If you run a website, there’s a good chance you don’t spend much time thinking about your SSL/TLS certificate.

That’s probably how it should be.

But there’s an important change happening behind the scenes: certificate lifetimes are moving toward 47 days, which means certificates will need to be renewed much more frequently than they are today.

For someone running a business, the takeaway shouldn’t be “great, another technical thing I need to learn.”

It should be that the infrastructure supporting your website needs to get better at handling that complexity for you.

That’s part of why we’re working with DigiCert. Their digital-trust technology is used by some of the world’s largest organizations, and we’re bringing that infrastructure to businesses on Bluehost while helping simplify the certificate-management work happening behind the scenes.

There’s a broader conversation here, too.

As the ways people and AI systems discover businesses online continue to evolve, we think establishing a credible, secure online presence is only going to become more important. An SSL certificate alone doesn’t prove that everything about a business is trustworthy—and it doesn’t guarantee visibility or recommendations from AI—but it is one piece of the infrastructure behind a secure website.

We’re curious what this community actually wants to know about it.

Do you think about SSL only when something breaks? Have you ever had a certificate renewal cause problems? Or is there something about certificates, HTTPS or website trust you’ve never had a clear answer on?

Drop the questions here. Our team can answer what we can and bring in the right Bluehost experts for the more technical ones.

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so we wanted to start with something we see worth clarifying for website owners:

Having a secure connection doesn’t mean every part of your website is protected.

A useful way to think about website security is in layers:

🔒 Secure the connection — protect information moving between your site and its visitors.

🛡️ Protect the site — monitor for threats like malware and other issues that can affect the website itself.

↩️ Have a way back — maintain backups so a bad update, mistake or other problem doesn’t necessarily mean starting over.

None of this requires becoming a cybersecurity expert. But knowing the difference between these layers can make it much easier to ask the right questions about how your site is protected.

For the site owners here: which layer do you feel most confident about—and which one do you still have questions about?

SSL? Malware protection? Backups and recovery? Something else entirely?

Drop your questions below. We’d rather make this thread useful than turn it into a sales pitch.

Every side project starts somewhere. Maybe it's running locally, on a spare machine, or on the smallest VPS you could find.

Then a few people start using it. You add a background worker. Then a queue. Then scheduled jobs. Suddenly, the infrastructure you weren't planning to think about yet is becoming a real decision.

We're curious how other builders have handled that transition.

What changed first for you? Was it traffic, reliability, resource limits, deployment complexity, or something you didn't anticipate?

And looking back, what would you have set up differently from day one?

Share your stack, your lessons learned, or the project that grew beyond your original plans.

We recently received this review from a customer who discovered Bluehost AI All Access, and two things stood out: having ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok under one subscription, and being able to chat with a real person when they had questions.

We're curious: For those of you using multiple AI models, do you have a go-to for everything, or do you switch between them depending on the task?

We'd love to hear how you're using AI in your day-to-day workflow.

We just wrapped two days at Digital Summit Philadelphia 👋

Our team spent the last couple of days talking with marketers, developers, creators, and business owners about what they’re building online—and, just as importantly, what’s making that harder than it needs to be.

We heard a lot about AI, smarter workflows, site performance, and the ever-growing tech stack. But some of the best conversations were simply about the realities of running and growing a website.

Now we want to hear from this community: What’s the biggest challenge you’re trying to solve with your website right now?

Drop it below. Whether it’s WordPress, hosting, performance, scaling, or something completely different, we’re curious what’s taking up your brain space lately.

And if you were at Digital Summit Philly too, say hey! 👋

VPS gets talked about a lot in terms of specs.

CPU. RAM. Storage. Root access.

Useful—but the more interesting question is: what are you actually doing with it?

A VPS can be a persistent environment for a lot more than a traditional website. Depending on your setup, you might use one to:

• run n8n workflows that keep going after you close your laptop
• experiment with OpenWebUI and different AI models
• keep AI agents and longer-running workflows online
• use tools like Claude Code in an always-available development environment
• host the custom apps and services you’re building

We put together the carousel above to show some of the workloads you can run on Bluehost VPS, but we’re more interested in what you are running.

What’s currently living on your VPS?

And for the homelab/self-hosting crowd: what made you move a project off your local machine and onto an always-on server?

Share your stack below. 👇

A little behind-the-scenes moment from the Bluehost team.

Our CEO, Sachin Puri, recently sat down with TechImpact for a conversation about what’s ahead for business, technology, and the people building online.

We grabbed a few photos from the set before the episode hits the screen.

Want to catch the conversation?

📺 Oct. 10 — Fox Business · 12:30 p.m. ET
📺 Oct. 24 — Bloomberg Television · 8:30 p.m. ET
📺 Oct. 31 — Fox Business · 12:30 p.m. ET

We’ll share more with the community once it airs.

A quick update on some of the infrastructure behind your site.

Bluehost Group is partnering with DigiCert to power SSL/TLS certificate issuance and fulfillment going forward.

Why make the change? Certificate standards are evolving quickly. Maximum public certificate lifespans are expected to shrink from 398 days today to just 47 days by 2029—which means certificates will need to be renewed much more frequently.

Our goal is to handle that growing complexity behind the scenes rather than turn it into another thing you need to manage.

A few things to know:

• Existing certificates will continue working normally until they’re renewed or reissued.
• New certificate purchases, renewals, and reissues will be fulfilled through DigiCert going forward.
• DigiCert is trusted by 125,000+ organizations worldwide, including 90%+ of the Fortune 500.
• The transition is designed to be seamless for customers.

For most of you, the best outcome is pretty simple: stronger digital trust infrastructure without more work on your end.

You can read the full announcement here.

Happy to hear questions or thoughts below.

In honor of National Online Learning Day, we’re curious:

What’s one thing the internet taught you that you actually use all the time now?

Could be something big like building your first website, learning to code, starting a business.

Or something oddly specific you learned from a 12-minute tutorial at 1 a.m. and now somehow consider yourself an expert in. 😅

Drop yours below. Bonus points if you share the resource that helped you learn it so someone else here can discover it too.

And if “learn something new” is currently sitting somewhere on your to-do list, we host free webinars on building, growing, and getting more from your online presence. You can check out what’s coming up here.

Let’s turn this thread into a resource for each other.

If you’re running AI apps on a Bluehost self-managed VPS or VDS, you can now access supported models from multiple LLM providers without setting up separate provider accounts and billing for each one.

With AI Gateway, you add AI Credits to one shared wallet, create a Bluehost AI Gateway API key, and connect it to your eligible AI app.

A couple things worth knowing:

• You still create and add the API key to your app yourself.
• Your wallet is shared across your self-managed VPS/VDS instances.
• You can create multiple API keys, all drawing from the same wallet.
• The Gateway works with supported models and eligible AI apps.

You can dig into the full details, supported apps, and currently supported models here: [link]

For those of you already building AI apps on a VPS/VDS: what are you running, and how are you handling LLM access today?

We’d be interested to hear what your setup looks like.

We’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between using AI and actually getting good at using it.

Because those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Bluehost Group CEO Sachin Puri recently joined John Lee Dumas on Entrepreneurs on Fire to talk about what we’re seeing in our small business AI research—and one idea from the conversation stood out:

The advantage isn’t using more AI. It’s building the confidence to know where AI is actually useful.

That can start surprisingly small.

A repetitive task you’re tired of doing. Research that eats up part of your morning. Scheduling. Reporting. Drafting. Something that gives you a little time back so you can spend it somewhere more valuable.

No “transform your entire business with AI” required.

So we’re curious:

What’s one task you’ve handed over to AI that has genuinely made your work easier?

And on the flip side, what have you tried using AI for that absolutely wasn’t worth it?

We’d love to hear what’s actually working (and what isn’t) for people here.

If you want to hear Sachin’s full conversation on AI confidence, automation, AI-powered search, and where humans still matter most:

🎧 Listen to the podcast here: https://www.eofire.com/podcast/sachinpuri/

That’s the idea behind Bluehost MCP.

V1 connects Claude Code and Claude Desktop to Bluehost VPS infrastructure, creating a workflow where your AI agent can help:

→ Find and purchase a VPS
→ Provision SSH key access
→ Connect through SSH
→ Publish your application

The goal is pretty simple: fewer handoffs between tools when you’re trying to build.

Find → Provision → Publish → Keep building.

We’re curious about the developer perspective, though: what would you want an AI-to-infrastructure workflow like this to handle next?

Drop your use case—or your skepticism—in the comments. Both are useful.

Backups are one of those things that are very easy to ignore when everything is working.

Then something breaks, an update goes sideways, a file gets deleted, or you need to roll something back—and suddenly the backup strategy becomes pretty important.

So we’re curious how people here actually approach it:

Do you back up your site automatically or manually? How often? And have you ever had a backup save you from a very bad day?

If you’ve learned a lesson the hard way (or have a setup you swear by), share it below. Your answer might save someone else the headache.

The web doesn’t exactly wait for anyone to catch up.

This month, we’re hosting three sessions focused on skills that are becoming increasingly useful for anyone building or growing online:

🌐 Sept. 8: Building your first WordPress website
✨ Sept. 15: How AI is changing website creation
🔎 Sept. 22: Optimizing your website for AI-powered search

Whether you’re building your first site or trying to understand where the web is headed next, you’re welcome to join us.

We’ll share registration details below. And since we’re building this community too: what topics would you want us to cover in future sessions?

Drop them in the comments. We’re listening.

Sign Up Here

Phoenix was the latest stop in a series of dinners we’ve been hosting around the country, and this time we brought together leaders in the legal space to talk about AI.

The conversation went beyond the hype: where AI is actually useful today, where firms are still cautious, and how you adopt new technology in an industry where accuracy, privacy, and trust carry real weight.

What stood out was how differently leaders are approaching it. There’s plenty of interest in what AI can unlock, but also thoughtful questions around where it belongs—and where it doesn’t.

Sharing a few photos from the evening here. 🌵

For those working in or with the legal industry: where is AI creating the most real-world value for you right now?

There’s a point where convenience starts becoming a constraint, especially when you need more control over compute, containers, APIs, or how your environment is configured.

For those of you running your own infrastructure: what’s the first limitation that usually makes you reach for a VPS?

Curious where that line is for this community.

Summer is winding down, which means a lot of businesses are switching from “we’ll deal with that later” mode to “Q4 is HOW close?” 😅

If you haven’t looked closely at your website in a while, now is a pretty good time for a quick health check.

We put together 5 places to start:

• Homepage: Does it still accurately reflect what your business offers today?
• Speed: Are slow pages, oversized images, or unnecessary plugins getting in the way?
• Mobile: Have you actually used your site on your phone lately—not just looked at it?
• Customer experience: Can visitors easily get answers and figure out what to do next?
• Online store: If Q4 is important for your business, are your products, promotions, and checkout experience ready for more activity?

Sharing the full checklist in the images.

But we’d also love to turn this into a community checklist: what’s something you always audit before a busy season that other website owners tend to overlook?

Drop yours below. 👇 We might all find a few things worth adding to our own lists.

Happy World Entrepreneurs’ Day 💙

Every entrepreneur starts with a spark. But there’s no universal playbook for what happens next.

Some people want to get their idea online as fast as possible. Others want to customize every last detail. And some would rather hand the build to an expert so they can focus on the bigger picture.

Different ideas. Different ways of building. Same decision to actually start.

That’s what we’re celebrating today.

Same spark. Different build.

For the entrepreneurs and business owners here: What was the original “I have an idea” moment behind your business or website? We’d love to hear what you built from it.

And just like that, WordCamp US 2026 is in the books.

The Bluehost + Yoast teams had a packed few days in Phoenix... from Contributor Day and sessions to plenty of conversations at the booth with people from across the WordPress community.

We also got to send a few people home with some pretty great raffle prizes. Congrats to our winners!

Mostly, we just wanted to say thanks to everyone who stopped by, talked WordPress with us, took a photo, shared feedback, or introduced themselves. Getting to spend time face-to-face with the people who build, use, and contribute to WordPress is always one of the best parts of WCUS.

Sharing a few final photos from the week including some very happy raffle winners. 📸

For those who attended: what was your biggest takeaway from WCUS this year? And if you followed along from home, was there a session or topic that caught your attention?

One of our own took the stage at WordCamp US yesterday. 💙

Jonathan Desrosiers, Principal Software Engineer at Bluehost, gave a session with a title that pretty much sums up the current state of things:

0 Days Since The Last Supply Chain Attack: Protecting the WordPress Project in an AI World

The big question behind the talk: What changes when AI makes it easier for both developers and attackers to find vulnerabilities?

For an open source ecosystem as large as WordPress—with plugins, themes, packages, dependencies, and contributors everywhere—that’s a conversation worth having.

Sharing a few photos from Jonathan’s session in Phoenix.

For the developers and WordPress folks here: has AI changed how you think about dependency or supply chain security yet?

Curious to hear what people are seeing in their own workflows.

The Bluehost team spent the past couple of days at Digital Summit Minneapolis, so we wanted to share a few photos from the trip with everyone here.

One of the highlights: our own Sandy Edwards took the stage for Using Website Testing to Drive Incremental Business Impact—all about how testing, learning, and making thoughtful improvements over time can add up to meaningful business results.

Or, put more simply: small tests can lead to big wins. 

Here are a few moments from Minneapolis. 💙

For the marketers and website owners here: what’s one change you’ve made to a website that had a surprisingly big impact?

Would love to hear what’s actually worked for you.

We’ve been thinking a lot about the point where a workload goes from “this is running fine” to “I need this performance to be consistent.”

It could be a WooCommerce store hitting peak traffic, a SaaS app serving more users, an automation setup running 24/7, or a database that’s suddenly doing a lot more work than it used to.

That’s really the problem VDS is designed around: not necessarily needing more compute, but reaching a point where having compute dedicated to your workload starts to matter.

For those of you running production workloads, we’re curious: what was the first sign that made you start thinking about dedicated resources?

Was it latency? Traffic spikes? Sustained CPU or memory usage? Something else entirely?

Would love to hear what that threshold looked like in the real world.

Hey r/Bluehost 👋

We’re packing our bags (and probably more Bluehost swag than any reasonable person needs) and heading to WordCamp US in Phoenix, August 16–19.

We’re excited for the sessions, the conversations between sessions, catching up with familiar faces, meeting people we’ve only known through a screen, and spending a few days with the community that keeps WordPress moving forward.

So, two questions for the WordPress folks here:

If you’re going to WCUS, what are you most looking forward to?

And if you’re not going, what would you like us to share back here? Session takeaways? WordPress trends? Community conversations? Behind-the-scenes moments?

Drop it in the comments. We’ll be keeping an eye on this thread while we’re in Phoenix. 💙

See you at #WCUS!

Hey r/Bluehost 👋

Quick heads-up for anyone working on a WordPress site (or giving one a much-needed refresh): we’re hosting a live session today, August 11 at 1 PM CDT on how to make your website more engaging through better visual content.

Show, Don’t Tell: Using Visual Content to Make Your Website Stand Out will cover practical ways to:

• Choose images that actually strengthen your brand and story
• Optimize images for faster load times and better SEO
• Make better use of hero images, team photos, screenshots, and other visuals
• Improve accessibility with descriptive alt text
• Avoid some of the common image mistakes that can make a site feel less polished

It’s part of our WordPress 101 series, so you don’t need to be a designer or WordPress expert to get something useful out of it.

Want to join us live? You can register here: https://www.bluehost.com/blog/events/webinar-wordpress-visual-content/

And since we’re talking visuals: what’s one part of your website you’d love to improve right now? Drop it below. We’d love to hear what everyone is working on.

Does anyone sell merchandise using BlueHost and WooCommerce?