HostMonster Review: Plans, Prices & Specs

What HostMonster was

HostMonster was a cPanel shared hosting brand for personal sites and small businesses, and by its own account it had been doing that since 1996. Its archived about page is a good summary of the whole proposition: hosting for thousands of business and personal websites, high-powered service at a fraction of the cost, guaranteed uptime, secure backups and, in its words, solid and honest business practices.

In practice it was the quieter twin of Bluehost. The two brands shared an origin in Utah, ran on similar platforms and offered near-identical unlimited-style shared plans with cPanel, one-click WordPress installs and a domain included. Both ended up inside Endurance International Group, which became Newfold Digital in 2021, and once that happened the case for maintaining two near-identical storefronts became hard to argue.

What happened

Sales ended in 2024

The last working capture of the HostMonster homepage in the Internet Archive is from mid-July 2024. A capture taken the following day is already a permanent redirect to Bluehost, and every capture since then behaves the same way. There was no gap and no farewell page: the storefront was swapped for a redirect in a single step.

The brand was merged into Bluehost

Bluehost publishes a page specifically for the customers it inherited, and it is unusually direct. It states that HostMonster and Bluehost are now one, tells existing customers to log in at Bluehost with their current credentials, and answers the obvious worries in a row of noes: renewal dates and billing cycles will not change, the hosting server and content will not move, support access continues, settings update automatically, and domains are unaffected. Taken at face value, HostMonster customers were rebranded rather than migrated.

What the domain does today

Checked in September 2026, hostmonster.com and its old pricing URLs return permanent redirects to Bluehost’s HostMonster landing page. Nothing is for sale under the HostMonster name and no HostMonster prices are published anywhere.

If you are still a HostMonster customer

• Use the Bluehost login for your account and its password reset if your old credentials are refused. Bookmarked HostMonster control panel URLs are not worth troubleshooting.
• Check the renewal price rather than the renewal date alone. Continuity of billing cycle is not the same as continuity of price, and legacy plans tend to be repriced at the next renewal.
• Download a full backup: files, databases and email over IMAP. Do this before any plan change, not after.
• If your site still runs on an old PHP version because nothing forced an upgrade, treat this as the moment to test and update it.
• If you are moving on, unlock the domain, obtain the transfer authorization code and verify the administrative contact email first, then move hosting, then email, then the domain.

What to use instead

If you were content with HostMonster, staying on Bluehost is the path of least resistance and genuinely is where your account already lives. If the consolidation is what bothers you, then the distinction to keep in mind is ownership: Bluehost and HostGator are both Newfold Digital brands, while the independent options below answer to nobody else.

Why this page exists

We keep reviews of retired hosting brands online because people still search for them, still link to them and still have accounts, invoices or domains tied to them. A dead page or a silent redirect to a sales funnel does not answer the question those readers actually have, which is what happened and what to do next. This page is a status record, not a recommendation: we have not tested HostMonster and we cannot, because there is nothing left to buy. Everything above is based on what the brand’s own domain does today, what the Internet Archive captured while the site was still live, and what the successor company publishes for the customers it inherited. If the situation changes we will update the page rather than delete it.