SiteGround vs Bluehost – Which is the Best Hosting Platform For WordPress?

There is a common IT metaphor used to describe hosting – renting hosting is like renting a place to live in. The way we need a house to live, basically web hosting is where your website lives. Your website’s data and files are stored on a server, or a host, where your content is made available to you and your customers through a web browser. Since everyone wants instant gratification make sure it’s in right hands so that customers can access every part of your website 24/7.

Choosing right hosting provider is like choosing a player into the game. Do you need a weak player? Definitely not. Get the strongest one! But you might be in a dilemma “How to choose right web hosting providers?”  Do not panic! We got your back, fam.

How to choose the right Hosting Platform for your Website?

Web hosting market is not the tiny one. Literally, there are hundreds of options available. So, these are the few things you need to be careful while choosing the right hosting platform for your website. While there are multiple hosting services available, don’t just count pennies and go with the cheap or don’t have the misconception about getting awesome service with a heavy price tag. Do a little bit of research and just buy what you really required. Below list will help you choose right hosting platform for your website.

We have created this post without being biased; putting together the most popular WordPress hosting company comparison as fair as we can. While creating this article we have undergone in-depth thorough research. No doubts, both of the hosting service providers are brilliant in their own respects but the vital question for us now is ‘which is the best WordPress hosting platform?’  The battle between the two competitors is really tough. So, today we will be comparing SiteGround and Bluehost from 5 different essential motivator in decision making when it comes to choosing right hosting platform for your website. Both the platforms have their own supporters claiming it’s the best. So, we decided to give you a piece of correct information on this platform to help you select the best out of best.

1. Support and Customer Service
2. Speed and Uptime
3. Features and Security
4. Social Proof and Customer Reviews
5. Pricing

Looking for the answers but short on time? If you just want a brief comparison, take a look at this table where we have made a comparison of both hosting provider functionalities.

Hosting Company	Support	Speed	Price/ month	Server Location	View All Plans
	24/7 Live Chat, Phone	Average Loading Time 2.29 Seconds	$2.95/mo.	1	Visit Bluehost
	24/7 Instant Tickets, Live Chat, Phone	Average Loading Time 1.26 Seconds	$3.95/mo.	4	Visit SiteGround

From the above table, it’s clear that major differences between SiteGround and Bluehost are pricing, support and Speed.

Now that you have the basic idea of what these two hosting company offers, let’s get into the detailed and informative comparison of them.

SiteGround vs Bluehost: Support and Customer Service

First of all, we have support, which in our opinion is the most important thing when choosing a web hosting provider. Especially if you are not all that technically inclined because sooner or later something can go wrong and you don’t want to wait on the phone for a very long time. Or send in a support ticket and not receive a response back for days at a time. You want to be able to reach a support representative as quickly as possible so they can resolve the issue as quick as possible and get your website back up again.

SiteGround offers 24/7 support tickets, live chat, and phone support. And the support ticket response is less than 10 minutes which is fastest in the industry. Their live chat support and phone support is instantaneous. They always have someone available to answer a chat or to pick up the phone whenever someone needs assistance. They have also highlighted some of their best-performing support reps every month on their blog page. We don’t see any other web hosting companies do that. To us, it shows that they are putting a lot of focus on having support available and making sure that the customers are satisfied. And giving their support reps an incentive to do so by highlighting them on their blog every month.

Click on the image above for the full post.

Bluehost, on the other hand, offers 24/7 technical support through phone, chat, and email. And they also have an extensive knowledge base where you can put the problem that you’re having into a search box and it will return some results that will give you some troubleshooting steps which might resolve issues. One of the downsides is that they don’t have a support ticket system, and we kind of questioned why this is a case? They are a big company, they have a lot of resources, so why don’t they have a ticket system? It would be nice to have just another way for someone to be able to interact with your support team.

SiteGround vs Bluehost: Speed and Uptime

Next up is speed and uptime, and what we’re looking here is something that tells us in which server our website is going to be hosted. And what kind of software and hardware are designed to make our website load faster. So that we can take full advantage of those features.

SiteGround clearly displays how they utilize a combination of hardware and software to make the fastest hosting using the best in speed technology. They have: SSD drives, NGINX servers, caching plugin that you can use for WordPress, a free one-click content delivery network through Cloudflare, HTTP/2, and PHP 7.

Now, when we look at Bluehost they don’t share much about their speed and uptime. We couldn’t find anything that talks about how these servers were equipped for being fast. We didn’t see any mention of SSD, drives or PHP 7, or any type of caching ability like that.  In case of similarities, they both offer a 99.99% uptime, and although we couldn’t explicitly find this written in Bluehost website, 99.99% is the industry standard so we are going to assume that they can at least hit that.

SiteGround vs Bluehost: Features and Security

So next up is the features and security, we are going to first talk about what both include and then we will go over what each one offers that the other doesn’t. They both offer 30-days money back guarantee so in case if you change your mind within that 30 days then you can cancel your account and get a full refund. All the plans that they offer are also optimized for WordPress along with free automatic updates. And they also offer free SSL certificate for a secure web connection. And they both offer 24/7 support and customer service as we mentioned above.

SiteGround does not offer free domain name.	You get a free domain name for a year.
HTTP/2 is enabled on all SiteGround servers.	HTTP/2 enabled on WordPress Hosting plan and VPS hosting plan.
SiteGround is officially recommended by WordPress.	Bluehost is officially recommended by WordPress.
Free daily backups on all plans, but free restores only on GrowBig and GoGeek.	Backups available via SiteBackUp Pro add-on.
SiteGround has IDS / IPS systems which block malicious bots and attackers.	Bluehost’s SiteLock addon offers protection from DDoS attacks.
SiteGround offers free website migration.	Bluehost charge $149.99 for site migration.
SiteGround have limited site traffic.	Bluehost claims for Unlimited Site Traffic.

Features of SiteGround and Bluehost

Now some of the thing Bluehost offers that SiteGround doesn’t is that they give you a free domain name for one year, then after that year is up, you have to pay the going rate for the domain rate registration, which is typically around $10 or $15 per year. They also give you 50 GB of web space. This is five times more than that SiteGround offers but Bluehost doesn’t have SSD drives, which means that the data delivery is going to be slower. So you are getting somewhat a tradeoff there, you get more space but it’s going to be lot slower data delivery compared to the SSD drives that SiteGround gives you.

And some of the things that SiteGround offers but Bluehost doesn’t is a one-click migration tool for WordPress. This means that if you are moving from another hosting company and your website is built on WordPress, you can easily move it over to the SiteGround using their migration tool. Some other hosting companies actually charge a fee (including Bluehost which cost $149.99) to do this but SiteGround does this for free.

Bluehost does not currently offer migration support for Reseller, VPS, or Dedicated Server accounts.

Siteground also give you daily backups, which is very important because if something happens to your website, you want to make sure that you have backup ready so that you don’t lose all of the work, effort and time. And they also have multiple data centers around the world that you can choose to host your website. So if you are in the US and the majority of your visitors are living in the US, then you choose a data center in the USA. But if you are in Asia or if the majority of your visitors are in Asia then you can choose a data center in Asia. And they also have two data centers in Europe as well. And lastly, they also offer a free one-click content delivery network installation through CloudFlare.

SiteGround vs Bluehost: Customer Reviews/Social Proofs

Now, this is where things get real. Because a hosting company can advertise itself as the one, but customer’s reviews will speak for themselves. This will give you insight into what their current and former customer really feel about the company. We went through lots of individual reviews available on the web from Google to other Social Media. Since 2016 SiteGround is setting its benchmark to the top position. Now the peoples who reviewed both SiteGround and Bluehost are real people like you and me who have websites that are hosted on WordPress and have dealt with different hosting companies in the past both good and bad. And yet for the past three years, SiteGround has been number one position.

Now another thing to mention is Bluehost is owned by EIG, which acquire over 70+ web hosting companies (Including Bluehost). The reasons people are not happy with EIG owned hosting companies are that they sell more server space than they have which results in slow servers and a bunch of downtimes. And people also claim that EIG outsources their customer support. When customer support is outsourced usually response time is slow and you rarely get a competent response. Although Bluehost has very low hosting prices, they have aggressive upsell and you will need to pay extra for other important features and a vast majority of customers just really aren’t happy about that.

SiteGround vs Bluehost: Pricing

Regarding pricing it is kind of difficult to answer- it’s not like asking how much a bag of chips cost. Your hosting price will depend on your provider and the plan you choose; the better plan, the more dollars you’ll need to spend. You need to choose a provider that offers great value for money, but also one which will give you the very best service for your website!

If you are on a low budget, you cannot go for a highly expensive platform. Anyways, you must carefully make a wise decision considering the budget you have for your project.

Therefore, I am trying to compare the minimum cost needed to host a website in the two WordPress hosting service providers SiteGround and Bluehost. I have chosen the basic startup plans that cost you least. Have a look at the table below: ­­

Visit SiteGround Pricing Visit Bluehost Pricing

If you’re just starting out and all you need is just one website, then you can choose the STARTUP PLAN on SiteGround or BASIC PLAN on Bluehost. So I am going to compare prices between these two hosting service providers.

Now SiteGround has an introductory price of $3.95 per month, and after the introductory rate is over the price goes to $11.95 per month. On Bluehost, they offer $2.95 per month as an introductory price, and then it goes up to $7.99 per month, which is four dollars cheaper than SiteGround.  But please note that there are couples of caveat on Bluehost. The advertised pricing of $2.95/mo. price only comes with 36 months plan, it would be $5.95 per month for you to do 12 months of hosting at the introductory rate or $4.95 per month for as an introductory rate if you purchased two years upfront.

Whereas on SiteGround it doesn’t matter if you purchase 12 months, 24 months or 36 months of hosting, the introductory price is still going to be $3.95 per month. So even though SiteGround is four dollars more expensive per month, you’re really only talking about less than $48 over the course of a year between the two. And most importantly with SiteGround, you are going to get better technology and more features compared to Bluehost. So, this is a case where you get what you pay for.

SiteGround Pricing Options                                                                            Bluehost Pricing Options

While Bluehost provides a free domain name for one year, in case of SiteGround if you wish to purchase domain then prices start from $9.95. For setting up hosting account with SiteGround they charge a $14.95 setup fee if you pay for their shared hosting plans monthly instead of annually. So, you’d be better off paying 1 year upfront to avoid that.  Even though with the lower price tag, compromising the features and services, we think that Bluehost gives us great value for money!

Concluding: Which is the Best Hosting Platform For WordPress?

Both web hosting companies featured in this article are awesome, with top tier service and tech, and both hosting companies are officially recommended by WordPress (it’s kind of a big deal, guys!) and that kind of recognition is only given out to web hosts that meet WordPress’s exalted criteria. Judging and concluding, both of these two have a fair share of drawbacks and a fair share of advantages. Rather than one being superior to another platform, SiteGround and Bluehost both can be the best/ most appropriate platform for you depending on your need and resourcefulness.

Comparing each one side-by-side, we have concluded that SiteGround gives you more options for support and quicker support. The servers that your website will be hosted on is going to be optimized for speed. They give you more features than Bluehost. The only place where they may fall short is pricing, but in that case, it’s kind of you get what you pay for. So even though if you are paying a little bit more, you are getting more features and better technology. On the other hand, Bluehost have a variation of pricing and plans for the flexibility of users. Bluehost wins the battle of pricing if you are just starting out business while on the other side SiteGround has additional features that come along with the price tag.

SiteGround takes the cake with outstanding performance and responsive support. But if you are looking for loads of website storage at lower prices then Bluehost is unbeatable.

So the decision is up to you? What are you looking for and what are your needs? We have outlined all the pros and cons of both the hosting service providers so that it is easier for you to now make your decision.

If you have any experience using these hosting platforms then feel free to share your opinion.

Have any queries or suggestions regarding our services or blog then leave us a comment below.

Some of the hosting related articles you can go through are:

• 10 Best WordPress Hosting Services
• Managed WordPress Hosting Services for 2019
• Free WordPress Hosting Services for StartUps

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