Comparison Review: SiteGround or Bluehost?
Do you find it difficult to decide between SiteGround vs Bluehost for hosting?
We understand your struggle, which is why we’ve created this in-depth, data-backed comparison of these two popular web hosting providers.
Regardless of whether you’re in charge of a successful company with a long history that desperately needs to establish an online presence before it loses touch with younger audiences or you’re someone who would like to escape the 9-to-5 grind and live as an independent freelancer working for clients from all around the world, you need a reliable web hosting provider to put your website on the web.
This SiteGround vs Bluehost comparison is divided into several sections, and each section has its own conclusion, so you don’t need to read this entire monster article if you’re in a hurry.
Who Is SiteGround?
SiteGround is a successful web hosting company that was founded in 2004 in Sofia, Bulgaria. To this day, SiteGround has remained completely independent, which means that it isn’t owned and controlled by some parent company that may or may not have the best interest of its customers in mind.
At the time of writing this article, SiteGround has around 500 employees, hosts nearly 2 million domains worldwide, and provides a broad range of hosting services, including shared hosting, cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, and dedicated server hosting.
Who Is BlueHost?
Even though Bluehost is just a year older than SiteGround, it’s a significantly larger web hosting company that powers more than 2 million websites all over the world and employs 750+ people.
Unlike SiteGround, Bluehost isn’t an independent web hosting company because it’s owned by Endurance International Group (EIG), which is a massive company headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts whose business revolves around strategic acquisitions of smaller companies, which it then continues to operate under their original brand names. EIG currently owns over 80 brands, which wouldn’t be sustainable if it didn’t provide them with a fair degree of autonomy.
Hosting Popularity Contest
When it comes to popularity, Google Trends tells a clear story: Bluehost has been significantly more popular than SiteGround for many years now. However, notice that SiteGround is slowly but surely catching up with it for reasons that will become obvious very soon.
Of course, popularity isn’t a reliable indicator of the quality of a web hosting service. In fact, popularity and hosting services more often than not don’t mix well. Large web hosting companies with high volumes of customers often struggle to balance growth and customer service, and they compensate for it by offering web hosting at discount prices.
Beginners with no previous experience with web hosting have the tendency to jump at the opportunity to host their websites without spending much money, but they often regret it when they figure out that their web hosting provider of choice doesn’t really care about them too much.
We’re not saying that SiteGround is inherently a better choice just because it’s less popular than Bluehost. What we’re saying is that going with the crowd often means that you get just average value for your money. That’s why you should always do your research and identify which web hosting service for you because that’s the only way how to avoid web hosting problems. And since you’re reading this article, it’s safe to say that you’re already on the right path.
Hosting Popularity Winner
Bluehost: If web hosting were a popularity contest, Bluehost would definitely place above SiteGround.
BlueHost Vs SiteGround: Pricing Plans
Both SiteGround and Bluehost offer a broad range of web hosting options, and we’ll talk about all of them later in this article, but we want to start with a brief SiteGround vs Bluehost shared hosting pricing comparison since that’s the most popular web hosting option there is.
SiteGround Hosting Pricing
- StartUp for $14.99 a month ($6.99 a month for the first term with our SiteGround coupon): Includes 1 website, 10 GB of storage space, and 10,000 monthly visits. SiteGround advertises the following features of the StartUp plan: site builder, SSL and HTTPS, email accounts, CloudFlare CDN, daily backups, 24/7 support, 30-days money-back guarantee, unmetered traffic, unlimited MySQL, cPanel, and SSH.
- GrowBig for $24.99 a month ($9.99 a month for the first term): Includes unlimited websites, 20 GB of storage space, and unlimited bandwidth. SiteGround advertises the following features of the GrowBig plan: all features included in the StartUp plan plus free site transfer, SuperCacher, advanced on-demand backups, and WordPress and Joomla staging.
- GoGeek for $39.99 a month ($14.99 a month for the first term): Includes unlimited websites, 30 GB of storage space, and 100,000 monthly visits. SiteGround advertises the following features of the GoGeek plan: all features included in StartUp and GrowBig plans plus advanced priority support, more powerful servers, PCI-compliant servers, and one-click Git repository creation.
Bluehost Hosting Pricing
- Basic for $7.99 a month ($2.95 a month for the first term with our Bluehost discount code): Includes 1 website, 50 GB of storage space, and unlimited bandwidth. Bluehost advertises the following features of the Basic plan: SSL certificate, standard performance, 1 included domain, 5 parked domains, and 25 sub-domains.
- Plus for $10.99 a month ($5.95 a month for the first term): Includes unlimited websites, unlimited storage, and unlimited bandwidth. Bluehost advertises the following features of the Plus plan: all features included in the Basic plan plus unlimited domains, unlimited parked domains, unlimited sub-domains, $200 marketing offer, spam experts, and a free trial of Office 365 Mailbox.
- Choice Plus for $14.99 a month ($5.95 a month for the first term): Includes unlimited websites, unlimited storage, and unlimited bandwidth. Bluehost advertises the following features for the Choice Plus plan: all features included in Basic and Plus plans plus domain privacy, and site backup.
- Pro for $23.99 a month ($13.95 a month for the first term): Includes unlimited websites, unlimited storage, and unlimited bandwidth. Bluehost advertises the following features for the Pro plan: all features included in Basic, Plus, and Choice Plus plans plus high performance, 2 spam experts, and dedicated IP.
As you can see, SiteGround’s pricing is slightly higher, and it doesn’t offer any unlimited plans. However, Bluehost doesn’t actually offer any truly unlimited plans as well even though it says it does. How so? Because what Bluehost calls “unlimited” or “unmetered” is just a vague marketing term whose real meaning is that Bluehost doesn’t give its users a specific limit.
Because many Bluehost customers have received an email from the web hosting provider asking them to upgrade their account despite running fairly basic websites without too many visitors, it’s estimated that the real limit is actually quite small. We don’t know about you, but we would much rather know exactly where we stand instead of having some ambiguous limit hanging over our heads.
SiteGround doesn’t offer a free domain name with any of their web hosting plans, but you can easily register one starting from $15.95 a year. Most web hosting providers, including Bluehost, do offer a free domain name to new customers, but their offers are almost always limited to the first year of service, so you don’t really save that much money, especially in the long run.
Unsurprisingly, both SiteGround and Bluehost include unlimited email with most plans, allowing their customers to easily set up forwarders and aliases, allocate email storage space, and connect third-party email clients. The two web hosting providers also let their customers create as many FTP accounts as they need and connecting suing SFTP isn’t a problem.
Regardless of how you choose after reading this SiteGround vs Bluehost comparison, you always get a 30-day money-back guarantee that gives you the right to request a refund anytime. Just keep in mind that SiteGround and Bluehost don’t refund add-on products, which includes domain names, so you might want to limit your initial purchase and extend your plan with add-ons only when you’re sure that you’ve found a web hosting service you want to stick with.
Hosting Pricing Winner
Bluehost: Being a larger company, Bluehost can afford to keep its prices low, especially when it comes to web hosting plans aimed at beginners.
SiteGround Vs BlueHost: Features
SiteGround and Bluehost offer far more functionality than your average web hosting provider, including many value-added features intended to make your life easier and your web hosting experience smoother.
Who Has The Best Website Builder?
It goes without saying that SiteGround and Bluehost work seamlessly with all popular content management systems, including WordPress, but they also feature Weebly-based site builders. Weebly is a San Francisco-based website builder that makes it easy to build a website, blog, or online store without any coding skills required, offering hundreds of pre-made templates for customization.
To use SiteGround’s implementation of Weebly, all you need to do is log in to your account and enable it from User Area > My Accounts > Sitebuilder tab for any of your domains. To use Bluehost’s implementation of Weebly, log in to your cPanel account and scroll down to the “Site Builders” section, where you need to select the domain you want to use and click login to get started. If you’re familiar with Weebly, you will feel right at home when using both SiteGround’s and Bluehost’s site builder.
Comparing Hosting Control Panels
SiteGround and Bluehost offer cPanel-based hosting control panels that share more similarities than differences. Bluehost has dressed its hosting control panel in a stylish theme and added its own custom WordPress admin dashboard to make things easier for its users, while SiteGround is using a much older cPanel theme with a significantly higher information density.
We can see why experienced web administrators gravitate toward SiteGround’s hosting control panel, but we believe that Bluehost’s custom dashboard is a boon for beginners who are still figuring things out and need all the help they can get when building and administering websites. We just wish Bluehost would tone it down a bit with the constant upsell nags, which are seemingly everywhere.
Auto Installers
Being able to install popular content management systems with one click is without a doubt one of the most convenient web hosting features ever, and we’re happy to report that both SiteGround and Bluehost include the usual repertoire of auto installers.
SiteGround uses a third-party auto installer script called Softaculous, which offers makes it possible to install more than 230 different applications with just a few clicks. SiteGround customers can access the script right from cPanel. Once logged into Softaculous, you can simply select an application from the list located in the left column and follow the steps given in the Install tab. What’s also great about Softaculous is that it can automatically keep your applications updated, which means you don’t need to worry about manually installing security patches and bug fixes.
Bluehost provides auto installers via Marketplace, which can be accessed right from cPanel. To install, for example, WordPress, all you need to do is find the Website section, select Install WordPress, choose the domain name to install it to, and provide the email address, username and password for the new WordPress installation.
WordPress Support
WordPress support is another highly desired web hosting feature, which is hardly a surprise considering that WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, powering over 75 million websites.
While you can expect WordPress to run just about everywhere since its requirements—at least in its stock configuration—are fairly modest, don’t expect all web hosting providers to be equally good at WordPress hosting.
We’ve already established that both SiteGround and Bluehost provide convenient WordPress auto installers, but what other WordPress-related features do they offer? Well, SiteGround has its in-house caching system called SuperCacher, which provides several layers of catching to give WordPress sites a noticeable performance boost. With GrowBig and GoGeek plans, SiteGround also provides its WordPress and Joomla users with an easy-to-use staging tool that they can use to create and manage development copies of their websites.
Did You Know?
WordPress has strict and stringent testing processes before recommending web hosts to support their platform. Both SiteGround and BlueHost are recommended by WordPress among a couple of others on the WordPress website.
Because Bluehost has neither an in-house catching solution nor staging tool, it’s far less WordPress-friendly than SiteGround—at least when it comes to shared hosting. This alone could be a deal-breaker for serious WordPress users, but it’s not something beginners and regular users should worry about. There are plenty of third-party WordPress catching plugins that can replace SuperCacher, and the same can be said about staging.
We should mention that Bluehost has a fully managed WordPress hosting plan called WP Pro, which does include support for staging and is designed with high-demand WordPress sites in mind. WP Pro starts at $19.95 per month, and it elevates server resources and customer support beyond what’s included in Bluehost’s shared hosting.
Site Transfer
Transferring an established site to a different web hosting service can be a huge pain since there are a hundred little things that can go wrong. SiteGround has figured out that customers hate site transfers so much that they would much rather choose a web hosting provider that is willing to migrate their site for them, even if the provider charges slightly more for its services. That’s why SiteGround offers to migrate 1 website completely for free.
Bluehost offers a site transfer service as well, but not for free. Instead, it charges its customers $149.99 to migrate up to 5 websites and 20 email accounts from a single account with their old hosting company. That’s a lot of money for something freelancers on sites like Fiverr charge just a few dollars, and we’re not sure if we would be willing to pay premium just to have someone from Bluehost migrate our site instead of an independent freelancer.
Hosting Features Winner
SiteGround: There are many things SiteGround and Bluehost do equally well, but SiteGround outperforms Bluehost regarding the number of features it offers.
SiteGround Vs BlueHost: Magento Hosting
Bluehost does not market themselves as a Mangento host, but rather focuses on their strong shared hosting platform, WordPress hosting capabilities, and their Virtual Private Server Hosting (VPS). However, Bluehost does offer Magento installation and server configuration via their VPS plans. The Bluehost VPS platform offers the premium capabilities of a dedicated server but at the affordable price point Bluehost is known for. This platform runs cPanel, but with a slick UI that leverages powerful additional features and is customized for seamless management. The custom Bluehost admin panel offers easy one-click installation for Magento, as well as WordPress and Drupal.
SiteGround markets themselves as a Magento hosting company, with free Magento 2 installation on a Magento optimized server. These servers include free CDN, free daily backups, ultra-fast SSD drives, and their stellar 24/7 support team. If you are looking to leverage Magento Community Edition SiteGround offers expert support for Magento installation, setup and store management. For those just getting started on building their online shop, SiteGround offers optimized Magento hosting on their most affordable shared hosting plans (starting from just $3.95/month!). SiteGround really takes Magento hosting to heart, ensuring your Magento CE store is fast, safe, and expertly supported.
SiteGround also has excellent and well documented Magento tutorials; everything from Magento installation to theme setup to advanced store configurations to optimize your user experience. These include product configurations, shipment tracking options, coupon code and promotion management, and more!
Magento Hosting Winner
SiteGround: If you’re wondering whether to go with SiteGround vs Bluehost Magento hosting, SiteGround is the clear winner.
SiteGround Vs BlueHost: Speed & Performance
The last thing you want is to select a web hosting service that’s so slow that it convinces even the most devoted visitors you have to go somewhere else. Well, here’s good news for you: that will happen with neither SiteGround nor Bluehost. That said, we’re not saying that the two web hosting services perform the same, and this SiteGround vs Bluehost comparison wouldn’t be complete without their comprehensive performance overview.
Storage Speed
SiteGround and Bluehost use SSDs for storage, which are much faster and more reliable than traditional hard drives. Modern SSDs are able to achieve data transfer speeds of around 560 MB/s, while the performance ceiling of HDDs is somewhere around 120 MB/s. Believe it or not, but there are still some web hosting providers that keep their customers’ data stored on HDDs even though SSDs have been readily available for years now.
- PHP: In addition to fully embracing the latest storage technology, SiteGround has already upgraded to the latest version of PHP, whereas Bluehost is still running PHP 7.0. If you don’t know, PHP is a general-purpose programming language originally designed for web development, and newer versions of PHP contain many performance enhancements that are not present in older versions. What’s more, web applications have their own PHP requirements, and you may come across an application that won’t run on without the latest versions of PHP present. At the time of writing this SiteGround vs Bluehost comparison, SiteGround has already rolled out PHP 7.3, which is able to process as much as 3x more requests per second than previous PHP version. That’s a huge difference in performance that Bluehost customers are deprived of because Bluehost apparently likes to take its sweet time with technology updates.
- QUIC Technology: Due to Bluehost’s sluggish nature, support for QUIC, a new encrypted-by-default internet transport protocol that improves the performance of connection-oriented web applications that are currently using TCP, is nowhere in sight. SiteGround, on the other hand, was one of the first web hosting providers to introduce QUIC technology for their websites. It’s perhaps thanks to QUIC technology why SiteGround consistently outperforms Bluehost in performance benchmarks that analyze Time to First Byte, or TTFB, which is a performance metric that refers to how quickly the host’s server sends the first byte of data when responding to a request. SiteGround averages at around 300 ms, while Bluehost averages at more than 400 ms. Most SEO experts recommend a TTFB of 500 ms or less, so both SiteGround and Bluehost are fine in this regard, but you can be sure that less is always better.
Uptime
But what good are the latest and greatest performance-enhancing technologies when your web hosting service of choice is unavailable? Not good at all. That’s why uptime is one of the most critical performance metrics out there, and it’s also why we were curious to see how good SiteGround and Bluehost fare in this regard.
Back in 2018, Hostingfacts was monitoring 32 different web hosting companies and measuring their uptime via Pingdom. If you would like to see detailed uptime statistics for each of the 32 web hosting companies, we highly recommend you read this article. But if you’re interested in just SiteGround vs Bluehost, here’s a quick breakdown for you:
- Bluehost: average uptime of 99.991% with 7 outages and 52 minutes of total downtime per year.
- SiteGround: average uptime of 99.988% with 26 outages and 73 minutes of total downtime per year.
In other words, Bluehost users experienced 21 minutes of downtime less than SiteGround users, and they also experienced just 7 outages compared with 26. It seems then that Bluehost has a robust infrastructure that rarely goes down. But when it does go down, it stays down longer.
Since the middle of 2020, we’ve been monitoring the uptime of both SiteGround and BlueHost. As you can see SiteGround has provided us with 100% uptime in the last 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 days. The latest downtime was recorded in September 2020 and that was for a total of 44 minutes.
BlueHost has offered 100% uptime with zero outages since August 2020 which is absolutely incredible. Since most guides recommend aiming for an uptime of 99.95% or higher, both Bluehost and SiteGround pass with flying colors, but Bluehost does slightly better.
Server Locations
SiteGround proudly advertises the fact that it has data centers in four locations: US (Chicago), the UK (London), The Netherlands (Amsterdam) and Singapore. Bluehost isn’t too clear about its servers and their location. It’s widely known that it has a large data center in Utah and several data centers across the globe, but we don’t know exactly where they are located.
SiteGround lets its customers change the server location of their websites, which is a huge bonus for several reasons. First, it’s better for performance to host your website as close to your visitors as possible. Additionally, search engines prioritize local websites, so hosting your website is the same country where most of your visitors live is a great SEO strategy.
One might argue that the number and location of data centers matter a lot less in the day and age of readily available content delivery networks (CDNs) such as CloudFlare, which both SiteGround and Bluehost let their customers enable for free. A CDN like CloudFlare caches an up-to-date copy of your website across multiple servers in different parts of the world, always serving your traffic using the nearest server available.
Hosting Speed, Uptime & Network
Tie: SiteGround adopts state-of-the-art technologies to deliver its customers high-performance web hosting experience, while Bluehost leverages its robust infrastructure to ensure near-flawless availability.
SiteGround Vs BlueHost: Security
There are many online threats that threaten web owners, which is why it’s paramount to choose a web hosting service that deeply cares about the security of its customers. We’re very happy to say that both SiteGround and Bluehost support SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt, which is a non-profit certificate authority run by Internet Security Research Group that provides X.509 certificates for Transport Layer Security encryption at no charge. By enabling encryption on your website with Let’s Encrypt, you can not only protect the privacy of your visitors, but you can also improve your SEO rankings.
For $1.50 extra a month, you can purchase SiteGround’s SG Site Scanner to have your website regularly scanned for security issues. The scanner, powered by Sucuri, scans all the pages that are linked on your website homepage and notifies you immediately if it detects any issues. Bluehost offers a similar security solution, called SiteLock, and it can automatically scan your website for malware to ensure they are not being blocked or spammed.
In addition to proactive security monitoring, it’s also a good idea to always be ready for the worst, which means having multiple reliable backups ready at all times. SiteGround keeps daily copies of websites for the last 30 days and restoring a website from a backup takes just a couple of seconds. You can even download backups of your site straight from SiteGround’s cPanel and create backups on demand thanks to the Backup on Demand feature, available with the GrowBig and GoGeek plans.
Bluehost also backs up its customers’ websites at regular intervals and makes it easy to restore from backups. Bluehost’s backup tool lets you download backups of your files to your desktop, and it even lets you select individual files or groups of files and folders you want to recover, which comes in handy in situations where you only need to restore a few specific files. All in all, both SiteGround and Bluehost leave very little to be desired as far as automatic backups go.
Hosting Security
Tie: We don’t think you have a reason to worry about your security regardless of whether you choose SiteGround or Bluehost.
SiteGround Vs BlueHost: Scalability
Your web hosting service of choice should be able to grow with you and your needs. Shared web hosting may be great for getting a website up and running while spending as little money as possible, it will only get you so far before you start encountering serious performance bottlenecks that are guaranteed to make it very difficult for you to maintain a healthy growth rate.
The good news is that shared web hosting isn’t the only web hosting option SiteGround and Bluehost offer:
- SiteGround Cloud Hosting: This highly flexible and fully managed hosting option starts at $80 a month and comes with 24/7 VIP customer support. The main selling point of SiteGround’s cloud hosting platform is that you can start with the most affordable plan and seamlessly scale up or down depending on your current needs.
- SiteGround Dedicated Servers: If you need more resources and don’t want to share them with others, SiteGround’s dedicated hosting is a great choice, and it starts at $240 a month. In addition to providing you with a high-class dedicated machine set up and managed by SiteGround’s experts, you also get access to proprietary software to boost your server performance.
- SiteGround Enterprise Hosting: If your hosting needs are so big that no ready-made hosting plan can satisfy them, SiteGround can build a bespoke hosting solution just for you so you can benefit from its world-class infrastructure and technological expertise. Just don’t expect it to be cheap because all bespoke enterprise hosting solutions come with a hefty price tag.
- Bluehost WP Pro: Aimed at serious WordPress users who want a staging environment that allows them to test websites before publishing, build an unlimited number of websites, and never have to worry about traffic limits, WP Pro is Bluehost’s best managed WordPress hosting, and it starts at just $19.95 a month.
- Bluehost Dedicated Servers: Dedicated hosting with Bluehost is available from $79.99 a month, but more expensive plans are available as well for those who want more power, storage space, and bandwidth. Dedicated hosting provides much greater control than shared or even cloud hosting, but it requires considerably more experience to manage.
- Bluehost VPS Hosting: Virtual private servers, or just VPS for short, are a great alternative to dedicated servers, offering nearly the same flexibility and performance at much more affordable prices. With VPS hosting, you rent a virtual machine that’s isolated from other virtual machines on the same server and uses a pool of hardware resources that are allocated solely to it.
Hosting Scalability
Tie: Despite how detailed our SiteGround vs Bluehost comparison is, you can clearly see that the two web hosting companies offer a lot more hosting options than we can cover here, allowing their customers to grow without any limitations.
SiteGround Vs BlueHost: Customer Support
When choosing a web hosting provider, customer support should be very high on your list of priorities. It makes no sense to save a few dollars each month by choosing a provider with more affordable plans only to spend $100 or more on third-party technical support because you’ve selected a provider that doesn’t really care about its customers and couldn’t really be bothered to support them.
Both SiteGround and Bluehost offer 24/7 support via phone, email (ticket) and live chat. CodeinWP, a hub for WordPress freelancers, bloggers, and creators, surveyed its visitors to find out which of the two web hosting companies providers better customers support, and the results speak for themselves:
SiteGround | Bluehost | |
---|---|---|
Overall Support Rating (Score out of 5) | 4.7 | 3.2 |
WordPress-Specific Support Rating (Score out of 5) | 4.5 | 3.4 |
Clearly, most people believe that SiteGround provides a superior customer support experience, and we can’t but agree with that assessment. While both SiteGround and Bluehost customer support staff respond quickly and are friendly, SiteGround’s support seem to more knowledgeable, and they’ve always helped us solve issues quickly and without too much back and forward.
Hosting Customer Support
SiteGround: It’s often said that smaller companies care more about their customers than large enterprises. Even though SiteGround is now anything but small, it still hasn’t forgotten the importance of high-quality customer service. siteground.com
SiteGround vs Bluehost Summary & Recommendation
- Popularity: Bluehost
- Plans and Pricing: Bluehost
- Hosting Features: SiteGround
- Performance: Tie
- Security: Tie
- Scalability: Tie
- Customer Support: SiteGround
As you can see, it’s a tie unless we take popularity out of the question. If we do, SiteGround becomes the winner of this SiteGround vs Bluehost comparison.
SiteGround Pros and Cons
SiteGround Pros | SiteGround Cons |
---|---|
A Weebly-based site builder | SiteGround doesn’t offer a free domain name with any of their web hosting plans |
Auto installers | More expensive |
Automatic WordPress updates | |
SuperCacher for better WordPress performance | |
One free site migration | |
SSD storage only | |
The latest PHP version | |
Support for QUIC technology | |
Manual data center selection | |
SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt |
Bluehost Pros and Cons
Bluehost Pros | Bluehost Cons |
---|---|
A Weebly-based site builder | SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt |
Easy-to-use cPanel | Bluehost doesn’t actually offer any truly unlimited plans as well even though it says it does |
Very affordable | Annoying upsells |
Auto installers | Underwhelming customer support |
SSD storage only | |
Fantastic uptime |
FAQs About SiteGround & Bluehost
Which web hosting service is easier to use?
Both SiteGround and Bluehost are largely geared toward beginners, so you shouldn’t have any problem figuring out how to use them. That said, Bluehost has redesigned its cPanel to be very user-friendly, making otherwise daunting admin tasks feel absolutely effortless.
How should I choose to get the best value for my money?
That really depends on how you define value. If you value state-of-the-art features and high-quality customer service, you should choose SiteGround. But if you value ease of use and availability, Bluehost is most likely the better choice. That said, both SiteGround and Bluehost deliver outstanding value for money for reasons which we’ve explained in detail in our SiteGround vs Bluehost comparison.
Which is better for WordPress? SiteGround or Bluehost?
If you don’t want to spend money on anything beyond basic shared web hosting, SiteGround is a better choice for WordPress. However, Bluehost has a fantastic managed WordPress hosting plan called WP Pro, which elevates server resources and customer support beyond what’s included in its shared hosting. While not all that expensive compared with its shared hosting, WP Pro does cost slightly more than what many beginners would most likely be willing to pay.
Can I change from SiteGround to Bluehost and vice versa?
Of course! In fact, SiteGround gives you one free site migration. With Bluehost, you need to migrate your site yourself, but the web hosting company has plenty detailed tutorials on its website to help you connect to your old host’s FTP and download all your files, then connect to the new host’s FTP and upload them there.
Will Endurance International Group ever acquire SiteGround?
SiteGround has been around for a very long time, and it has remained completely independent so far, which leads us to believe that it wouldn’t be willing to trade its independence for money, especially considering that it’s been gaining far more new customers than Bluehost in recent years. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised at all to see SiteGround make a strategic business acquisition of its own to strengthen its market position.
How to install WordPress on SiteGround hosting?
To install WordPress on SiteGround, sign in with your username and password and head over to the account section. Enter cPanel and select the WordPress icon. Click install and follow the installation instructions. After just a minute or two, your new WordPress installation should be ready, and all you need to do is log in to the admin section using the same login credentials you used during installation.
How to install WordPress on Bluehost?
Because Bluehost offers a one-click WordPress Installer just like SiteGround, all you need to do to install WordPress is log in to your Bluehost cPanel and locate the Install WordPress button in the Website section. Click on the button and follow the installation instructions.
The conclusion of this lengthy SiteGround vs Bluehost comparison is that there is no clear conclusion as to which of these two web hosting providers is better. If we were to take popularity out of the question, SiteGround would win by the smallest margin possible, and we’ve also found it to have more pros compared with Bluehost, offering impressive support for WordPress, great performance, manual data center selection, and state-of-the-art web hosting technologies. But it wouldn’t be fair to praise SiteGround without mentioning that its quite a bit more expensive than Bluehost and slightly less beginner friendly. In conclusion, we can only say that this battle of web hosting giants has a much closer result than we anticipated initially, and that’s good news for those who are not sure which one to choose because it’s impossible to choose wrong either way.
More Bluehost & SiteGround Comparisons
For more Bluehost & SiteGround comparisons, as well as the latest coupons and promotional deals, see the following articles: