SiteGround Vs Bluehost (Aug 2018) : 7 Tests, 1 Winner – IHB

Updated: August 1, 2018

Does choosing a hosting company give you nightmares? 

Are you having trouble choosing between SiteGround and Bluehost because you haven’t found any unbiased reviews that you can actually understand?

 Choosing the right hosting service is a nerve-wracking experience because hosting can make or break your website. You have to spend hours upon hours doing research, trying to understand what sounds like gibberish and then comparing all these companies. And biased reviews more intent on selling you something than being honest don’t make things much easier.

It’s not something you can avoid, though, because poor hosting can have your traffic dwindling to nothing – that’s if you manage to get any traffic in the first place. So, you have to put in the effort or watch your website crash and burn.

 You have another option that will require less time and won’t be nearly as aggravating. I’ve done all the legwork for you and you’ll find a comprehensive SiteGround vs Bluehost hosting comparison below, along with many other hosting reviews and comparisons, including HostGator vs Bluehost and HostGator vs SiteGround.

Bluehost was founded in 2003, whereas SiteGround made its entry into hosting in 2004.

SiteGround Vs Bluehost tests

• BlueHost Vs SiteGround – SecurityTest
• BlueHost Vs SiteGround – Uptime Test
• SiteGround vs Bluehost Server Response Time
• Bluehost vs SiteGround – Website Speed Test
• SiteGround Vs Bluehost: Customer Support

If you are too busy to read this entire review, here's an infographic that covers the main points.

Bluehost vs SiteGround – Performance, Reliability, Speed test and Security

While SiteGround web hosting developed some highly innovative approaches and ideas such as their own SuperCacher, free CDN by Cloudfare, NGINX web server technology and SSD Drives(Bluehost uses HDD drives) to beat the competition and provide maximum performance to its users, Bluehost has flagged behind everything for the last 2-3 years.

SSD drives are more expensive, but haven proven to be faster and more reliable than HDD drives. Only a few hosting companies can boast that  their servers use SSD drives and SiteGround is one of them.

Apache VS  NGINX Servers – Which are better ?

SSD vs. HDD: What’s the difference?

SiteGround has already released PHP 7.2 RC, thereby fulfilling their promise to offer their customers the latest technology in a timely fashion. The new release will bring a number of improvements to speed, efficiency and security.

A few other new features SiteGround has recently introduced include:

• The SiteGround Migrator plugin that helps customers migrate their WordPress site quickly and easily
• An upgrade to the SG Optimizer plugin to include multisite support.

Conversely, Bluehost has not yet provided their customers with access to PHP 7.2 and are still running PHP 7.0. They’re also much slower across the board in terms of updates and new features, which sets them pretty far behind SiteGround on the cutting-edge technology front.

Read more:- PHP 5.6 Vs PHP 7.0 Vs PHP 7.1 Vs PHP 7.2 – Performance Analysis

The most recent survey sitground conducted among its customers shows a satisfaction score of 97% in 2017.

This score has steadily increased over the past three years, proving that SiteGround constantly strives to improve the quality of the services they offer.

Look at this video to understand how SiteGround is able to secure our websites from all hackers and other security threats.

SiteGround vs Bluehost – Security

SiteGround has recently developed an anti-bot AI that protects their customers from brute-force attacks.

Read more :- What is Brute-force attacks and how it can destroy your website within minutes ?

The new bot prevention system has delivered amazing results as it blocks as many as 2 million attacks across their servers. Not only does the AI system protect customer websites, but it also frees up server resources that can now be used by customers.

The AI system monitors all SiteGround’s servers simultaneously and analyzes the data. Based on the results, it takes automatic action to stop malicious bots. Some of the flags the AI watches include:

• Failed logins
• How many simultaneous connects are present to different URLs
• DDoS weaknesses that are already known in different apps
• Various request types associated DDoS attacks
• A constantly updating list of blacklisted user agents

When the AI determines that an IP is malicious, it blocks it and issues a challenge via a Captcha page. If the “puzzle” is solved, meaning that it’s actually a human and not a malicious bot, the address is whitelisted. And the AI learns from these situations so that it can reduce the level of false positives that occur.

Thus, SiteGround’s new security system is much more efficient at protecting customer websites.

Bluehost relies on Cloudflare to protect its customers from DDoS attacks. They also offer other security features, such as spam protection, password-protected directories, and an option to blacklist certain IPs.

Winner: SiteGround wins by a long-shot because they’ve developed their own AI to thwart brute-force attacks and aren’t relying on a third party to protect their customers.

BlueHost Vs SiteGround – Uptime Test

Both Bluehost and SiteGround offer 99.99% uptime guarantees.However, practice shows that Bluehost has significant and consistent issues with downtime, leading to an average uptime of less than 98% per month.

I haven’t seen anything that shows a major downtime for SiteGround. Moreover, they were up more than 99.99% during the last year. They have pretty much the most  in the entire web hosting industry.

SiteGround, on the other hand, does not exhibit any major problems with downtime. In fact, over the past year, their average uptime exceeded 99.99%. This proves that their servers are highly reliable and some of the best in the industry.

We used Host Tracker to monitor approximately 150 Bluehost and SiteGround websites to determine a more accurate figure for their uptime.

To see different estimates for uptime percentage, you can change the variables inthe following interactive graph

The above graph provides you with a snapshot of how much better SiteGround performs in terms of uptime compared to Bluehost.

Bluehost Vs SiteGround – Uptime of test website

We also paid for separate accounts with SiteGround and Bluehost to collect even more independent data on uptimes. Below, you can see the results of our two test websites.

Bluehost Vs SiteGround – Website Speed Test

Thanks to their highly efficient servers, and static caching, speed is one feature that works great at SiteGround. The combination of features from Varnish caching, Memcache, SuperCacher and CloudFare Railgun, help improve the speed of your website significantly.

TTFB or Time to First Byte refers to how quickly the host’s server sends the first byte of data when responding to a request. This is an important metric because it allows us to test the speed and quality of the servers independent of front-end issues.

The speed with which the server delivers the first byte of data won’t be affected by the type of the website, it’s size or other similar factors. So, it’s an excellent way to figure out the quality of the hosting company’s servers.

SiteGround had a TTFB of 308 ms, while Bluehost’s was 401 ms.

Based on these figures, it’s clear that SiteGround is the winner. They have great servers but the fact that they have 5 major data centers across the world also helps. The physical distance the data has to travel also affects TTFB.

SiteGround’s servers are located in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Milan, and Singapore.

Bluehost doesn’t reveal the location of all their data centers, though some believe they have one in Mumbai, another in Shanghai, and, of course, their US locations in Provo and Orem, Utah.

Clearly, SiteGround is the winner by a significant margin in terms of TTFB. Their excellent servers are the main reason, but it might also have something to do with the number of data centers they have and their locations.

Here are the results of a  speed test from different location around the world.

Bluehost Vs SiteGround – Server Quality Test

To test how the servers of each host react to a large number of concurrent visitors, we used the Load Impact App. This test will determine the performance of each host server when there are 100’s of visitors coming to your site at the same time.

Here are some of the steps taken to ensure that all tests were as fair as possible.

• Each site has a WordPress 4 installation running on it, and features the same theme, the same number of images, page size, content and requests.
• All the plugins and catching systems were disabled
• The test was conducted several times and the best results are displayed here.
• The host servers we tested are located in Chicago, IL, and Provo, UT, while the servers we used were located in Dallas, TX, and Ashburn, VA, respectively.

The green Line indicates the number of visitors and the blue line represents the adjacent response time as the traffic increases.

SiteGround Server Response Time

My Server Location: Dallas, TX
Hosting Server Location: Chicago, IL
Max Response Time: 1.6 seconds
Minimum Response Time: 669.9 milliseconds

SiteGround’s performance was rock solid, especially considering the $3.95 price tag for their most basic hosting plans. Their average response time was 650ms all the way to 50 concurrent users with no real hiccups.

Have a look at the source and full test results from Load Impact for SiteGround

Bluehost Server Response Time

My Server Location: Ashburn, VA

Hosting Server Location: Provo, UT
Max Response Time: 10.61 seconds
Minimum Response Time: 915.53 milliseconds

Bluehost’s performance was lackluster. Response time increased as the traffic increased. Even at lower levels of traffic (10 users), the response time variedbetween 1,000ms and 3,500ms. As concurrent traffic increased to 20, the response time touched a high of 10.61s. Their performance was highly inconsistent with a significant variance from one second to another.

Click here for the source and full test results from Load Impact for Bluehost

Based on the results of these tests, the conclusion is that SiteGround’s servers are twice as fast in terms of response time as Bluehost’s.

SiteGround’s Cloud hosting plan starts at a high price of $80/mo. They use next generation LXC technology built on bare metal, meaning that you get your own machines with resources dedicated tosolely to your project and on the most reliable technology. SiteGround servers can be scaled up to 16 CPU cores and 16 GB of RAM, which is quite a lot of power and is on par with dedicated plans. Moreover, Cloud comes with the HHVM, a revolutionary tool from the Facebook team for faster PHP execution.

Meanwhile, Bluehost Cloud Hosting starts at a price of $8.95, as the price tag clearly shows ( they have same prices for shared accounts). However, it barely differs from a shared solution as it uses a shared network of VPS resources. So, it’s not really the same dedicated power.Therefore, SiteGround’s cloud hosting is more suitable for highly popular sites because they offer much more power.

Bluehost vs SiteGround Cloud – Uptime

Bluehost Cloud Uptime

Test website name: bh-inlinehosting.com

Testing website’s name server and hosting details are provided below.

Uptime statistics for Bluehost Cloud

SiteGround Cloud Uptime

Test website name: sg-inlinehosting.com

Testing website’s name server and hosting details are provided below.

Uptime statistics for SiteGround Cloud

• Both Bluehost cloud and SiteGround cloud recorded an uptime of 100%.

SiteGround vs Bluehost Cloud – Speed

• The Same website used in the above test was used for this test as well.
• We used the Load Impactapp to send upto 100 concurrent visitors to a website hosted on both companies’ cloud hosting plans. This test can be used to estimate how much time a user would have to wait for your web page to load when your site is accessed by a certain number of concurrent users. It can, therefore, determine how many visitors your website can be handle at same time when it’s hosted on these servers.
• In most situations, a flat or falling graph indicates that your hosting can handle the load comfortably.
• If the site’s response time slowed down significantly, then it will show steadily increasing values as the load level increased.

SiteGround Cloud speed test result

• There were just a few initial spikes, but then the graph was flat until it reached 100 concurrent users, with an average response time of 515ms.
• SiteGround servers were able to handle this traffic without too many hiccups or slowdowns.

Bluehost Cloud speed test result

• As you can see from the above results, once the concurrent traffic exceeded 40, the response time started jumping higher and higher. The highest response time was recorded at 16s and then the server stopped responding.
• Bluehost’s cloud servers were not able to handle concurrent traffic above 40 users.

Signup at SiteGround Cloud Signup at BlueHost Cloud

Prices, Plans and Features

SiteGround comes with a basic startup plan for beginners, which features a single domain and 10 GB disk space. The fee is $3.95 per month, even if your initial period is one year.

Bluehost’s entry plan allows unlimited domains and is advertised at $4.95 per month, but the price applies only if you start on a three-year cycle. If you choose one year as your initial sign-up period, the price will be $6.95 per month.

Features	SiteGround Startup	SiteGround GrowBig	Bluehost Shared	Bluehost Plus
Disk Space	10	20 GB	50 GB	Unmetered
Traffic Allowed	10000 Visits	25000	Unmetered	Unmetered
Email Accounts	Unlimited	Unlimited	5	Unlimited
Domains Allowed	1	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Control Panel	cPanel	cPanel	cPanel	cPanel
1 Month	$3.95	$6.45	No	No
12 Month	$3.95	$6.45	$4.95	$8.45
3 Year Term	$3.95	$5.95	$2.95	$5.45
	Sign Up	Sign Up	Sign Up	Sign Up

SiteGround offers all it’s customers a free Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL. This means that websites with subdomains can be encrypted using one certificate, making them easier to set up and maintain.

SSL certificates not only make browsing more secure, but they can improve your rankings too. Google is ranking HTTP sites lower than HTTPS ones, and they’ve also started putting up warnings that non-HTTPS sites aren’t safe.

A Wildcard SSL is even more important because it allows sites with subdomains to secure the whole packages. Sites with forums, online stores, chats and so on can now easily secure everything with a single certificate.

Bluehost only provides its customers with regular SSL certificates, making life a little more complicated for their clients.

★ Winner Bluehost or SiteGround ( You decide) .

Check Latest SiteGround Prices Check Latest BlueHost Prices

Also Read:  Which is the best web hosting service plans for your website ?

SiteGround Vs Bluehost: Customer Support

Customer support is very important in dealing with day-to-day problems associated with websites including issues associated with downtime, server connectivity, or security.

A reliable and fast customer support team is what you should be looking for to solve these problems quickly, without affecting your website.

• SiteGround customer service offers a 24/7/365 day live chat, a ticketing system and a toll number for support. They have a wait time of less than 5 seconds for their live chat and less than 10 minutes for the ticketing system. In contrast, I have waited more than 5 minutes on some other leading hosting companies live chats. They have enabled a feature which allows users to study the bio of each support representative’s skills, work experience and user ratings. Moreover, they boast a wait time of less than 10 minute for their ticketing system.
• Bluehost offers the same features. They have friendly representatives and an attractive chat box. Their support team, however, isn’t quite as fast nor do they have the expertise to solve some high-end issues promptly. Moreover, they often transfer small issues from their live chat team to the ticketing system, which creates more wait time for users.

I tried reaching both SiteGround and Bluehost live chat teams for support one after the other and here are the results.

Bluehost took 5 minutes to connect whereas SiteGround managed to reply within a few seconds of connecting. This easily proves the superiority of SiteGround’s customer support.

Bluehost Live Chat Waiting time:  5 Minutes

SiteGround Live Chat Waiting time:  0 Minutes