Let’s pit two established hosting providers SiteGround vs Bluehost to each other. These two are the most reputed hosting providers in an industry.
SiteGround has built its reputation in the hosting business for over two decades. Today, more than one million domains are hosted on SiteGround. SiteGround is known for its high-speed technology. SiteGround is without any doubt one of the best shared-hosting providers which offer automatic WordPress updates, frequent backups, Free SSL and easy to use cPanel.
In comparison, Bluehost was founded in 2003 and came under the umbrella of EIG. EIG controls over 70 web hosting companies and 4.9 million customers worldwide.
Bluehost was taken over by EIG because of unfortunate introduction by its former owner of CPU throttling; as a result, it started freezing websites for hours per day.
Check here our review of SiteGround and what others say about it.
Plans and Pricing
Let’s check the pricing of SiteGround and BlueHost. Generally speaking, the price difference doesn’t matter much in shared hosting. Pricing remains the same in top quality hosting providers. You will find the only difference of few dollars in yearly plans.
I recommend going with web hosting based on performance and reliability.
In general, prices are almost same for Bluehost and SiteGround. But as per my experience, SiteGround provides better service and performance.
SiteGround shared hosting offers three plans. Their startup plan costs $3.95/month which offers to host 1 website with 10 GB of web space. If your site gets 10000 monthly visits, then it will work quite well.
However, if you are planning to host unlimited websites, then GrowBig which costs $.5.95/month or GoGeek plan with a price tag of $11.95/month is right for you. GrowBig can manage 25000 monthly visits while a GoGeek plan can manage 100000 monthly visits.
Bluehost also has 3 shared hosting plans. You can purchase a basic plan for $ 3.95. It comes with 50GB space including free domain and SSL. Though Bluehost is not clear for how many monthly visits there plan will operate well.
Another two plans of Bluehost “Choice and Choice plus” almost offer the same features but the Choice plus plan is powered with domain privacy and code guard. Both plans have the same cost of $ 5.95 and come with features like unlimited website space,1 spam expert and much more. You can host as many websites you like in these plans. But kindly note, the renewal price of “Choice plus” will be high.
Affiliate link disclosures : We are using affiliate link on our website that results in a commission. We get commission from both companies but it’s our duty to show you which web hosting provider is better as per our experience.
Key features
Let us compare the key features of most selling plan. Bluehost’s plus plan and SiteGrounds’s Grow Big plan, both priced at $5.95 per month. SiteGround beats Bluehost in many vital areas except in storage space. This is not surprising for me as most of the hosting companies provide unlimited storage, but SiteGround did not.
The reason is simple; there is nothing like unlimited storage. *The moment you will start listing large and heavy files in hosting. Your site can be taken down. In this case, SiteGround comes clean and tells us they provide 20 GB web space in their Grow Big plan.
* Kindly check usage policy of Bluehost
I recommend going with extended functionality offered by SiteGround rather than an unlimited offer of web space by Bluehost.
One thing I want to add here is free site migration provided by SiteGround. If you are already running a website and you want to transfer your site, then SiteGround will migrate or transfer your 1 site for free.
Most of the hosting providers charge a huge fee for site migration. It can cost you more than $99 or higher. On Bluehost, you have to pay $149.99 for website transfer.
Performance
Performance is the most significant factors that decide the quality of web hosting. Performance is checked through server location, speed, and Uptime. So let’s start analyzing
Server
SiteGround data centers are spread across three continents. Their data centers are located in three locations of Europe (London, Amsterdam, Milan), one in the US (Chicago) and another in Asia (Singapore).
In total, they have 5 servers located all across the world which creates excellent hosting speed for websites hosted on SiteGround.
Bluehost also offers to choose servers from a different location such as USA (Utah), Europe (London), and Asia (Mumbai and Hong Kong).
Server speed
SiteGround has shown extremely positive results in Europe, US, and Asia. Their service is remarkably fast. The distance from your physical server gives you a little latency in Singapore location. However, from Australia, it suffers a bit.
Bluehost also shows fast server reaction times, but Europe is seemingly suffering a little.
There is not much difference between the two in neck-to-neck comparisons, but we have observed that in the US and Europe, the servers of SiteGround are much more robust than Bluehost.
Uptime
Most of the hosting providers promise 99% uptime, but I would like to say never purchase hosting from unknown or local companies. They have bad uptime. When I was new to hosting, I bought a hosting package from a non-reputed company because they were providing hosting for cheap. After that, my site started going down, and within 15 days I migrated my website to a reputed hosting provider.
However, it doesn’t appear that uptime is a significant concern. Over 30 days, both displayed an excellent 100% uptime. While both have 100% uptime, Bluehost has a response time that slightly lags behind SiteGround. This is one of the essential factors which I believe affect the ratings of a host.
User Interface
A user interface can be checked through cPanel. cPanel is an excellent way to check how user-friendly and easy to use it is. Bluehost offers an enhanced cPanel version, but it looks more like a simplified version.
Indeed, it’s suitable for web host buyers for the first time, but I feel that SiteGround offers more flexibility over the longer term.
Customer Support
There is nothing more important than a dynamic support team. With a 365-day live chat service, a ticketing system and even a number to call for assistance, SiteGround supports the full range of applications.
Bluehost has a similar customer support setup like SiteGround but response time is a bit slow as compared to SiteGround. SiteGround responds with 15 seconds but Bluehost lags a little bit behind, but I think that doesn’t matter much to wait a few seconds more.
Wrapping up
Both Bluehost and SiteGround are reputed Web hosting providers, and both are recommended by WordPress.org on their page. They both are listed in our top list of the best web hosting , but few key factors make SiteGround better than Bluehost. These factors are excellent features, stable speed and response time.
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