Struggling to choose between SiteGround vs Bluehost for hosting your sites? I was too. So I signed up for both and then tested them head-to-head to find out which is better.
In this post, I’ll share the findings of this hands-on comparison and shed some light on the performance of these hosts to help you make the right choice for your needs.
SiteGround | Bluehost | |
---|---|---|
Price from | $2.99 / mo. | $1.99 / mo. |
Renewal from | $17.99 / mo. | $11.99 / mo. |
1 | 1 | |
Traffic (mo.) | ~ 10k-400k visits | ~ 15k-400k visits |
Disk Space | 10 GB | 10 GB |
Free Domain | ✅ | ✅ |
Email hosting | ✅ | ✅ |
24/7 Support | ✅ | ✅ |
WordPress setup process | Super easy – no tech knowledge needed | Super easy – no tech knowledge needed; also includes WonderSuite builder tools |
Free SSL | ✅ | ✅ |
Backups | Daily automated | Daily backups from 2nd tier plans |
1.23s (US) • 0.39s (EU) | 0.74s (US) • 0.59s (EU) | |
Uptime | 100% | 100% |
Datacenter locations | 11 | 5 |
Best for | Users who want to launch their site on WordPress, but prefer to have most server-related things handled for them. | Beginners looking to launch a website in an affordable way, with email hosting included for free and a domain name for the first year. |
Advantages over the other host | More managed experience for WordPress | Affordability and beginner-friendliness |
Go to SiteGround | Go to Bluehost |
SiteGround vs Bluehost (IN DETAIL)
Let’s look at these hosts in a couple of main areas:
Features ⚙️
Now, let’s compare the features in SiteGround vs Bluehost in a little more detail.
Here is the key to what the emojis mean:
- ❌ – the host does not offer this feature on any plan.
- ✅ – the host offers this feature on all of its plans.
- ✅💰 – the host offers this feature, but only on the higher-tier plans (or it’s an add-on that costs extra).
SiteGround | Bluehost | |
---|---|---|
Hosting dashboard | Custom SiteTools dashboard | cPanel + Custom dashboard |
WordPress installer | ✅ | ✅ |
Free SSL certificates | ✅ | ✅ |
Server-level caching | ✅ | ✅ |
Automatic daily backups | ✅ | ✅💰 |
Manual on-demand backups | ✅💰 | ✅💰 |
WordPress staging sites | ✅💰 | ✅ |
Custom CDN | ✅ | ✅💰 (SiteLock TrueSpeed CDN) |
Cloudflare CDN integration | ✅ | ✅ |
Free email hosting | ✅ | ✅ |
Malware scanning | ✅ | ✅💰 (SiteLock) |
Firewall | ✅ | ✅💰 (SiteLock) |
WP-CLI | ✅ | ✅ |
Free WooCommerce plugins | ❌ | ✅💰 |
Free performance plugin | ✅ | ❌ |
Total datacenter choices | 11 | 5 |
Datacenter(s) in North America | 4 – Iowa – Virginia – Texas – California |
1 – Utah |
Datacenter(s) in Europe | 5 – United Kingdom (London) – France (Paris) – Germany (Frankfurt) – Spain (Madrid) – Netherlands |
1 – United Kingdom (London) |
Datacenter(s) in Asia Pacific | 2 – Singapore – Australia (Sydney) |
3 – India (Mumbai) – China (Shanghai) – Hong Kong |
Go to SiteGround | Go to Bluehost |
As you can see, both SiteGround and Bluehost offer most of the important features that you need to host a WordPress site (or a different type of website).
However, Bluehost does charge extra for some key features, such as automatic backups. Even with that, Bluehost will still often work out to be cheaper than SiteGround. You could also avoid some of these upcharges by using plugins instead, such as a WordPress backup plugin.
Performance 📈
How quickly your website loads is important for creating a great user experience and maximizing your marketing efforts, so any SiteGround vs Bluehost performance differences should play an important role in your decision.
To put them to the test, we set up our own websites on both hosts and then subjected them to regular performance tests and uptime monitoring.
We’ve been running these ongoing tests for years now, which gives us lots of insights into the performance of both hosts.
Hands-on speed testing results
Here are the results of our hands-on performance testing for both SiteGround and Bluehost.
East Coast USA: 0.94s ⭐ | West Coast USA: 1.47s |
Central USA: 1.29s | London, UK: 0.43s ⭐ |
Paris, France: 0.35s ⭐ | Mumbai, India: 1.48s |
East Coast USA: 0.86s ⭐ | West Coast USA: 0.71s ⭐ |
Central USA: 0.64s ⭐ | London, UK: 0.69s ⭐ |
Paris, France: 0.49s ⭐ | Mumbai, India: 0.43s ⭐ |
In general, both hosts did pretty well in our performance tests, with load times well under two seconds for most locations that we run our tests from.
Hands-on uptime test results
To check uptime, we set up an uptime monitor for both hosts and let it run indefinitely.
Here’s our SiteGround vs Bluehost uptime data from the past few months:
July 2024 | August 2024 | September 2024 |
---|---|---|
100.00% ⭐ | 100.00% ⭐ | 99.99% |
See the live status page and historical data for SiteGround.
July 2024 | August 2024 | September 2024 |
---|---|---|
100.00% ⭐ | 100.00% ⭐ | 100.00% ⭐ |
See the live status page and historical data for Bluehost.
Overall, there’s no real difference when it comes to uptime, and both hosts performed quite well in our testing.
User experience 🧑💻
In general, both SiteGround and Bluehost offer a user-friendly experience for both non-technical and technical users.
Even if you’ve never made a WordPress site, you should have no problem setting one up with either host.
In terms of dashboards, however, there’s one big difference right away:
- SiteGround uses its own custom dashboard tool called Site Tools.
- Bluehost has also built some custom dashboard experiences, but Bluehost also gives you full access to cPanel.
If you’re not familiar with what cPanel is, it’s kind of the “standard” hosting dashboard experience that many hosts use. SiteGround used to offer cPanel, but SiteGround moved to its 100% custom Site Tools dashboard in 2020.
Which one is better? Well, it really depends on your personal preferences.
If you’re already familiar with cPanel and you’ve built some of its tools into your workflow, you might prefer Bluehost because you still get full cPanel access.
However, SiteGround’s Site Tools dashboard is plenty capable and gives you access to a lot of the same functionality that you’d get with cPanel.
To let you make your own decision, let’s take a hands-on look at the SiteGround vs Bluehost user experience and dashboards, including what it’s like to make a WordPress site at each.
SiteGround dashboard and user experience
SiteGround’s custom hosting dashboard is called Site Tools.
When you’re just getting started, you get a simple tool to install WordPress and set up your site – we cover it in detail in our guide on how to install WordPress on SiteGround.
From there, you can manage your individual sites in a dashboard that looks like this:
In the sidebar, you’ll find a range of different tools to manage areas like performance, security, backups, and so on.
For example, here’s what it’s like to use the backup system.
You can also pin your favorite tools to the top so that you can quickly access them, which is a nice bit of customization. You can see this in the first screenshot.
In general, most regular users will not feel like they’re limited in comparison to cPanel. For example, if you don’t feel like connecting to your server via FTP, SiteGround offers its own file manager tool, just like cPanel File Manager.
Bluehost dashboard and user experience
Bluehost’s dashboard is a mix of a custom interface as well as full cPanel access.
To create a new WordPress site, Bluehost offers a simple installer tool – our guide on how to install WordPress on Bluehost covers it in more detail.
You can either make a basic WordPress install or use Bluehost’s WonderSuite features to help you build a complete website.
Once you’ve set up your site, you get a dedicated dashboard for each site that lets you manage key areas:
- Overview – see basic details and access key areas like cPanel File Manager.
- Security – manage free SSL certificates and SiteLock (SiteLock costs extra).
- Backups – you can manage backups if you pay for CodeGuard (some plans offer a free year of CodeGuard, but it costs money after that).
- Plugins – manage all of the plugins on your site, including activating and updating plugins.
- Users – manage WordPress users, including resetting a user’s password.
- Speed – manage performance features, such as the built-in page caching and Cloudflare integration.
- Advanced – manage advanced details like databases, SSH keys, access logs, FTP access, phpMyAdmin, etc.
- Settings – manage key WordPress settings like automatic updates.
If you want to access more advanced tools, Bluehost still lets you access the full cPanel interface from the Advanced tab in your dashboard – just click the Manage button next to cPanel.
Having access to cPanel is a nice bonus for more experienced users who want to make use of more advanced tools. However, for non-technical users, you might never even need to interact with this area.
Support 🖱️
Both SiteGround and Bluehost offer 24/7 support via a variety of channels, so you’ll have no problem getting in touch with someone if you need some help.
Here’s a quick table comparing some key details:
SiteGround | Bluehost | |
---|---|---|
Availability hours | 24/7 | 24/7 |
Live chat | ✅ | ✅ |
Phone | ✅ | ✅ (Not available on cheapest plan) |
Email/ticket | ✅ | ✅ |
Knowledge base | ✅ Link | ✅ Link |
Go to SiteGround | Go to Bluehost |
Pricing 💵
In general, Bluehost is a little bit cheaper than SiteGround. However, Bluehost no longer offers unlimited websites on its plans, while SiteGround still allows unlimited websites (though the plans still have storage limits).
When it comes to Bluehost vs SiteGround pricing, there are a lot of variables to consider.
First off, both SiteGround and Bluehost use a promotional pricing strategy to give you a discounted price on your first billing cycle (which is usually a year, if you pay for the full year upfront).
However, once that first billing cycle ends and you need to renew your account, you’ll need to pay the “regular” price, which can often be more than double the promotional price.
As such, it’s important to consider both prices when making your decision. In general, Bluehost is cheaper than SiteGround when it comes to the regular price, even though the promotional prices are similar.
For example, with promotional pricing, the entry-level plan costs $2.99 per month at SiteGround and $1.99 per month at Bluehost.
Same same, right?
However, after the first year, that same plan would cost $17.99 per month at SiteGround, but only $11.99 per month at Bluehost.
Here are some tables to compare pricing at SiteGround and Bluehost for different plan tiers – for more details, check out our full guides to SiteGround pricing and Bluehost pricing.
Final thoughts on Bluehost vs SiteGround 🏁
In the end, there’s no single winner when it comes to choosing between SiteGround vs Bluehost.
Rather than trying to recommend one host to every single person who reads this, I think it’s more useful to lay out the situations in which you might want to pick one of them over the other (or where a different host might be an even better option than both Bluehost and SiteGround).
When to pick Bluehost
Where Bluehost really excels is in offering a beginner-friendly and budget-friendly way to make a WordPress website.
If you’ve never built a website before (or if you have but you still don’t enjoy dealing with technical details), Bluehost can be nice because of just how easy Bluehost makes it to set up your site.
You can easily spin up a new WordPress site using the installer tool. And if you want even more of a helping hand, you can use Bluehost’s WonderSuite instead of dealing with setting up your WordPress site from scratch (though you’re always free to do that, of course).
At the same time, Bluehost is still quite affordable. Yes – there’s a big jump between the first-year promotional prices and the regular prices. But even at the regular price, Bluehost is still one of the cheaper hosts out there, and cheaper than SiteGround.
Another potential advantage that Bluehost has over SiteGround is cPanel. If you specifically want cPanel web hosting, Bluehost offers it, while SiteGround doesn’t.
When to pick SiteGround
SiteGround might be a better option for people who are willing to pay a bit more for a slightly more managed experience for WordPress.
At full price (after the first year of promotional pricing), SiteGround is definitely more expensive than Bluehost. But at the same time, SiteGround fared slightly better in our tests, so you are getting more for that money.
Another advantage that SiteGround has is that it still lets you host unlimited sites, which Bluehost no longer offers.
However, while this seems like a big reason to choose SiteGround over Bluehost, it’s actually not as big a difference as it might seem because SiteGround still has pretty strict storage limits. So, while you can host more websites than Bluehost, you won’t be able to host that many more because of the storage limit.
FAQs about SiteGround and Bluehost 💡
Lastly, let’s run over a few common questions that you might have about these two hosts:
Yes! If you start with Bluehost, you’re always free to change to SiteGround later on (and vice versa). SiteGround offers an official SiteGround Migrator plugin that makes it pretty easy to move your site.
SiteGround used to be listed on the WordPress.org recommended hosting page. However, it’s no longer listed there as of 2024. That doesn’t mean SiteGround is a “bad” host now, though.
Bluehost is on the official list of recommended hosts at WordPress.org. It has been an officially recommended host for many years now.
As of 2024, Bluehost is part of Newfold Digital. It used to be owned by a publicly traded company named Endurance International Group (EIG). However, EIG was acquired by a private equity firm in 2020, which spun it off into Newfold Digital. The same parent company owns other well-known hosts, including HostGator, Web.com, Domain.com, iPage, and others.
SiteGround is a privately held company that was founded and remains headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria. SiteGround has offices in multiple locations in Bulgaria, as well as a business presence in Madrid, Spain.
Yes. If you’re interested in learning more about either of these platforms, you can do that here: SiteGround review and Bluehost review. You can also check out our full collection of the best WordPress hosts to find even more high-quality options. If you want to host a ton of low-traffic sites, you might be interested in our full roundup of unlimited website hosting providers.
Do you still have any questions about choosing between SiteGround and Bluehost for your website(s)? Let us know in the comments and we’ll try to help!
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