offers a good number of support channels. You can get 24/7 support via phone, live chat, and tickets. It’s always great to be able to get a live person on the phone.

If you like solving problems by yourself, Bluehost also has a large knowledge base.

Bluehost Plans and Pricing – Managed WordPress Hosting

While Bluehost’s managed WordPress plans offer better speed than Bluehost’s shared plans, they also come with a higher price tag.

Their Blogger plan offers 100 million visits (that’s a lot!), 30GB of storage, and 2GB of RAM starting at $19.99 per month.

The Professional plan offers 300 million visits, 60GB of storage, and 4GB of RAM starting at $29.99 per month.

They also offer two higher tiers for those who need even more power.

All of Bluehost’s managed WordPress plans come with a dedicated IP address as well as SiteLock CDN and SiteLock Pro security.

Should You Choose Bluehost Managed Hosting?

For the money, Bluehost’s managed plans performed quite well in our speed tests. The only thing that makes us hesitate is the poor uptime of our test site.

If you’re willing to take the gamble that our uptime experience was an aberration, then Bluehost’s managed WordPress hosting offers good value for the money.

With a 30-day money back guarantee, you can test out the uptime yourself at no risk.