Bluehost vs SiteGround: Which is better Value for Money?

No matter the kind of website you’re looking to host online, be it starting your own blog, online store, or podcast, a good web hosting service is key to your success.

However, two of the arguably most popular service providers may be on your list.

Bluehost and SiteGround are both formidable and fiercely competitive brands in the web hosting industry.

So which one is truly better?

In this article, we’ll do an in-depth side-by-side comparison of both hosting giants to help you make the right decision for your website.

Let’s get started!

Bluehost vs SiteGround: Web Hosting Comparison Overview

Bluehost is a popular web host that has been in existence since 2003. They form part of the larger Endurance International Group which has many other sister companies. Together, they host 1 million plus domains worldwide.

It offers a wide range of web hosting plans from basic shared hosting to dedicated server hosting, powered by their own servers located across the globe.

Bluehost’s trump card so far has been beginner and budget-friendly hosting plans for all kinds of startups and online businesses.

SiteGround is also well-known in the web hosting industry and has been around since 2004. With over 10 years of hosting experience under its belt and some 400+ employees working around the clock, it offers top-notch web hosting plans.

Plans include everything from shared hosting and cloud hosting to domain registration and email hosting. Other impressive features with SiteGround are its special features for developers like FTP accounts, pre-installed Git, and free SSH.

So who stacks up better? Bluehost’s easy onboarding or SiteGround’s advanced features?

We compared these two hosting giants based on the following features and here’s a quick summary of how they both performed. Ultimately your business needs, experience level and budget should be the main influencers of your choice.

• Performance – SiteGround
• Speed – SiteGround
• Uptime guarantees – SiteGround
• Security measures – Bluehost
• cPanel usability – Bluehost
• Customer support and technical staff – SiteGround
• Value for Money – Bluehost
• Beginner-friendliness – Bluehost
• WordPress Integration – Draw

Let’s get into it!

Performance Comparison

The number one thing to look out for when you’re considering a web host is their overall performance and site speed. A good web host makes sure your website is readily available and accessible, instantly and all the time.

This implies your website should load almost instantly or within less than 5 seconds and should always be online with minimal site crashes.

Your site speed directly influences your SEO and page rank with Google, thus slower loading sites make it less likely for your website to be on Google’s first page. It also improves your site visitor’s experience and improves conversions.

A key factor in your web host’s speed is what kind of technology they employ. Archaic and inefficient technology will have your website taking forever to load.

Which Web Host Has Better Technology?

Both Bluehost offer stellar features on the technology front, and it really comes down to a matter of your business needs and levels of experience.

Both contenders nail this with superior, Solid-State Drive technology (SSD) which offers a unique advantage over regular hard drives.

SSDs give your website more speed, reliability, and faster web page loading. In fact, SSD drives have an input/output that is 100 times better than standard drives. Here are some other impressive specs for SiteGround.

SiteGround’s Tech Features

• In-built NGINX speed server that loads static content on hosted websites fast.
• Geeky SuperCacher meant specifically for improved caching using NGINX reverse proxy
• Free CDN available which helps websites load faster by connecting to servers closest to your web visitor’s location.
• Updated to PHP 7.2 and runs on HTTPS/2 (which is WordPress recommended) for maximum security

In terms of other non-technical features that contribute to SiteGround’s impressive performance are

• Automatic updates for WordPress core software.
• Host unlimited sites on all plans apart from the cheapest plan.
• 10-30 GB website storage depending on your plan.
• Easy staging sites (only on the advanced GrowBig plan, though).
• Managed WordPress
• Unlimited Databases
• Unmetered traffic.

By providing lots of space and no traffic restrictions, SiteGround eliminates the risk of your website being bogged down by either too much content or too many visitors at a time.

Bluehost’s Tech Features

Bluehost is equally competitive in this space, offering cutting edge performance with modern server technologies.

As one of the few web hosts that WordPress recommends, Bluehost is designed to work seamlessly with WordPress and optimal site performance.

Some features of Bluehost’s technology include

• Multi-server management
• Access control
• File management and access to file transfer protocols.
• Unlimited email accounts
• PHP 7.0 (SiteGround is up to PHP 7.2 and HTTP/2 upgraded for efficient WordPress performance.
• Unlimited storage and bandwidth on most plans except the Basic plan which limits storage to 50GB.
• Automatic WordPress updates.
• A native caching system to speed up your site.
• Host unlimited sites on most plans on all sites except the basic plan.
• Easy WordPress staging sites for testing.

Clearly Bluehost also has a nice lineup of features to help your website perform at its best putting it neck and neck with SiteGround.

SiteGround limits your storage to just 10GB on the basic plan but Bluehost gives you 50GB on their basic plan. But Bluehost only has PHP updates to 7.0 compared to SiteGround’s PHP 7.2 which is ideal for optimal performance on WordPress sites.

So who wins?

Winner: SiteGround

The win goes to SiteGround! With a higher PHP7 update, NGINX technology and advanced caching, SiteGround edges over Bluehost by a tiny little bit to give you a faster loading site and better performance.

Speed Test – Which Web Host is Faster?

Speed is everything when it comes to building a thriving online business. In fact, industry benchmarks show that anything beyond 5 seconds of page loading time and your website’s bounce rate increases to a whopping 90%!

That directly influences how many conversions and sales you get in the end.

Many factors influence site speed including hardware, data center location and technology. These factors are within the control of your service provider.

The kind of content and theme you use on your site also play a role. And there are the occasional factors outside your control like the internet connection speed of your visitors.

Nonetheless, a web hosting provider with the right technology and hardware can more than make up for most of these factors.

For starters, both SiteGround and Bluehost use CloudFlare technology for their Content Delivery Network (CDN). So both providers use CloudFlare’s optimized global network for speedy content delivery.

Next let’s move to hardware, specifically storage.

Bluehost vs Siteground: Storage

One major function of a web host is to store your site’s data on a server and make it readily accessible to anyone who enters your site’s address. In recent times, a newer kind of storage drive has been developed to allow faster processing and data loading.

These new drives are called Solid State Drives (SSDs) and they operate remarkably faster than existing Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) which improves overall experience and efficiency.

While both Bluehost and SiteGround use SSDs to store your data, SiteGround uses SSDs exclusively, no matter which plan you are on. Bluehost on the other hand offers SSD storage for only their WordPress and VPS plans. Meaning if you’re on any other plan, your speed may take a dip.

One key factor that influences site speed is the number of data centers your web hosting provider has. The closer a data center is to a website visitor in terms of geographical location, the faster the site will load.

Thus, the more data center locations a service provider has, the faster hosting it can provide. SiteGround is known to have 5 data center locations on different continents. They guarantee that every client’s data center will be the one closest to them.

Bluehost is known to have at least 20+ data centers located across Europe, US, China and India making it more likely to find a data center near you.

Bluehost vs SiteGround Page Loading Time Test

Both Bluehost and SiteGround offer relatively fast page loading times, but who has the competitive edge?

Many SiteGround reviews mention how much their page loading times and overall site speeds have seen incremental jumps once they switched to SiteGround. Let’s look at page loading time tests.

Pingdom by Solarwinds is a paid service that provides website, page speed and uptime monitoring stats.

Tests from Pingdom that monitored SiteGround and Bluehost hosted websites over a seven-day period recorded the difference in loading times for both hosts. Pingdom uses constant speed tests at 30-minute intervals to form an average page loading time.

In the first test, both websites used a light theme that had simple text and just an image. After the monitoring period, Bluehost’s page load speed averaged 1.17s which isn’t bad. However, the SiteGround website’s speed averaged 289 milliseconds which is amazingly fast.

Other comparisons done of Bluehost's server speeds in multiple locations compared to SiteGround’s server speeds in multiple locations show that SiteGround’s overall loading time is far shorter compared to Bluehost’s.

This is partly due to SiteGround recently migrating to Google’s Cloud data center alongside deploying Ultra fast PHP giving them a 40% boost in overall website speed.

Winner: SiteGround

From using SSDs exclusively and page loading times that are down to milliseconds thanks to Google’s Cloud Data center and super fast PHP, SiteGround is the better choice for speed.

Uptime Report and Guarantees

Next in line to hosting speed is uptime. Your site’s availability online is another critical performance metric. Uptime is simply how long your website stays online and running for visitors to access.

Like speed, there are a few factors that directly influence your website’s uptime.

The list includes but is not limited to hardware issues, server maintenance times and power cuts to your hosting service provider. Poor site uptimes can affect your online business badly by causing lost sales, poor site/brand credibility and lost advertising spend.

Google rankings also don’t favor websites with frequent interruptions. No web host can guarantee 100% uptime simply because there are too many variables that aren’t within their control involved.

Nonetheless, your service provider should give you an uptime guarantee of at least 99.95%. In other words, within any six-month period, your site might be down no more than 5 hours in total. Both Bluehost and SiteGround offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee which is very impressive.

SiteGround’s uptime guarantee is further backed by a clause in their Service Level Agreement (SLA) that will compensate you with free hosting for a month if they fall below the 99.99% guaranteed uptime.

SiteGround’s confidence in providing almost a 100% uptime guarantee comes from the powerful hardware and technology they employ to ensure your website is always online.

For starters, they use high-end, resource efficient Linux container technology (LXC) which means that sets of processes involved in running that aspect of the server are separate from the rest of the system.

This ensures better stability and reliability even when there are unexpected peaks in traffic. On top of using the LXC, SiteGround’s team of developers have written customized code to further improve overall performance.

Other technology features that give SiteGround a competitive edge with regards to uptime include

• Pro-active server monitoring to ensure any potential server problems are spotted and fixed fast.
• Automatic Backup System and Instant Backups On Demand
• Anti-bot artificial intelligence to increased demand caused by bots
• Secure Account Isolation

Bluehost on the other hand also has equally powerful state-of-the-art software and expertise that helps keep your site online almost always. First, all of its servers run on a Tier 3 certification (highest level is Tier 4).

This improves uptime reliability and better redundancy capabilities.

In fact, Bluehost’s projected downtime is a low 1.6 hours in a full year. Other hardware features that boost Bluehost’s 99.98% uptime guarantee include

• Quad-processor servers for the utmost speed.
• Constant power supply with a diesel generator for backup.
• Mirrored storage backup so that there’s always an updated copy of your site’s data available even if there is some kind of data loss.

Unlike SiteGround, Bluehost doesn’t offer any compensation to back its uptime guarantee claim. They do however promise in their Server Uptime Agreement to fix any server issues within 15 minutes to get your site back online.

If the problem is serious, they have clearly stated it may take more than 15 minutes to repair.

That however doesn’t mean they don’t deliver on their service claim as many independent bloggers and site owners testify about how impressive Bluehost’s uptime is.

Both Bluehost and SiteGround offer impressive uptime stats. But which provider has the winning edge?

Winner: SiteGround

SiteGround’s iron-clad compensation offer combined with its use of LXC technology as well as constant site-monitoring give it the upper hand when it comes to uptime.

The fact that they’re confident enough to offer free hosting if they don’t deliver on their claim shows how much confidence they have in their own capabilities.

Security Measures.

Once you’re storing any kind of information or content online, you’ll need to pay attention to security.

Whether it’s a blog, online store or a new consulting business you’re starting, security is one of the key requirements to maintaining privacy and keeping your information out of the wrong hands.

In 2019, over $3.5 billion dollars worth of damages was caused by cybercrime alone. According to the University of Maryland, hackers attack every 39 seconds, on average 2,244 times a day. Simply put, you can’t take your website’s security for granted.

Both Bluehost and SiteGround offer above-standard security and data protection to help protect your information from malicious attacks and hackers. We’ll look at both service providers in terms of physical/hardware protection and then software-based protection.

The standard way to offer protection to anyone visiting your site is with a secure encrypted connection via SSL certificates.

These digital certificates authenticate a website and provide an additional layer of encryption especially when it comes to entering personal details like credit card information. Both Bluehost and SiteGround offer standard SSL encryption on all their plans.

Bluehost lets you choose an extra layer of encryption with its SiteLock feature for an additional $1.99/month. Apart from double encryption, you also get daily backups of your site’s data which reduces the risk of data loss in case of any eventualities.

Another common cyber threat is a DDoS attack or Distributed Denial of Service attack, which basically means hackers flooding your site with multiple requests at time so much so that it crashes.

Bluehost’s Security Features

Bluehost offers protection from this kind of cyberthreat using CloudFlare’s protection. Apart from CloudFlare, it also lets you

• Password-protect your directories.
• Blacklist IP addresses that post spam comments or attempt to login to the back end of your site using tools like SpamAssasin
• Provide hotlink security as protection from data theft
• Two factor authentication with site logins to be sure its you

Impressive as Bluehost’s list is, SiteGround offers comparably strong security features to ensure your website is safe. First off is physical protection of where your data is stored. They pull out all the stops to make sure it is physically near impossible to access data from their data centers.

SiteGround’s Security Features

SiteGround offers round the clock security at all its data sites, complete with biometric verification at all entry points and bulletproof lobbies. To further protect their hardware, they use industrial standard UPS machines for surge and power outage protection.

Like Bluehost, you’ll also get free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates with all plans, which is the industry standard for site security in recent times. Some providers sell SSL certificates as an add-on feature for up to $30/month.

Another unique security feature SiteGround offers is their A.I powered anti-bot system that’s designed specifically to protect its clients from brute force attacks.

Brute force attacks are multiple trial and error attempts to guess passwords, encrypted details or access hidden content on your site.

The A.I system has stopped in excess of 1.5 million brute force attacks and also helps free up more space for better performance. Other security features include

• Automated daily and on-demand advanced site backups
• Double firewalls with custom security rules.
• Native proprietary malware detector HackAlert to notify web admins of any suspicious activity or potential site attacks
• CloudFlare CDN protection from DDoS attacks
• CHROOT account isolation
• SiteLock website checker for malware.
• Most recent PHP 7.2 update

So which service provider offers more value especially in relation to security?

Winner: Bluehost

This is almost too close to call. With multiple custom security solutions, A.I powered anti-bot security and physical data center protection that is almost unrivalled, SiteGround gives you sterling website security.

But Bluehost’s free daily backups and additional SiteLock feature for less than SiteGround’s hosting plan prices mean you can get more for less, giving Bluehost the winning edge.

Which cPanel is Better

Your website’s cPanel is where you actually run and manage your online presence. Think of it as the personnel only part of a banking hall.

Depending on how easy to use your cPanel is and your level of tech experience, there is a lot you can do to change your front end from there.

It is a standard platform that usually operates on Linux based web hosting servers and is the industry standard for back end web site control.

Generally, what an ideal cPanel experience is can be subjective since it depends on the end user. However, both service providers have tried to make their user interfaces more intuitive and beginner-friendly.

SiteGround’s back end is pretty clear and crisp, offering you a plethora of options to choose from right from the login page. Finding what you need is relatively simple, and you wouldn’t need to dig around for anything.

Here’s how SiteGround’s cPanel looks like

What’s even better is SiteGround is working to further personalize and simplify the backend experience using their own version of cPanel called Site Tool. It gives you more customization options compared to standard cPanel, plus you can add collaborators to your site.

This means you can revoke or grant restricted access to parts of your website which is useful for teams. On top of their custom cpanel, SiteGround has created a unique staging tool to help you test any changes you want to make to your website in a test environment.

This feature is especially useful for advanced users and developers who customize their websites using code. It is available for WordPress and Joomla based websites.

Testing out changes to your site in a test environment will help you determine beforehand if the changes you plan to make to your site’s code will help improve the site or make it malfunction.

Bluehost’s backend and cPanel comparatively are actually simple, clear and straightforward. Everything you need is clearly displayed in plain sight as well so there is no need to dig around.

It’s clear and straightforward back end makes it easy to find where the cPanel feature is.

Here’s how Bluehost’s cPanel looks like:

Bluehost provides it’s on unique cPanel experience by offering easy 1-click content management platform installations and a simple custom interface that simplifies everything. This feature is available for WordPress, Magento, Joomla and several other platforms.

If you were to look at many Bluehost reviews, the ease of use of their backend is the one thing that runs through most of them.

Some people may feel the ads and app advertisements on the backend of Bluehost take away from the overall user experience, but that is a matter of personal preference.

Winner: Bluehost

Ease of use experience is really subjective. Both Bluehost and SiteGround have relatively simple and clutter-free control panels that are beginner-friendly, but Bluehost’s cPanel looks a little less overwhelming than SiteGround’s backend.

The difference in your user experience will be determined by what you need the interface to do.

Advanced webmasters and developers may find SiteGround better suited for their needs.

Customer Service and Technical Support

When it comes to web hosting, customer and tech support can be a gamechanger. The importance of having a super responsive and helpful customer support service from your hosting provider can’t be stressed enough.

Whether you’re a new website owner or a large website admin, there will always be issues that you can’t independently resolve, be it by yourself or with your own tech support team.

Only your web hosting provider will be able to solve those issues and that’s why a responsive support team counts.

You’ll need technical support that can help you out when things go wrong on your website with little to know waiting time. Some hosting providers even go as far to guarantee response times, for example Liquid Web.

Both Bluehost and SiteGround do very well in this aspect. SiteGround offers a wait time of 10 minutes or less for live-support tickets which is decent. If you call customer support or request chat assistance, that happens in real-time.

In fact, many raving SiteGround reviews mention their excellent customer service as one of the highlights of using their hosting.

If you subscribe to their higher-tier hosting plans like the Go Geek and GrowBig, you’ll receive priority customer support as well.

They keep a large number of well-trained customer support staff just to maintain the shortest possible response time. Their most recent best customer support award is further proof of this.

Bluehost offers live customer support via chat and phone too. A unique support feature to Bluehost is their free expert consultation, pre-sales and sales strategies.

However, live support tickets may take longer to get resolved as that depends on how many other requests are queued up.

Also there are a fair number of customer complaints about the staff not being knowledgeable in hosting issues which meant the complaint had to be transferred to a different department with higher expertise for resolution.

This delayed problem resolutions by an additional 24 – 48 hours due just because of the transfer queueing up after others.

Winner: SiteGround

When it comes to customer support for your online business, time is of the essence.

SiteGround’s 10-minute ticket response time and insightful customer support staff will provide you with a much needed sigh of relief when things don’t work as planned with your website.

Bluehost vs Siteground: Which Web Host is Better for Beginners?

If you’re just starting out a blog, personal website or podcast site, chances are you don’t have much experience with managing a website.

Likewise if you’re a growing business with new staff who aren’t necessarily technical staff, you’ll need a web hosting provider that is easy to use.

Both Bluehost and SiteGround could work just fine for beginners, but Bluehost has the upper hand here. If you’re starting out with a new website, you may not exactly have a big budget for hosting.

Bluehost’s affordable plans provide enough powerful features at pocket friendly prices to help you build your online presence. Plus, migrating from one plan to another as your business grows is simple, thanks to the built-in scalability with Bluehost’s plans.

SiteGround offers a 30-day money back guarantee plus a range of services to make getting started easy, like domain privacy protection and domain. These services are however not free. But you do get easy integration with various content management platforms like WordPress.

Bluehost also offers a 30-day money back guarantee plus a free domain for a year. You get free migration for basic websites. For advanced or WordPress sites, it costs $149.99 to migrate five sites which is a fair price.

The major factor that influences beginner-friendliness is the control panel. Control panels to the inexperienced can seem overwhelming but Bluehost’s control panel is easy to use and well organized.

Everything is visually appealing and in plain sight with no redundant icons to cause clutter.

Other than that, Bluehost’s cPanel user interface is also extremely user-friendly. You get plenty of white space, and the use of different colors is low, which adds to its visual appeal and enhances the user experience.

The overall interface is not cluttered with icons, making it easy for beginners to navigate.

Winner: Bluehost

Clutter-free, easy to navigate and straight forward, Bluehosts cPanel is easy to understand. That plus pocket-friendly prices make it ideal for anyone who is just getting started with their website.

WordPress Integration.

WordPress is a popular website builder used by over 30% of websites globally. It's easy text editor, large plugin market and community support make it the preferred choice of most new website owners. Thus having a seamless WordPress integration is almost mandatory now.

Some hosting providers don’t necessarily make integrating WordPress on your site easy. But both Bluehost and SiteGround make this process as simple as clicking a button through 1-click installations.

They are both part of the three web hosting companies officially recommended by WordPress.

Bluehost takes it a step further and has Optimized WordPress hosting designed to provide WordPress specific solutions to its users. Everything on its WordPress hosting plan including the customer support for that plan are created to offer WordPress specific solutions.

Bluehost’s offers both Shared and VPS WordPress hosting. This means you get to choose what kind of WordPress hosting is right for your budget.

The VPS hosting option lets you enjoy the benefits of not having to share as many resources with other websites on a server. You literally have a slice of the server to yourself.

The amount of resources like storage and bandwidth you get depend on which of the plans you choose. A fair number of Bluehost reviews especially from start-ups mention how helpful their VPS hosting is for business.

Other WordPress features Bluehost offers include

• A 1-click staging area (currently a beta version of it) where you can experiment with how changes to your site will look.
• More space and bandwidth to scale your business over time.
• Stability much less reduced risk of downtime.
• Improved security because of less shared resources.

Bluehost however doesn’t give you automatic updates and a caching system, so you’ll have to update your plugins manually to keep them up to date. WordPress site migration also comes at a fee of $30 per site.

SiteGround also offers WordPress hosting that is designed to help you make the most of the platform. The difference is their advanced WordPress hosting is cloud-based which makes it faster and more efficient, all though it may cost a little more.

If you’re not sure how well cloud-based hosting will work for you, just check out some SiteGround reviews

As part of its WordPress hosting, you get free WordPress migration, which other service providers may charge for.

Apart from free migration, you’ll get automatic updates using their custom WP migrator tool and other great tools for WordPress too. In fact, SiteGround claims their SG optimizer plugin can give you up to 200% to 300% increased performance on your website.

Other features SiteGround offers in relation to WordPress integration are

• In-built cache system
• Automatic plugin update
• Use of their staging tool with their GrowBig plan or GoGeek plan to test any modifications made to your website in a safe test environment.
• Free WordPress site migration.

So in a nutshell

• Both the web hosting providers provide sizable bandwidths, free SSL certificates, FTP and SFTP accounts, a free SSL certificate, and more.
• You get a little more with SiteGround’s auto plugin updates, Git access, SG optimizer and free WordPress migration, but you’ll pay a little more.
• Bluehost provides larger storage options, is more user-friendly and budget-friendly too.

Winner: It’s a Draw

Both hosts have 1-click WordPress integration and are recommended by WordPress. Bluehost gives you more space and a friendlier price while SiteGround gives you more automation and technological perks at a higher price.

Hosting Plans & Pricing Comparison

One of the biggest distinguishing factors when it comes to choosing web hosts is price, especially for those new to web hosting or just starting up an online business.

There are lots of web hosting companies with different features to choose from so it pays to do your research well and figure out what your business really needs. If you’re on a budget, check out our review of cheap shared web hosting providers.

If your business needs more advanced web hosting, you can check out our dedicated web hosting providers review.

Bluehost and Siteground both offer competitively priced web hosting plans with excellent features. Both offer

• Shared Web hosting plans
• WordPress hosting plans
• Dedicated Server hosting plans

Siteground has Cloud, Woocommerce and Enterprise hosting plans for businesses while Bluehost has VPS and Reseller Hosting plans for businesses looking to sell hosting.

Both companies offer pretty impressive specs with their hosting plans too, including but not limited to free CDNs, speedy caching, SSL certificates,DDoS protection, and money-back guarantees.

But depending on the kind of hosting plan you choose, you may get other plan-specific features like storage, bandwidth and subdomains.

Bluehost's pricing runs on the cheaper end of the spectrum. In fact it has built its reputation around offering cheap, user-friendly yet powerful hosting, thus most of its plans are lower compared to SiteGround.

In spite of that, SiteGround offers a number of advanced features that more than make up for the price difference.

Bluehost Pricing

Shared Hosting Plans:

VPS Hosting Plans:

Dedicated Hosting Plans:

Siteground Pricing

Shared Hosting Plans:

WordPress Hosting Plans:

Cloud Hosting Plans:

SiteGround’s pricing is a little bit on the high side of most standard web hosts but its slew of features make it well worth the price.

All plans come with

• unmetered traffic meaning you won’t pay overage fees for traffic spikes,
• free email,
• daily back ups,
• free CDN,
• free SSL,
• managed WordPress and unlimited databases.

Winner: Bluehost

SiteGround offers some pretty impressive specs with its managed WordPress across all plans and unlimited databases.

But for a lower price tag and a user-friendly onboarding experience, Bluehost provides just about the same standard of powerful hosting features including unlimited SSD storage and free CDN.

Bluehost vs Siteground: Pros and Cons

Choosing the correct web hosting company for your business is critical to the success of your business. Web hosting is the foundation of building anything successful online. Your customer experience, conversions and page rank with Google all depend on it.

We’ve compared most of the features of these two web hosting giants and they seem to be pretty much neck and neck. So let’s compare their perks and downsides to get a better picture.

Bluehost Review

Bluehost is the perfect jumping pad to get started with owning and running your personal website, blog or online store. You get ease of use and budget-friendliness as the major perks here.

Pros

• Free domain for a year and free SSL with every plan.
• Complete DDoS protection from CloudFlare.
• Free CDN
• 30-day money back guarantee.
• User-friendly and clear cPanel
• Full suite of hosting plans for personal and commercial online needs including reseller hosting and dedicated hosting.
• 24/7 customer support all year round
• Seamless integration with popular website builders like WordPress and Joomla.
• Unlimited storage and bandwidth on all plans higher than its basic shared hosting plan.

Cons

Some of Bluehost’s major pitfalls include

• Extended customer support response time during peak traffic period and near indefinite response time for tickets during high demand.
• No auto updates for plugins or automatic backups.
• Zero compensation for downtime due to either a service interruption or a fault.
• Migrating multiple websites can end up being expensive because it's $30 a piece.
• Data location centers are unknown, even though there’s 20 of them.

Siteground Review

For the tech enthusiasts, developers and big commerce giants, SiteGround’s top notch features powered tech will help you customize and create the perfect website.

Pros

• Fast page loading speeds with an iron clad uptime guarantee.
• Very responsive and helpful customer support team, with quick resolution times.
• Free daily back ups and automated plugin updates.
• Fully HTTP/2 enabled servers which further boosts loading time and speed
• In-built caching mechanism called Geeky Super Cacher powered by NGINX
• Free CDN for faster site loading times
• Data centers are well distributed globally for speed.
• Protection from DDoS attacks.
• Updated to PHP 7 which is the most recent version of WordPress.
• Built on Linux contain technology
• Free SSL and max physical security to physical server center to prevent data theft.

SiteGround has more technical muscle to its hosting but it's not designed for everyone.

Cons

• More expensive hosting plans for less storage.
• Some features may be a bit advanced for new users.
• No built-in IP address
• Website visit limit on all plans
• Little support for novices and the DIY community.

Clearly SiteGround has its target user-market which may not be as broad as Bluehost’s making it less likely to appeal to many people.

Bluehost vs Siteground FAQ

Should You Use Bluehost or Siteground for Your Website?

It’s clear both web hosts have some amazing features to offer and technically speaking have the same standards when it comes to security, WordPress integration, performance and offering the latest technology to their users.

However both are intended for two different kinds of website users.

Bluehost is ideal for people who are just starting out online with little to no tech experience and perhaps are just trying to create a blog or personal website. It’s ease-of-use and lower prices make it ideal for new sites and beginners.

SiteGround on the other hand is better suited for experienced webmasters or those who have previously owned websites that are growing and need more firepower. It’s developer and technology rich features will best be used by people with some kind of tech experience.

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