Bluehost vs Siteground – Who’s The Best Choice & Why

Bluehost vs Siteground
Bluehost vs Siteground

With the wide variety of hosting services currently available on the market, most of which are going after the same group of customers, you need a solution that offers superior service. Bluehost and Siteground are such hosting services, both exceptional enough that they stand out as two of the best web hosting options that you can currently find.

Both of these solutions are a great choice for just about every company, since neither of them have any glaring issues. Which is why this article isn’t going to be a comparison between a superior product to an inferior one, but rather a comparison between the nuances of two great web hosting options and the differences that make both of them ideal for specific companies. This is how you’ll find the best one for your specific needs.

In essence, you can think of this article as a comparison between a Ferrari and a Lamborghini, in the sense that both are absolute beasts, but everyone is going to have a preference.

So between Bluehost vs Siteground, who’s better?

Contents

Bluehost vs Siteground – a little bit of history

SiteGround was founded back in 2004 from the collective efforts and ideas of three college students. The site began operations in the city of Sofia, Bulgaria and has gone on to become one of the most recognizable names in the web hosting industry throughout the entire world. The company has grown massively since it’s founding and is now a holding of companies registered in the USA, UK, Bulgaria, and Spain, that manages four offices and several datacenter locations around the world

Bluehost was started one year earlier, in 2003, by Danny Ashworth and Matt Heaton in Provo, Utah. The two founders wanted to give people an affordable web hosting option that can provide everything that they might need in order to get their site up and running. Bluehost powers over 2 million websites throughout the world and that number grows by the thousands each day. The company has a strong partnership with WordPress and has an in-house team of experts that can provide 24/7 customer support on the uses of the website creator.

Speaking of building your website, both Bluehost and SiteGround are on the list of the three officially recommended WordPress partners, the third one being Dreamhost. As you can imagine, having the official seal of approval from the top website creation tool on the planet, which powers more than a third of all websites, means that both companies are top tier.

What kind of features do they offer?

Features are an important part of any web hosting service, and these two have a few very useful tools that could prove beneficial for any customer.

Bluehost

Bluehost's landing page
  • Hosting options

The large variety of hosting options that Bluehost offers make their plans flexible enough for just about any company, regardless if they have any specific requirements that they’re looking for. Bluehost offers shared hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated hosting, colocation hosting and VPS hosting.

  • Security tools

The plans that are on offer also come with some extra protection that’s meant to put the user’s mind at ease from some more common threats to their sites. These security tools come with spam detection, malware detection, reliable firewalls and site backups that can be delivered at the request of the client.

  • Database support

Bluehost offers support for MySQL, PostsgreSQL, SQL Server, and more. The hosting service also offers the installation of CMS tools, as well as support for a variety of server-side coding languages.

SiteGround

Siteground's landing page
  • WordPress options

All of the web hosting plans that the company offers include WordPress installation, automated migrations, automatic updates, advanced caching, and expert WordPress support. This is great news for anyone that’s struggling when it comes to creating a website, since all of these options are bound to make the whole process a lot easier.

  • Priority support

This feature allows premium customers to be directly assigned to more experienced support agents in order to sort out any problems that they might be having in mere moments. This feature is available for all of the hosting packages aside from the most basic one, and it’s definitely worth spending a few extra dollars to gain access to it.

  • Performance boosters

The boosters that SiteGround provides can really help improve your site traffic and overall efficiency. These boosters include SSD storage, a customized server setup, free CDN with each account, HTTP/2 enabled servers, SuperCache and servers located in four continents.

How do their speeds compare?

Both companies have fantastic uptime, which is to be expected from two giants in the field. Thankfully this means that either one could be a great choice for anyone that’s looking to engage their services. However, if we were to pick between the two and say which one has the edge when it comes to speed, we’d have to give the prize to SiteGround.

Bluehost is by no means lacking in this field and was in fact considered to be the fastest web hosting service in 2019, but this only shows how rapid the page load times are at SiteGround since they can manage to stay ahead even against competition this fierce.

Both sites provide stable connections and very rarely experience any sort of outages or downtimes that might restrict visitors from visiting a site that they are hosting. However, SiteGround has been shown to have better speeds and faster page load times than Bluehost in every location that was tested throughout the entire world.

What’s the customer feedback like?

This section is going to focus on the quality of the customer support that both companies provide, as well as the forethought that they put into ensuring that they’re customers are safe and taken care of through the use of data backups that can provide a sort of safety net in case something goes wrong.

Customer Support

Both SiteGround and Bluehost provide 24/7 customer support via phone, chat or email. Both companies also hire the best of the best when it comes to IT experts and support staff that can fix any issues that you might be having, or provide you with instructions when it comes to using certain WordPress options.

The consensus is that both companies provide great customer support in every regard, but according to a survey that was conducted, it seems that a lot of WordPress users actually favour SiteGround slightly more than Bluehost.

According to the survey, while most customers were satisfied with Bluehost, there were a lot of customers that found their overall support, as well as their WordPress specific support to be lacking. SiteGround on the other hand received favourable scores in both categories as well as positive reviews from most of the participants of the survey.

In terms of customer support:

  • Bluehost scored a 7.98 among non-us voters and a 8.16 among US voters in the survey
  • SiteGround scored a 8.68  among non-US voters and a 8.59  among US voters in the survey

Backups

You can spend months at work without having anything go wrong, but then you can have one single day that can ruin all of those months of work and flawless execution. In order to prevent such days from happening, or at least minimize the damage that they could cause to your company, it’s important to have a backup option available.

SiteGround and Bluehost both have a daily copy of your site data for the last 30 days of work. This will allow any company to work without having to worry about data loss. Both of their approaches towards the backup are slightly different though.

  • SiteGround provides this service as a feature in their GrowBig and GoGeek plans
  • Bluehost only offers this service for free on their most expensive plan and it costs an extra $3 a month if you want to get it as a part of their other plans.

While SiteGround has no backup option available for their low-tier plan, Bluehost has a much more serious issue in that the additional backup fee actually doubles the monthly price of the service, unless you spend the extra money to get the most expensive plan available.

Conclusion

Bluehost falls behind SiteGround in both backup and customer support, and while it’s still a great web hosting service, it has a few flaws that it needs to work out when it comes to prioritizing the needs of their customers.

What are their prices like?

Both companies have pretty similar prices when it comes to their most expensive hosting plans, but the differences in the pricing of the other plans and what you get from each company for a certain payment will play a very large part in deciding which company will give you more bang for your buck.

Before we go on, we should point out that Bluehost actually has two mid-tier options that are called Plus and Choice Plus. We will only go over Choice Plus in this article due to the fact that they’re both the same price and Choice Plus has a lot more options.

Low-tier

The Basic plan that Bluehost offers is priced at $2.95 a month. For this price you get 1 website, 50 GB of SSD storage, standard performance, 1 included domain, 5 parked domains and 25 subdomains.

The StartUp plan from SiteGround comes in at €5.99 a month. The package provides you with 1 website, 10 GB of web space and around 10,000 monthly visits.

Mid-Tier

Choice Plus is the upgraded version of the Plus package from Bluehost and it’ll cost you $5.45 a month. This option comes with standard performance, but unlimited websites, SSD storage and bandwidth, as well as unlimited domains, parked domains and subdomains. Choice Plus also comes with access to spam experts, domain privacy and protection, site backup and CodeGuard basic, as well as a Microsoft 365 mailbox which is free for 30 days.

The GrowBig option that SiteGround provides will set you back €9.99 a month. For this price you get unlimited websites, 20 GB of web space and around 25,000 monthly visits. Included in this price are also the options to request on-demand backup copies, speed boosting caching, staging, as well as the option to add collaborators.

Top-tier

The last Bluehost option is called Pro and it costs $13.95 a month. The three differences between this and the previous package from Bluehost is that instead of standard it offers high performance, it provides you with a dedicated IP, and access to two spam experts as opposed to just one.

The most expensive hosting option that SiteGround has is the GoGeek plan, which costs €13.99 a month. For this price you get unlimited websites, 40 GB of web space and around 100,000 monthly visits. You also get access to all of the options form the previous plan, as well as white label clients, the highest tier of resources and priority support for any issues that you might have.

What you get in every package

Blue host offers unmetered bandwidth and a free SSL certificate across the board, regardless of which plan you go for, as well as resource protection, marketing credits, scalability and access to domain managers which can make it easier to track, update and transfer your domains.

Siteground provides its customers with unmetered traffic, free SSL, daily backups, free CDN, free email, an unlimited database, and a 100% renewable energy match with all of it’s plans. As an added bonus, all of the hosting packages that SiteGround offers also come with a 30 day money back option, as well as free WordPress installation.

Drawbacks

Bluehost has proven to be the cheaper option all across the board when it comes to the prices of the services themselves. However, they do charge a one-time migration fee of $149, whereas SiteGround offers the migrations option free of charge.

SiteGround offers a lot of impressive perks for buying any one of their packages, but they do have limited storage options even for their most expensive plan, while Bluehost offers unlimited storage even in it’s mid-range hosting plan.

Summary

Bluehost vs Siteground – who’s better? As we said in the beginning, either of these web hosting services are a great choice for just about any company, but there are a few things that you need to keep in mind before you decide which one you’ll want to ultimately go with.

Bluehost provides more than enough features for any small to medium sized company, especially when you consider the reasonable prices that they charge, as well as their unlimited storage options that come as a part of their mid and high-tier packages.

SiteGrounds provides excellent customer support, backup options and some of the fastest speeds of any hosting service provider that’s currently in business. They are especially well suited for medium to large sized companies, or anyone that’s willing to spend a bit more money on the quality that the company can offer.

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