Siteground vs Bluehost
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SITEGROUND OR BLUEHOST? WHICH HOST IS BEST?

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So here we have two hosting companies that are both recommended by WordPress. So which one should you choose or does it even matter?

Well, I am going to do a comparison of both SiteGround and Bluehost for WordPress hosting.

For this comparison, I will take look at a couple of different categories which are important when choosing a web hosting company.

The categories are:

  • The support that they offer,
  • The speed technology that they have,
  • Their features,
  • What other people are saying about them (otherwise known as social proof),
  • And their pricing

1.The Support

  SiteGround Bluehost
Popularity Medium High
Ease of use Great Good
Hosting features A lot Some
Speed Great Disappointing
Uptime Great Good
Server locations 4 1
Site migration First included Paid extra
Scalability Good Good
Security Secure Secure
Support Great OK
Prices Medium-high Medium-low
Conclusion SiteGround’s performance is impressive,
Has a lot of hosting
features and responsive support. However, they are a bit more expensive.
Bluehost offers more storage and lower prices.  But their performance is weak and their support, not the greatest

This is, in my opinion, the most important thing when choosing a web hosting provider. Especially if you’re not all that technically inclined because sooner or later something is going to go wrong and you don’t want to have 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.

SiteGround Bluehost
Overall Support Rating
Score out of 5
4.7 3.2
WordPress-Specific Support Rating
Score out of 5
4.53.4

You want to be able to reach a support representative as quickly as possible so that they can resolve your issue as quickly as possible and get your website back up again.

Bluehost offers 24/7technical support through phone and chat and they even have different phone numbers depending on what area of support you need. So if you have general support questions, then you can call one number; whereas if you need help with something with WordPress, you can call another.

 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 in order for you to go through that might resolve your issue.

One of the downsides is that they don’t have a support ticket system, and I kind of questioned why this is the case.

They are a big company; they have a lot of resources, so why don’t they have a support ticket system? It would be nice to have just another way for somebody to be able to interact with your support team. So that’s a negative there.

SiteGround, on the other hand, offers 24/7 support tickets, live chat, and phone support. And the support ticket response is less than 10 minutes which is the fastest in the industry.

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Their live chat support is instantaneous and their phone support is also instantaneous.

They have staff in all of their shifts so that they always have someone available to either answer a chat or to pick up the phone, whenever someone needs assistance.

They also highlight some of their best performing support representatives every month. I don’t see any other web hosting company do that.

2. Next up is speed

SiteGround clearly displays how they’re using the best in speed technology they have: SSD drives, NGINX servers, a caching plugin that you can use for WordPress, a free one-click content delivery network through CloudFlare, HTTP/2, and PHP 7.

When I looked on Bluehost I couldn’t find anything that talked about how their servers were equipped for being fast. I didn’t see any mention of SSD drives, or PHP 7, or any type of caching ability like that.

3.The features

They both offer a 99.9% uptime, and although I couldn’t explicitly find this written on Bluehost website, 99.9% is the industry standard so I’m going to assume that they can at least hit that.

  • Money-Back Guarantee

They both offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. So if it’s not working out or if you change your mind within those 30 days, you can cancel your account and get a full refund.

  • Free SSL Certificate

All of the plans that they offer are also optimized for WordPress, along with free automatic updates, and they also offer free SSL certificates for secure web connections. And they both offer 24/7 support, although there were few differences between the two which I mentioned earlier in the article.

  • Domain Registration

Now some of the things that Bluehost offers that SiteGround doesn’t is they give you a free domain name for your first year. Then after that year is up, then you just have to pay the going rate for the domain name registration, which is typically around 10 or 15 dollars per year.

  • Website Space

They also give you 50 gigabytes of website space. This is five times more than what SiteGround offers but Bluehost don’t have SSD drives, which means that the data delivery is going to be slower.

So you are getting somewhat of a trade-off there, you get more space but it’s going to be a lot slower data delivery compared to the SSD drives that SiteGround gives you.

  • One-Click Migration

Some of the things that SiteGround offers that Bluehost doesn’t is a one-click migration tool for WordPress.

This means that if you’re moving from another hosting company and your website is on WordPress, you can easily move it over to SiteGround using their migration tool. Some other hosting companies actually charge a fee to do this, but with SiteGround it’s free.

  • Daily Backups

They also give you daily backups which are important because if something were to happen to your website, you want to make sure that you have a backup ready so that you don’t lose all of the work and time that you’ve put into building it up to what it is today.

Siteground or Bluehost

And they also have multiple data centers around the world that you can choose to host your website. So if you’re here in the US and the majority of your visitors are living in the US, then you choose a data center in the US. 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.

4. Social Proof

Numerous polls have been held by members of Facebook groups to find out which hosting companies they’re using and which ones they recommend to their clients. And in 2016 SiteGround was number one whereas Bluehost was number 15.

In 2017 SiteGround was number one again and Bluehost didn’t even make the top 15. And again in 2018 SiteGround was number one for the third year in a row.

Now, these are people who are just like you and me who have websites that are hosted on WordPress, and we’ve dealt with different hosting companies in the past both good and bad. And yet for the past three years, SiteGround has been number one.

5. Lastly, we have pricing

Now if you’re just starting out and all you need is just one website, then you’re going to want to use the “Startup” plan on SiteGround or the “Basic” plan on Bluehost.

SiteGround has an introductory price of $3.95 per month, and after that introductory rate is over the price goes to $11.95 per month. On Bluehost, they offer $3.95 per month as an introductory price, and then after that, it goes up to $7.99per month, which is four dollars cheaper than SiteGround.

Now there are a couple of caveats on Bluehost in order for you to get the $3.95 per month introductory rate, you have to purchase three years of hosting up front, otherwise it would be $5.95 per month for you to only do one year of hosting at the introductory rate, or $4.95 per month as an introductory rate if you purchased two years upfront.

Whereas on SiteGround it doesn’t matter if you buy one year, two years, or three years of hosting, the introductory price is still only 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 with SiteGround you’re going to get better technology and more features compared to Bluehost so this is kind of really a case of you get what you pay for.