If you’re confused between the choice of SiteGround vs Bluehost hosting, I have put a detailed review and comparison of both hosting companies. You’ll find the answers to the questions of which web hosting is the best in terms of speed, features, pricing plans, support, and security.
I know it’s a daunting task to decide where to host your new website. Well, SiteGround and Bluehost both are the popular web hosting companies and they’ve a decent amount in common, but of course some stuff will be different between them such as pricing, speed, money back guarantee etc. So, how to choose the best out of them?
An ideal web hosting is that which provide the speed and reliability by keeping overall cost low for traffic management.
In this article, I’m going to show you the details of SiteGround hosting and its comparison with Bluehost.
So, let’s jump straight into to see the real differences between both hosting.
Comparison of SiteGround vs Bluehost
SiteGround is a well-known brand in the world of web hosting. It was founded in the year 2004 and have a dedicated approach towards technology. They offer various hosting plans consisting of popular website technologies such as WordPress, Joomla, Magneto, Drupal, and Prestashop.
Bluehost is one of the top rated web hosting company which was founded in 2003. Serving more than 300,000 domains, Bluehost is counted as one of the top rated web hosting company having A+ Rating. It also offers 100% satisfaction guarantee by using line servers from Dell, Cisco, and Brocade.
1. Pricing
When it comes to pricing, SiteGround offers slightly less expensive hosting plans for different year terms than Bluehost which could save you around $30 per year. Both SiteGround and Bluehost offer three different plans for basic hosting but there’s one major difference between their pricing.
Look at the Bluehost discounted pricing.
Here, you can see their discounted price for basic plan which is $3.95 per month. But if you see the next screenshot, you’ll find that their discounted pricing is applicable only if you buy their service for 3 years or more.
Now, let’s check the regular discounted price of SiteGround hosting.
When you proceed to the purchase information, you’ll find the pricing is same whether you buy hosting for 12 months, 24 months or 36 months.
Conclusion: The main difference between their pricing is that with Bluehost you have to pay $3.95 in advance for 3 years. If you don’t want to pay for three years, you have the option of choosing 24 months and 12 months, but less the year term you choose the more you have to pay. That’s why people would rather choose SiteGround over Bluehost.
2. Speed & Uptime
Probably speed and performance is the most important thing to know about when you are going to choose the web hosting. In case of Bluehost and SiteGround, it seems that website hosted on SiteGround load a bit faster than Bluehost.
SiteGround uses special cache technology to speed up your website. For instance, a site hosted on SiteGround takes around 300-400 ms to load whereas Bluehost based website takes a bit more time to load.
Let’s see at this screenshot of Uptime stats of Bluehost.
And here is the uptime stats of SiteGround.
Bluehost and SiteGround both claims an impressive uptime of 100% monthly but after testing both of them separately, we found that SiteGround has slightly better uptime of 100% whereas Bluehost shows the uptime of 99.99% for 7 days.
Overall, we can say that SiteGround would be a better choice if unobstructed uptime is your main concern.
3. Customer Service & Support
Customer support is a big determining factor when choosing between hosting companies. This is one thing that you will need at some points to help in hosting related queries.
SiteGround offers three ways to contact them including 24/7 live chat, phone and tickets. SiteGround customer service staff provide ongoing support on just about any topic you need and boast 100% customer satisfaction rate. They purposefully over more staff per schedule shifts so all live chats, emails, and calls are answered as fast as possible.
Bluehost also offers a comprehensive customer support with 24/7 web expert consultations on topics including speed, security, traffic and other website related topics. Unlike SiteGround, Bluehost also offers ticket, chat and toll-free numbers to contact. However, Bluehost customer support is not good enough and some users have reported less favorable connectivity and response time.
4. Website Migration
If you already have a website hosted somewhere and you are looking to transfer it to Bluehost, it will cost you $149.99 with migration up to 5 websites and 20 email accounts.
But, if you choose SiteGround, you will be happy to know that you don’t need to pay anything for your website transfer. SiteGround offers their customers a free website transfer when user sign-up for a SiteGround’s GrowBig and GoGeek hosting plan. For additional website migration, they charge just $30 per website.
5. Security
Whether you are running a personal blog or an eCommerce website, security should be your top priority. While choosing a web host you should check some security features such as backup, SSL certificate, Malware Scan etc.
SiteGround hosting plan includes free SSL certificates, daily backups for your website. SiteGround also has sophisticated IDS / IPS systems to block malicious bots and attackers. On the other hand, Bluehost also offer their users a free “shared” SSL and free backup which you can schedule on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. For malware scan, Bluehost offers different paid protection services.
SiteGround vs. BlueHost Conclusion
After getting this detailed information, we can say that both hosting companies are giving tough competition to each other. However, if you are basing your preference on performance, customer support and reliable service then SiteGround is my recommendation.
If you are still confused about what hosting to choose, you can look at their different hosting packages and come to your own conclusion. As both companies come with a money back guarantee, so there is very little risk in changing your hosting option.
If you like this post or if you want to share your thoughts about both web hosting, please let us know in the comment section below.
That’s really nice, Bluehost is very costly.
Hello,
amazing post.. Thank you so much for sharing..!!