5 out of 5 stars
Rating: 4.7/5
Best overall ecommerce hosting provider
Also recommended by WordPress.org
After rigorous testing, Bluehost is our top ecommerce hosting provider thanks to its features, value for money, and security. Source: Website Builder Expert
Bluehost is a great choice for ecommerce stores, in fact, it’s our number-one choice! There are dedicated WooCommerce plans on offer, ideal if you want to build a WordPress site. Speaking of WordPress, Bluehost also comes with an offical WordPress recommendation by the platform itself for tis WordPress-specific hosting.
You can sell an unlimited number of products, and there are also features including gift cards, secure online payments, and product filtering available.
Check out our full Bluehost review to decide if it’s the provider for you.
What We Liked
Great for WordPress websites
Dedicated ecommerce plans
24/7 phone support and live chat
What We Didn’t Like
Data centers are only located in the US
Storage is limited compared to others on the market
In Bluehost’s cPanel, I was able to find ecommerce solutions to add to my site. Source: WebsiteBuilderExpert
Plans and Pricing
Bluehost has a variety of plans that suit ecommerce stores, starting with the Online Store shared hosting plan that costs $6.99 per month for 12 months. We recommend this plan if you’re launching a small store, since it doesn’t come with multi-channel selling tools.
If you’re looking to grow your store, we recommend checking out Bluehost’s more advanced WooCommerce-specific plan for selling online. The Online Store + Marketplace plant supports multi-channel inventory, great if you want to sell your products on marketplaces such as Amazon and Etsy too. This plan comes in at $12.95 per month for 12 months.
As with most hosting providers, these Bluehost prices are introductory offers and you can expect the prices to rise once your initial period is up. The Online Store plan, for example, will rise to $15.99 per month after your initial 12-month period, a pretty hefty price increase.
Performance and Scalability
You need your online store to be accessible to customers 24/7. While no hosting provider can guarantee 100% website uptime (you just never know what hurdles may crop up), you need one that can come close.
Luckily, Bluehost does. Bluehost advertises an uptime of 99.98%, meaning you can be confident your store will be online and ready to take orders almost always.
Bluehost is a speedy provider, meaning your online store will load and react quickly to user interactions, however, it is worth noting that all of Bluehost’s servers are located in the US, which means if you’re offering international shipping and opening your store to a wider audience, your customers abroad may experience some lags in loading times.
We did a number of tests for Bluehosts’s uptime. Overall, it averaged an uptime of 99.18%. Source: WebsiteBuilderExpert
We also compared the uptime of Bluehost with its closest competitor, HostGator. As you can see, it came slightly ahead in average uptime. Source: WebsiteBuilderExpert
Help and Support
Hopefully running your online store will be smooth sailing, but now and then problems do arise, and you want to be sure that your hosting provider will be on hand to help you out.
Bluehost offers 24/7 ecommerce support via phone or live chat. We always love a hosting provider that offers phone support – sometimes nothing beats speaking to a human one-on-one.
There’s also the online Knowledge Base with over 300 ecommerce-themed resources to help you make the most of your hosting and answer common questions.
It took us 5 minutes in total, from opening the chat and answering the filter questions, to getting a response from an agent. Source: Website Builder Expert
Security and Reliability
Your online store needs to be secure. It’s a non-negotiable. Customers will be inputting sensitive data, such as delivery addresses and payment details, and it’s paramount that you look after that data.
A data breach could be catastrophic for your online reputation, so you need to be confident that your hosting provider is as safe as Fort Knox.
The good news is that Bluehost takes website security seriously. Both the Online Store plans come with a free SSL certificate and malware scanning, helping to keep you and your customers safe from online threats.
Bluehost offers SiteLock essentials (protection from malicious attacks) for an $35.88 per year, be aware that this is auto-added at checkout and you’ll need to remove it if you don’t want the extra cost.
Storage and Backups
You need plenty of storage if you want to run an online store, especially if you have a large product inventory to showcase.
Bluehost’s Online Store plan offers 40GB of SSD storage and, even more impressive, unlimited product listings, meaning you can scale and add as many products to your store as you want without having to pay extra or impact your website performance.
Storage is capped on the most expensive Bluehost plan, where you’ll get 100GB, plenty for most online stores but worth noting if you were hoping for an unlimited option.
Daily Backups are also included as free for the first year of your plan, meaning should the worst happen and your website is threatened, you’ll be able to get it back up and running quickly. However, daily backups will set you back $47.99 per year after your initial 12 months, so you’ll need to factor this into your budget.