Bluehost pricing and are the extras worth it?

I would like to finally get a website up and running. My question is if i use bluehost and get the basic 36 month package will I be billed monthly or will it all come out of my account as a lump sum? Basic is $3.95 a month for 36 months so $142.20. Also wondering if the ‘extras’ they offer like domain privacy are worth it, thanks!

I used bluehost when I first started out on web development. I had almost 0 idea of what I was doing at the time, but if I remember correctly I was billed a lump sum.

After gaining more experience with web development I found bluehost might not be the best choice depending on what your doing. For example, there are a number of cheaper ways to get static site hosting up and running.

  • heroku - a Paas offering, easy 1 line deployments
  • netlify - creators of the JAM stack
  • firebase - mainly mobile oriented, but their web offerings allow you to build an client-side app, and provide an API to get real-time database support. You don’t need to use any of the apis to get the static hosting.
  • github pages - static hosting from github, relatively easy to use and always free.

all have free tier or are straight up free to use for static site hosting, along with maybe even more (heroku is a cloud Paas, so you can build an entire full stack app on it with just the free tier)

I recommend explaining your projects requirements, or what you want to do, as bluehost might not be the best choice, or the above services I posted might not apply :smile:

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Great info! This is the first page I am going to have up and I just want it to be a developer profile page with links to some of my projects and information about me. It sounds like some of those options you listed are better options. A free option would be preferred as I can’t afford the lump sum at this moment

If you plan on getting a static profile going, I personally suggest figuring out how to get it going using github pages. Github page setups are a little funky sometimes, but it will be directly tied with your Github profile which is always cool. There are a number of helper tools out there to get things going easily like the gh-pages npm package, and plenty of guides.

Here is a guide for a manual deployment if you don’t want to use the gh-pages package :slight_smile:

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EDIT: I think that signing up for any package for three years will severely impede your freedom of choice. What if another host has a better deal next year, or even worse, the company fails? Getting people locked into long-term contracts may help the companies, but it’s not always the best deal for the users. END EDIT

I’ve used CINFU for a long time. For a basic, static site, $0.66 per month. Granted only 1GB storage, but why pay for what you don’t need? They also have larger packages and VPSs.

For $0.66 p/m you can host unlimited domains, unlimited data transfer, 50 email addresses, free SSL, 5 PHP databases and other features.

I just want to put my vote in for Github pages. It is very easy to get a static site up and running, and editing the live site is as easy as just pushing changes to the repository.

If you have any experience with Github, Github pages should be very easy to use. If you do not have experience with Github, now is as good a time as ever to familiarize yourself with it. If you are trying to get a job as a developer, knowing how to use Github will be very important.

Just look up on Google: deploy user page github pages. Pretty easy to follow guides. I have a user page for my portfolio site and I have all of my projects on Github project pages, so all of my work is easily available online.

The one problem I had was when I tried uploading a React project, but there is an npm package called gh-pages that helps with this. Again, lots of guides online.

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I appreciate the feedback. I have a github profile and am going to use github pages for my first site. Very glad i did not get locked into the three year contract

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Yes it is worth it I’m using bluehost from the last 3 years here it will help you and it will be the lowest priced hosting on the internet right now, Also and providing the quality services.

When i start blogging I was using bluehost for cheapest plan that was starting $3, after a year i upgrade it to unlimited, i didn’t charged for extra .