Compare Bluehost vs Siteground - 2021 Edition

Bluehost vs Siteground 2021 - Which Is

Better For WordPress

Trying to choose between SiteGround and Bluehost to host your website?

SiteGround and Bluehost are two of the most popular web hosts for any type of website, and both offer a lot of useful features for WordPress users too. Since you’ll see so many people recommending both hosts, it can be difficult to know which one is right for you.

In this post, I’m going to walk you through deciding between Bluehost and SiteGround. This is not about picking a single “winner”. Instead, I’m going to highlight the main differences and make some recommendations so you can choose the option that best suits your needs and budget.

I’ll start by comparing them in three main areas:

Pricing Friendliness
Performance
User-

At the end, I’ll make some recommendations on when to choose SiteGround and when to choose Bluehost.

Read Also:

SiteGround vs Bluehost Pricing

Overall, when it comes to pricing and resources, it is cheaper than SiteGround. This applies to both promotional prices (what you pay for your first billing cycle) and regular prices (what you pay when you need to renew).

Here are the Bluehost prices:

And here are SiteGround:

In addition to looking at the price charts, there are a few other important things to consider here:

Resources
Billing Terms
Free Domain Name

Winner: Bluehost

Bluehost Gives You Unlimited Resources

Another Thing that Bluehost makes cheaper are the resources you get with your plan. With the exception of the cheapest Basic plan, Bluehost gives you:

Unlimited websites
Unmetered storage
Unmetered bandwidth

Siteground gives you unlimited websites (except the Startup plan) and unlimited bandwidth. However, they impose strict storage limits. For example, even the expensive GoGeek plan only gets 40 GB, while Bluehost still gives you 50 GB for the cheap Basic plan (and unlimited storage on all others).

Additionally, although SiteGround offers unlimited bandwidth, they do advertise a suggested visit limit. This limit isn’t a hard limit – it’s just an estimate of how many visitors you can have before SiteGround’s other limits (like CPU seconds) start. If you want to see the technical limitations of SiteGround’s plans, you can: Go here

Gap page
Scroll down
mouse on the links in the Server Resources section

Save

Also I wrote a post explaining the limitations of SiteGround shared hosting.

Note that even though Bluehost does not measure any of your resources, they will still enforce fair use policies. So if they feel like you are abusing the limits, they can still limit your account:

save

Winner: Bluehost

SiteGround only offers you the full promo prices for just one year

Because both Bluehost and SiteGround’s promotional prices offer such a big discount, it is usually a good idea to prepay for as many years as possible. For example, if you prepay for three years, you can fix the cheap prices for all three years.

You used to be able to do this on both Bluehost and SiteGround. However, from 2020, SiteGround will only give you the full promotional discount on your first year. If you try to prepay for two or three years, you will still get a small discount, but not the full advertised promotional price.

For example, let’s say you want the SiteGround StartUp plan, which is advertised with a promotional price of $ 6.99 per month and a regular price of $ 14.99 per month. If you sign up for a year, you pay that $ 6.99. Prices for two- and three-year plans are slightly higher, though:

Two Years – $ 9.99 a month
Three Years – $ 10.49 a Month

So while you still get a discount, the deal isn’t that good.

With Bluehost, it works in the opposite direction. The longer you register, the greater the discount you will receive.

For example, say you want the Bluehost Plus plan , which is advertised with a promotional price of $ 5.45 per month and a regular price of $ 10.99 per month. If you want to get that full promotional price, you have to pay for three years up front. If you pay for a shorter period, the monthly price will be higher:

One year – $ 7.45 per month
Two years – $ 6.95 per month
Three years – $ 5.45 per month

Winner: Bluehost

Free Domain Name

Finally Bluehost will give you a free domain name for your first year, while SiteGround does not. In addition, if you want to buy your domain through SiteGround, they will charge you $ 15.95 for a .com domain, which is quite expensive. However, Bluehost also charges you $ 15.99 to renew your domain name after the first year, so Bluehost’s prices are also pretty high.

If you want to save some money, you can use a third-party registrar, such as Namecheap or Google Domains, which will charge more like $ 10 – $ 12 for a .com domain name.

Winner: Bluehost

SiteGround vs Bluehost Performance

While Bluehost wins in terms of prices and resources, SiteGround is ahead when it comes to performance.

Hosting Architecture

One of the things that explains why SiteGround is more expensive is that SiteGround has invested a lot of money in its infrastructure, which means better performance for SiteGround customers.

For example, SiteGround recently moved all of its hosting plans, even the shared ones, to Google Cloud hosting, which allows you to take advantage of Google’s network.

SiteGround also uses a combination of Apache (as a web server) and Nginx (as a reverse proxy), allowing them to offer server-level page caching (but only for the GrowBig and GoGeek plans). Server-level caching not only eliminates the need for a separate caching plugin, but it also slightly outperforms caching plugins, as your server can completely bypass WordPress when loading content from the cache.

I know this is a bit technical, but all you really need to understand is that it will make your site load a lot faster.

SiteGround also offers all of its customers a free plugin called SG Optimizer. SG Optimizer helps you easily implement all the major WordPress performance best practices, including minification, image optimization, Gzip compression, browser caching and more.

SG Optimizer is just as good as the WP-Rocket plugin and SiteGround customers get it for free.

Finally, SiteGround recently added to the GoGeek plan its own ultra-fast PHP configuration, which can further improve performance.

Bluehost doesn’t completely ignore performance – you do get some features, such as built-in caching. But overall, SiteGround’s hosting architecture is more optimized than Bluehost’s.

Winner: SiteGroundComparison Test

Performance:

In my performance comparison test, SiteGround is definitely a winner. However, the price difference between the two doesn’t really justify this win, and I was expecting a much better result from SiteGround.

For this test, I used Genesis theme + Cloudflare installation on a live site with the same set of plugins. Let’s take a look at the results of the different tests:

TTFB Test

Bluehost:

Save

SiteGround:

Save

Winner: SiteGround

Even in site response time and load time, SiteGround was a clear winner.

Data center locations

Another important part of WordPress performance is data center locations. The physical distance between your host’s data center and your visitors will play a big role in your site’s load times. You can reduce this impact by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Nevertheless, you always want to choose a data center that is as close to your target group as possible.

Another aspect that doesn’t get as much focus is backend dashboard loading times. If you are further away from your site’s data center, your WordPress dashboard will also load more slowly when you work on your site, which can be frustrating.

Here, SiteGround offers many more options. SiteGround gives you a choice of six data centers on four continents:

North America – Council Bluffs, Iowa (US)
Europe – London (UK), Eemshaven (Netherlands), Frankfurt (Germany)
Asia – Singapore
Australia – Sydney

When you sign up, you can choose the data center that best suits your needs.

Although Bluehost has multiple data centers, they don’t let you choose. They also make it very difficult to find out which data centers they offer because they don’t list them on their website.

Instead, the data center your site gets depends on the Bluehost service you sign up with. For example, if you log in to the North American Bluehost site, your site’s server will be in Utah, USA. But if you sign up with Indian Bluehost site, your site’s server will be in Mumbai, India.

In total, Bluehost has data centers in the following locations:

North America – Utah, US
Europe – London, UK
Asia – Mumbai (India), Hong Kong (China), Shanghai (China)

But again, make sure to sign up through the local Bluehost website for your region (or the region you want to target) because you can’t choose your own data center like you can with SiteGround.

Winner: SiteGround

SiteGround vs Bluehost Dashboard / User-

friendliness Bluehost and SiteGround are both very user-friendly hosts. In this section, I’ll go through their hosting dashboards and some of the key features.

Hosting Dashboard

Both SiteGround and Bluehost offer custom hosting dashboards to make managing your site easier.

As of 2020, SiteGround has moved completely from cPanel to its own Site Tools dashboard. The Site Tools dashboard makes it easy to install WordPress and take other important actions to manage your site.

Bluehost, on the other hand, uses a hybrid combination of its own custom dashboard, while still allowing you access to cPanel if you wish. This combination is nice to have – beginners can perform the most important actions from Bluehost’s custom dashboards, while more advanced users can still access the full cPanel dashboard if needed.

Winner: Tie

Features

Both hosts also provide you with useful features to help you manage your site.

With both hosts, you get:

Automatic WordPress updates
Free SSL certificates with one click
Free email hosting
Staging sites

A major area where SiteGround wins is backups. With all plans, SiteGround automatically backs up your site every day and stores 30 days of backups. However, Bluehost only offers automatic backups on the most expensive Choice Plus plan .

However, keep in mind that SiteGround stores the backups on your site’s server, so you’ll want to regularly download them to your local computer to eliminate a single point of failure.

SiteGround vs Bluehost: Which One Should You Use?

SiteGround and Bluehost are both popular hosts for a reason. That is, they all have their strengths and weaknesses, and there is not one “better” host for every person.

Use Bluehost if …

Overall, Bluehost is good for a beginner looking to get started on the cheap. Bluehost’s prices are about as cheap as it gets, and you also get a free domain name for your first year, which reduces costs even further.

Plus, Bluehost does a great job of making it simple and easy to start a site. While SiteGround is also quite easy to use, Bluehost’s onboarding wizard is one of the best and makes it really easy for a newbie to get started.

Use SiteGround if …

On the other hand, SiteGround is good for people looking to improve their hosting to get better performance. With its new pricing, SiteGround is definitely more expensive than Bluehost – there’s no way you can avoid that.

However, the upside is that you get better resources and useful tools for WordPress performance. SiteGround, for example, now uses the Google Cloud infrastructure for all of its plans. On the GrowBig and GoGeek plans, they even implement server-level caching, which provides excellent performance and means you don’t need a caching plugin.

SiteGround customers also get access to the free SG Optimizer plugin, which rivals premium plugins like WP Rocket in its feature set.

However, to get that improved performance, you’re going to pay a little more and also face limited resources. For example, there is no longer unlimited storage, and while SiteGround doesn’t put a hard limit on traffic, their plans do have “suggested” visits.

If you’re just starting out, you probably don’t need that extra performance, which is why Bluehost is a great option. But once your site starts to grow, it can make sense to invest in a host that offers better performance, such as SiteGround.

For more information, we also have full reviews from both providers:

Bluehost Review
SiteGround Review

Have questions about Bluehost vs SiteGround and which host is right for your needs? Leave a comment below!

Featured Post

Ubersuggest Evaluate 2021 – The New Finest Worth search engine optimization Software?