Is Bluehost CodeGuard Basic Worth It? Do You Need It?

Bluehost CodeGuard Basic is a paid daily-backup add-on that currently costs $3.99 a month ($47.88 a year) for 1 GB of storage across up to five sites. It is worth paying for if you want off-server backups with change alerts and a one-click restore and you do not want to manage a plugin. If you run WordPress and are happy to spend ten minutes on setup, the free UpdraftPlus plugin pushing backups to Google Drive or Dropbox does the same core job for nothing.

That is the short answer. Below we go through what CodeGuard actually does, what Bluehost charges for it in 2026, which plans include backups by default, and how the free alternative compares, so you can decide before you tick the box at checkout.

Bluehost in 2026 (a quick introduction)

Bluehost is one of the oldest shared hosts still running and remains on the list of hosts WordPress.org recommends. It is owned by Newfold Digital and hosts millions of domains, most of them small business sites and blogs.

The plan line-up changed in the last couple of years. The old Basic, Plus, Choice Plus and Pro tiers are gone. As of August 2026 the shared and WordPress hosting plans are:

• Starter: from $3.99 a month on a 36-month term, renewing at $9.99 a month.
• Business: from $6.99 a month, renewing at $13.99 a month.
• eCommerce Essentials: from $14.99 a month, renewing at $21.99 a month.
• Enterprise and Custom: quote-based.

Every one of these plans now includes free SSL, free malware scanning, a free domain for the first year and weekly website backups. Business and eCommerce Essentials add a year of free domain privacy. Daily backups are not in any of them, and that gap is exactly what CodeGuard is sold to fill.

At checkout Bluehost still offers its package extras: CodeGuard Basic, SiteLock security, Yoast SEO Premium (sold as Bluehost SEO Tools on some flows) and domain privacy on the Starter plan. All of them are pre-ticked on some checkout pages, so check the order summary before you pay. Extras are billed annually.

What is Bluehost CodeGuard Basic?

CodeGuard is a third-party backup service (it belongs to Sectigo, the SSL company) that Bluehost resells. It connects to your hosting account over FTP or SFTP plus a database connection, takes a full copy of your files and database, then checks in every day and stores only what changed.

Each day’s snapshot is kept as a separate version. You can browse the history, download any version as a zip, or restore the whole site, a single file, or just the database back to a chosen day. Backups live on CodeGuard’s own cloud storage, not on your Bluehost server, which matters: if the server is compromised or the account is suspended, the backups are still reachable.

The “Basic” in the name refers to the plan tier, not to a cut-down feature set. Basic gives you the same daily backups, monitoring and restore tools as the higher tiers; the difference is storage (1 GB) and the number of sites (5). Cache directories, log files and temporary files are excluded from the backup, which keeps the footprint small.

One thing CodeGuard Basic does not do is scan for malware. That is SiteLock’s job in Bluehost’s line-up, and Bluehost now bundles basic malware scanning into every hosting plan anyway. CodeGuard detects that files changed; it does not tell you whether the change was malicious.

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Benefits of Bluehost CodeGuard Basic

Here are the four things you are actually paying for.

1. Automatic daily backup

• A snapshot runs every day without you touching anything. There is no cron job to configure and nothing that stops working when a plugin update breaks the site.
• Backups are stored off-server on CodeGuard’s cloud, with unlimited files and databases inside your storage quota.
• Every snapshot is timestamped, so you can roll back to a specific day rather than “the latest copy”.
• Cache, log and temp files are excluded, so 1 GB goes further than it sounds for a typical blog.

2. Website monitoring (ChangeAlert)

• CodeGuard compares today’s files against yesterday’s and emails you a ChangeAlert summary of what was added, changed or removed.
• If you did not update anything and the alert lists new PHP files in your uploads folder, you have an early warning of a hack. Pair that with our guide to the signs your WordPress site has been hacked so you know what to look for.
• This is the feature free plugins usually lack, and it is the strongest argument for CodeGuard over UpdraftPlus.

3. Redundancy and version history

• Old versions are not overwritten. Each daily snapshot is retained until you run out of storage, at which point the oldest versions are pruned.
• Copies are stored on redundant cloud storage, so a single disk failure on CodeGuard’s side does not take your history with it.
• Because backups are not on your Bluehost server, a ransomware-style attack that encrypts your hosting account cannot touch them.

4. One-click restore

• Pick a date in the CodeGuard dashboard and click Restore. CodeGuard pushes the files and database back over the same FTP and database connection it used for the backup.
• You can also restore individual files or only the database, which is handy when a bad plugin update breaks one thing but you do not want to lose today’s comments or orders.
• Restores need your FTP and database credentials to still be valid. If you change your hosting password, update it in CodeGuard too or the next backup will fail silently until you read the warning email.

If your site makes money, the honest value of these four features is that nobody on your team has to remember to do anything. The backup happens, the alert arrives, and the restore is a button.

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Bluehost CodeGuard pricing

Bluehost sells four CodeGuard tiers. The prices below are taken from Bluehost’s own CodeGuard help page in August 2026; check the page before you buy because add-on pricing changes more often than hosting pricing.

CodeGuard plan	Monthly	Billed annually	Storage	Sites	On-demand backups
Basic	$3.99	$47.88	1 GB	5	No
Professional	$4.99	$59.95	5 GB	10	Yes, with priority queue
Premium	$8.99	$99.95	10 GB	25	Yes, with priority queue
Enterprise	$19.99	As listed by Bluehost	25 GB	100	Yes, with priority queue

Bluehost CodeGuard Basic

• Offered as a checkout add-on and from the My Products area of the Bluehost account manager afterwards.
• $3.99 a month, billed as $47.88 for the year. Renewal is optional; if you do not renew, the backups stop and the stored versions are removed after a grace period.
• 1 GB is enough for most blogs and brochure sites. A WooCommerce store with a few thousand product images will blow through it, and you will need Professional or above.

Is CodeGuard included free with any Bluehost plan?

• Not on the current Starter, Business or eCommerce Essentials plans. Those include weekly server-side backups, not CodeGuard.
• The old Choice Plus plan included CodeGuard Basic free for the first year and the old Pro plan included it for the life of the plan. If you are still on one of those legacy plans your inclusion should carry over at renewal, but confirm with Bluehost support because legacy benefits are being phased out.
• Enterprise and Custom plans are quoted individually and can include it.

Buying CodeGuard directly

• CodeGuard no longer sells directly to the public in the way it used to; the product is distributed through hosts and resellers. In practice, buying through Bluehost is the route most Bluehost customers will take.

Always read the renewal line on the invoice. The $3.99 figure is the annual-term price and renews at the same rate today, but Bluehost’s intro-versus-renewal gap on hosting plans shows how quickly that can change.

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Bluehost CodeGuard free alternative

If your site runs on WordPress, you do not have to pay for daily off-site backups at all. The WordPress.org directory has several mature backup plugins; we keep a ranked list in our guide to the best WordPress backup plugins. The one we recommend to Bluehost customers most often is UpdraftPlus.

UpdraftPlus WordPress backup plugin

UpdraftPlus has over 3 million active installs, a 4.8-star rating from more than 8,600 reviews, and as of this writing was last updated in August 2026 with version 1.26.7, tested up to WordPress 7.1. It is owned by the same team that makes WP-Optimize, and it is not going anywhere.

The free version schedules separate file and database backups (every 4, 8 or 12 hours, daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly), sends them to Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Microsoft OneDrive, FTP, email or several other destinations, and restores from the WordPress admin in a few clicks. You choose how many backup sets to retain.

What you give up compared with CodeGuard Basic:

• No daily change alerts. UpdraftPlus backs up; it does not tell you what changed.
• No incremental versioning in the free tier. Each backup set is a full copy, so retention eats storage faster (though Google Drive’s free 15 GB is still fifteen times CodeGuard Basic’s quota).
• The plugin runs inside WordPress. If the site is so broken that WordPress will not load, you restore by uploading the backup files manually or by reinstalling WordPress and the plugin first. It works, but it is not one click.
• Backups depend on WP-Cron, which on a quiet site may not fire on time. A real server cron fixes this in five minutes.

UpdraftPlus Premium (paid plans available, priced per number of sites) adds incremental backups, multisite support, migration and cloning, and priority support. We covered the full feature set in our UpdraftPlus review.

CodeGuard Basic vs UpdraftPlus free at a glance

	CodeGuard Basic	UpdraftPlus (free)
Price	$47.88 a year	$0
Backup frequency	Daily, automatic	Any schedule you set
Storage	1 GB on CodeGuard cloud	Your own cloud account (Drive, Dropbox, S3 and others)
Versioning	Incremental daily versions	Full backup sets, you set retention count
Change alerts	Yes (ChangeAlert email)	No
Works if WordPress is down	Yes, restore runs from outside	Only with a manual restore
Works for non-WordPress sites	Yes	No
Setup effort	None (Bluehost connects it)	About 10 minutes

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Is Bluehost CodeGuard Basic worth it?

It depends on what the site is for and who looks after it.

Pros

1. Off-server daily backups with zero maintenance. Nothing to install, nothing to update, nothing that breaks when a plugin conflicts.
2. One-click restore that works from outside WordPress. When a site is white-screening at 2 am, this is the feature you will be grateful for.
3. Change monitoring. The daily ChangeAlert email is a cheap intrusion-detection layer that free backup plugins do not offer.
4. Works for any site on the account, including static HTML or non-WordPress apps.

Cons

1. Cost. $47.88 a year is more than many people pay for their first year of hosting, and it is not included in any current plan.
2. 1 GB is tight. Media-heavy sites will need the $59.95 Professional tier or higher.
3. Free alternatives are good. UpdraftPlus to Google Drive covers the core need for WordPress sites.
4. Weekly backups already come with every plan. If you can live with losing up to a week of changes, you may not need more.

Things to weigh

• How much does a day of lost content cost you? For a hobby blog, nothing. For a store taking orders or a membership community with daily posts, a week-old backup is a disaster and a day-old one is an inconvenience.
• Are you comfortable installing and testing a plugin? If you have never done a test restore, a managed service is safer than a plugin you assume is working.
• Do you need the change alerts? If you are not running any other file-integrity monitoring, they are worth something on their own.
• How big is the site? Check the disk usage figure in your Bluehost dashboard before you buy the 1 GB tier.

Our view: for a personal blog or a small brochure site, skip CodeGuard and set up UpdraftPlus to Google Drive. For anything that earns money or collects user content, $4 a month for daily off-site versions and change alerts is cheap insurance, and we would rather you pay it than rely on a plugin you have never tested.

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How to get Bluehost CodeGuard Basic for free

The honest answer in 2026 is that you mostly cannot. The plans that used to bundle CodeGuard (Choice Plus for one year, Pro for life) are no longer sold, and the current Starter, Business and eCommerce Essentials plans include weekly backups instead.

There are three ways to get something close to free:

1. Legacy plan holders: if you signed up on Choice Plus or Pro before the plan change and have not migrated, check My Products in the Bluehost account manager. CodeGuard may still be attached at no charge. Confirm with support before assuming it will renew that way.
2. Promotional bundles: Bluehost periodically runs checkout promotions that include the first year of CodeGuard Basic with a longer hosting term. These come and go; look at the “Package Extras” step of checkout and read whether the line says $0 for year one or a recurring charge.
3. Use the built-in weekly backups plus a free plugin. Bluehost’s weekly server backups are your last resort; UpdraftPlus to Google Drive on a daily schedule is your working backup. Together they cost nothing and beat CodeGuard Basic on storage, though not on change alerts.

If you are a developer or agency looking after several client sites on Bluehost, consider whether the Professional tier (10 sites, 5 GB) is better value than Basic on each account, or whether a managed service is the right call. Our WordPress security hardening service includes setting up off-site backups and file monitoring for exactly this situation.

Frequently asked questions

Does Bluehost CodeGuard Basic include malware scanning?

No. CodeGuard backs up your site and alerts you when files change. Malware scanning on Bluehost comes from the free scanning included in every plan, or from the SiteLock add-on. A ChangeAlert listing unexpected new files is a useful hint, but it is not a malware report.

Can I add CodeGuard after I have bought hosting?

Yes. Log in to the Bluehost account manager, open My Products or the Marketplace, and add CodeGuard to the account. Bluehost connects it to your hosting automatically. You can also cancel it at renewal without affecting your hosting plan.

How long does CodeGuard keep my backups?

Daily versions are kept until your storage quota fills, then the oldest are removed. On the 1 GB Basic tier a small site may hold months of history; a large site may only keep a few weeks. The CodeGuard dashboard shows how much of your quota is used.

Is UpdraftPlus really as good as CodeGuard?

For WordPress backups and restores, yes, as long as you set a daily schedule, send backups off-site, and do a test restore once. What you do not get is change alerts or a restore that works when WordPress itself is down. If either of those matters to you, pay for CodeGuard.

Do Bluehost’s weekly backups mean I can skip both?

Only if you can afford to lose up to seven days of content. Bluehost also states that its courtesy backups are not guaranteed, so treat them as a safety net rather than a plan.

Which should you pick?

Pick CodeGuard Basic if the site earns money or collects member content, if nobody on your team wants to manage a plugin, or if you want a daily change alert without setting up separate monitoring. At $47.88 a year it is the simplest way to get daily off-site versions on Bluehost.

Pick UpdraftPlus free if the site is a blog or brochure site, you are comfortable in the WordPress admin, and you will schedule daily backups to Google Drive or Dropbox. Do a test restore on a staging copy so you know it works before you need it.

Whatever you pick, do not rely on the weekly Bluehost backup alone, and do not leave CodeGuard ticked at checkout by accident if you do not need it. Read the order summary, decide on purpose, and keep a copy of your site somewhere that is not your hosting server.

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