SiteGround Vs Bluehost: 9 Test to Decide "Who’s Best" in 2021?

Updated: April 15, 2021

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. Then, you have to compare all these companies to find the right one for your needs.

The good news is that in this SiteGround vs Bluehost comparison, we’ll demystify the jargon and reveal what’s important. Of course, we’ll also determine which of these two brands is the best at what they do.

SiteGround and Bluehost are a great choice for small and large blogs alike. They are both leaders in their categories, but they are also extremely popular, with around 2 million customers each.

These aren’t the only comparisons and reviews we’ve done, though. You can check out many other hosting reviews and comparisons in this blog, including HostGator vs Bluehost and SiteGround Vs HostGator.

SiteGround Vs Bluehost Winner – Why SiteGround is better than Bluehost?

	SiteGround	Bluehost
Overall Score	4.5	3
Best For	Newbie users and also more experienced users, who are unhappy with their current hosting provider and are looking for a stable, secure, and feature-rich service at a reasonable price.	Not recommended.
Server Location	USA, UK, Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Australia	USA
Verdict	They are one of the leading web hosting companies in the industry. Provides an innovative approach to speed and security, constant service improvements through latest technologies combined with friendly and expert support.	A well-known web hosting that offers web hosting for an average price targetted to users with limited performance requirement.
	Visit site Read review	Visit site Read review

If you don’t have the patience to read through our comprehensive review (or simply don’t require that many details).

Why choose SiteGround over Bluehost?

SiteGround’s performance is 3-5x better than Bluehost…

Speed and availability(uptime) is the biggest factor differentiating a very good host from an average web host.

Therefore, we carried out several tests to check the speed and reliability of both SiteGround and Bluehost.

Here’s a test conducted using the Sematext website performance monitoring tool on a test website with an identical webpage hosted on SiteGround and Bluehost.

We actually pay and maintain web hosting that we test here.  So, here’s the test website hosted on these web hosting. Both these web pages have the same theme and content installed.

Test website hosted  on SiteGround:  noorub1.sg-host.com

Test website hosted on Bluehost: bh-inlinetesting.xyz

As seen from the above image, SiteGround’s average load time was around 0.5S, which is exceptionally fast for any web hosting. In fact, it’s the fastest we have tested here.

Their performance in the USA was far greater than in Europe and Australia, this is due to the fact that this website was hosted on SiteGround’s USA servers. That being said, they loaded under a second even from Europe and Australia. This is an excellent benchmark for any web hosting.

When it comes to uptime(availability), it was up 100% of the time with no downtime.

For Bluehost, they loaded  5-6 times slower than SiteGround for the same exact website as seen from the below result.

Moreover, their availability was not that great with multiple downtimes during our testing period as seen below.

You can use https://tools.pingdom.com/ to check the speed of the above web pages for yourself.

Also, to help you choose better, we also did several comprehensive comparisons between SiteGround and Bluehost with multiple tests on different aspects of their web hosting.

Below, you can see exactly how we reached our conclusions.

Breakdown of this comparison

1. Speed test
2. Popularity
3. Pricing
4. Sever Quality
5. Uptime
6. Security
7. WordPress and Cloud
8. Support
9. UA Interface

Also Read: SiteGround Review – Why we rated SiteGround #1 web host in 2020?

Visit SiteGround Visit Bluehost

1. Bluehost Vs SiteGround Speed Test – SiteGround is super fast.

Let’s be honest. In today’s high-speed era, no one is going to hang around even for a few seconds more than they’re used to for a website to load. You could have the best content in the world, but unless you’re offering something very valuable (like diamonds) for free, no one is going to stick around.

Check out how you can decrease your website speed by 1- 2 seconds using SiteGround, WP Rocket, and Asset CleanUP PRO plugin.

With this in mind, we hosted 2 identical websites on Bluehost and SiteGround to understand their website speed.

This is the most accurate way to figure out the speed of a hosting company’s servers as both firms are served with exactly the same webpage from the same location. The small difference in page size is due to server-level catching because these hosts use different types of servers.

In this test, SiteGround loaded 2xfaster than Bluehost.

After SiteGround’s recent shift to Google Cloud data centers and their implementation of Ultra-Fast PHP, their websites are roughly 40% faster than before due to the high-quality servers provided by Google.

The ultrafast PHP has proven to add 30% more performance to a site. This is one of the most effective speed improvements that they have introduced recently and it adds great value to your website speed.

Which hosting is Faster around the world?

Even though SiteGround had a better load time from the USA, we wanted to know how SiteGround and Bluehost performed for the rest of the world. Therefore, we ran another test where we used the same website and checked the speed from multiple locations around the world.

Location	SiteGround Load time	Bluehost Load time
Frankfurt	0.6S	2.5S
Ireland	0.5S	3.2S
Mumbai	0.9S	3.6S
N. California, USA	0.4s	2.2S
N. Virginia, USA	0.35S	2.1S
Sao Paulo	0.9S	4.3S
Singapore	0.85S	2.0S
Sydney	0.6S	4.7S

The outcome of this test –

• SiteGround managed to load 2x faster than Bluehost everywhere around the world, with U.S. load time being the fastest.
• It’s clear from the above 2 tests that Bluehost has average speed in the USA, but their overall worldwide speed is below average.

According to Google’s latest research, 53% of people will leave a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That said, the SiteGround website loaded in less than 1 seconds for 8 out of 8 locations in the above test. 

Based on these figures, it’s clear that SiteGround is the winner in terms of speed. They have great servers but the fact that they use Google Cloud service which has 24 servers around the world also helps. The physical distance the data has to travel also affects overall load time.

Another technology, which SiteGround recently deployed, that boosts the speed of the sites we host out of the box is the Brotli compression algorithm. This is a next-generation technology developed by Google as a successor to the popular gzip.

SiteGround’s Google servers are located in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Sydney, and Singapore.

On the other hand, 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.

More on SiteGround’s data center can be read here.

As you can see below, SiteGround’s performance is on par with high premium hostings like Kinsta and WP Engine. Those hosts, however, will set you back an additional $10-20/month compared to SiteGround.

#SiteGround lets you change the server location of your website

One of the most effective ways to speed up your website is to place your website’s files on a server that is located near your target audience.

For example, if you have most of your traffic coming from Chicago, try to work with a host who has their servers in Chicago. This is highly recommended unless you can afford to set up a CDN for your website.

As a matter of fact, SiteGround offers CDN included for free with all their plans.

Also Read: Max CDN(Stackpath) vs Cloudflare – Which Is The Fastest CDN in 2019?

SiteGround makes it very easy to change server location anytime you want. So, don’t worry if you don’t know where most of your target audience is located when you start out.

However, changing the server location with SiteGround is a paid service, as it requires a website migration service in reality.

In contrast, Bluehost doesn’t let us choose a server location even during the initial process.

We have seen so many people switching from Bluehost to SiteGround due to their excellent speed and support.

Also Read:

How to Improve the Loading Speed of Your Website: A Step-by-Step Guide

★ Winner SiteGround. SiteGround is easily 2x faster than Bluehost in all our tests.

Visit SiteGround Visit Bluehost

2. Popularity – SiteGround grew its customer base four-fold in the last 5 years.

SiteGround hosted only 500,000 websites in 2015, but they host over 2.6 million websites in 2021, a five-fold increase in size over the last 6 years.

On the other hand, Bluehost recorded no growth in the last few years.

As you can see from the above Google Trends graph, Bluehost is still popular than SiteGround due to their relatively low price compared to SiteGround. However, SiteGround is narrowing that gap with their excellent performance in the last few years as you can see from the graph.

As a matter of fact, popularity and performance doesn’t always go hand in hand as it’s proven time and again that the most popular companies are not the best performing companies in their niche.

Bluehost is owned by EIG…

Bluehost was growing rapidly until 2013 when they were acquired by EIG. After the acquisition, like any other EIG company, Bluehost started receiving so many bad reviews that it eventually led to a significant drop in popularity and growth.

★ Winner SiteGround. 

Visit SiteGround Visit Bluehost

3. Bluehost Vs SiteGround 2019 Pricing – Bluehost is cheaper in the long run

All SiteGround’s hosting plans, including the StartUp now come with Dynamic cache and Memcached options. These features were previously available only on GrowBig and higher plans, but you can now safely add them to the StartUp one as well. Between 50% – 500% faster with Dynamic cache enabled. 

So, Which SiteGround plan is the best?

Each website will have different requirements depending on its content and the amount of traffic. Therefore, choosing the right hosting plan for your site is very important as this can save you lots of money and also help you with future performance issues.

We compared the performance and features of SiteGround’s Startup, GrowBig and GoGeek plan separately, in another post, to help you choose the most suitable SiteGround plan for your website.

4. Server Quality Test:- Which hosting is better for websites with high traffic?

The server is where your website files are hosted and stored. High-quality servers will ensure a smooth experience for your visitors.

For this reason, we wanted to test the performance of each host server when 100’s of visitors are thrown at them at the same time. 

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

As evident from the tests, SiteGround’s performance throughout this test was fast and consistent. That is due to many reasons, one of them is their recent deployment of a new MySQL setup that allows a much higher number of parallel requests to be processed simultaneously. This has a great impact on the effective handling of heavy MySQL queries and leads to a significant drop in the number of slow queries on their infrastructure, subsequently increasing the load capacity and the speed of the servers.

 Which Hosting Uses the Fastest Domain Nameserver?

You’ve probably heard the acronym DNS (Domain Name Server), but aren’t quite sure why it should affect your choice of web hosting.

Firstly, let me provide a short answer to the question: What is DNS?

When you type in a web address, eg. inlinehostblogger.com, your ISP (Internet Service provider) goes to the domain name server (DNS) for that domain and fetches the IP addresses associated with that domain. This IP address is where your website’s files are located.

So basically, DNS is like a phonebook that helps your browser locate your website files.

Once you buy web hosting, most companies manage your DNS as part of their service. That means they host your DNS details on their server.

Benefits of a Better Domain Name Server Include

• Improved website speed.
• Better security against attacks.
• More benefits of better DNS can be read here.

Therefore, we tested the DNS speed of both these hosting companies using a tool called SOLVEDNS.

5. Uptime Test – Do they fulfill their 99.99% uptime guarantee?

Uptime is the amount of time your website is up and running for your visitors. A lot of factors can affect the availability of your website.

Including –

• Hardware failure
• Server maintenance
• Power shutdowns of your hosting company. 

That’s why this test is very important because low uptime can negatively impact your business’ bottom line through loss of credibility, lost sales, Google rank drops and more.

Both Bluehost and SiteGround guarantee 99.99% uptime guarantees.

Do they really fulfill this guarantee?

We used Host Tracker to monitor approximately 150 websites to determine a more accurate figure for web hosting uptime.

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

But around two years ago, Bluehost’s tech infrastructure had a major overhaul. Since then, Bluehost was able to deliver 99.99% uptime.

Even more, SiteGround compensates you with free hosting if your website falls below the guaranteed network uptime of 99.90%.

★ Winner  SiteGround. Consistently delivering very high uptime of 99.99% during our testing.

Visit SiteGround Visit Bluehost

6. Security – SiteGround is safer against multiple web threats and malware.

SiteGround is another big factor that differentiates SiteGround from Bluehost.

SiteGround has a Proactive Approach to Security. Their security team develops advanced custom solutions and proactively patch vulnerabilities:

1. In-house built server monitoring system performs server check every 0.5 sec, and is able to fix many issues automatically and much faster.
2.  AI-anti bot blocks between 500,000 and 2M brute-force attacks every day and stops malicious traffic from reaching their clients’ sites.
3. 24/7 security admin team watching over software vulnerabilities, writing WAF rules to protect servers and sites from hacking and breaches.

Another big advantage is that with their recent shift to Google Cloud data centers, you get the benefit of a security model that has been highly regarded as one of the best, which secures products like Gmail, Google search, Youtube, etc,. In fact, your website couldn’t ask for anything better.

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. 

Visit SiteGround Visit Bluehost

Bluehost Vs SiteGround For Beginners – Which Hosting Is Good For Beginners?

Read More: How to start a WordPress Blog with SiteGround? A Guide for Beginners.

#Free migration for your website.

The manual transfer service was discontinued recently, and now users have to use the free SG migrator plugin to conduct a migration from another host over to SiteGround by themselves.

Earlier, SiteGround used to do a free manual transfer of your website from other hosting to SiteGround. However, now it’s a paid service.

Website transfer costs for each web host.

1. SiteGround – $30 for manual transfer, free with SG migrator plugin.
2. Bluehost – 149$
3. HostGator – Free
4. Kinsta – Free
5. GoDaddy – Not available

7. Bluehost Vs SiteGround – WordPress is easy with SiteGround and Bluehost

Choosing a web host with managed WordPress plans has a lot of benefits, such as pre-configured WordPress technologies, which allow you to use SSL and CDNs with little hassle and provide better overall performance.

Moreover, security is also better as the host can set the server up to protect against WordPress-specific threats.

#Bluehost and SiteGround are officially recommended by WordPress.

WordPress is a popular CMS and website building tool that powers over 30% of the entire web. Officially, they only recommend 3 hosting companies, and SiteGround and Bluehost are two of them.

Additionally, SiteGround’s WordPress hosting (same as regular shared hosting plans) is available at very attractive rates. It features a number of great WordPress tools, including auto-updates and free WordPress migrations using their proprietary plugin.

Learn How to migrate your WordPress website using WP Migrator.

Also, their SG optimizer plugin promises to boosts the performance of your website by 200-300%. 

These features will cost you a premium fee from other plugin developers.

To their server, they’ve added their proprietary SuperCacher that relies on NGINX tech to significantly boost speed. They also offer a free CDN.

Bluehost WordPress packages start at $20 per month. It offers similar performance to their shared hosting plans. 

Moreover,  80% of SiteGround’s 2 million domains are sites built on WordPress, which makes them very experienced in handling a WordPress website.

So, which WordPress host is better for WordPress: SiteGround or Bluehost?

In terms of performance and what’s included in the offer, SiteGround is a better choice for your WordPress website.

Additionally, Joomla and Drupal are some of the other popular CMS hosting options provided by SiteGround and Bluehost.

Cloud Hosting – Bluehost cloud is nothing but an extension of their shared hosting.

Bluehost vs SiteGround – Which hosting uses the latest technology?

Bluehost and SiteGround use Apache + NGINX web server technology, running NGINX for static files and Apache for dynamic ones. They use the NGINX reverse proxy caching solution in front of Apache to cache static delivery in order to speed up performance. If you don’t know what this means, ignore it, just know that this is a popular formula used by major hosting companies.

Additionally, SiteGround shifted its entire infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform, where infrastructure is built on top of virtual machines, instead of bare metal servers. This fact helps in easy auto-scaling of resources during peak times. What this move also means is that your website is hosted on one of the fastest and most powerful networks which is used by big companies like Apple, Netflix, Youtube, and Gmail.

Apache VS  NGINX Servers – Which are better?

SiteGround has already released PHP 7.4. Conversely, Bluehost has not yet provided their customers with access to PHP 7.2 and are still running PHP 7.0. And support for #PHP 5.6 and PHP 7 will end after December.

PHP 7.4 was released on November 28,2019 and was available on SiteGround as early as December 14. SiteGround and Kinsta are the only two hosting companies to offer PHP 7.4 right now.

• Why PHP version is important?, and more about SiteGround and Bluehost’s PHP version

  PHP is a server-side programming and scripting language used nowadays for creating interactive dynamic websites, especially by WordPress. The version of PHP used by your server determines the speed at which your web page is loaded and executed. The later the version, the better the speed and reliability.
  

  Kinsta tested PHP 7.3 with a WordPress installation and here are the results.

  PHP 7.3 was a clear winner,  processing 3x more requests per second than previous PHP versions.

  

  Yet Bluehost still uses PHP 5.6 for all the old hosting accounts. When contacted, their support responded by insisting we cancel our current account and start a new hosting account with them to take advantage of their new servers with PHP 7.2 or pay 150$ for them to do it for us. And, they also said that existing servers with the older PHP version would be updated eventually, however, they didn’t know when that would be.

  

  This can expose their clients to potential vulnerabilities and high-security risks. Based on this, I doubt Bluehost’s commitment towards security and performance.

Over the last 2 years, most sites have adopted HTTPS at a fast rate and HTTPS usage has increased from 40% to over 90% in the last 3 years according to Chrome stats.

However, one main issue with people moving towards HTTPS sites has been the slight increase in load time as a result. This was addressed by SiteGround using the latest TCP 1.3 and OCSP stapling method.

• How does SiteGround’s TCP 1.3  and OCSP stapling method will make your website faster?

  Each time you access an HTTPS website, the encryption certificate is validated by Certificate Authority (CA) on each request. This creates a slight delay in accessing your website. However, with SiteGround’s TCP 1.3 and OCSP stapling method, this check gets handled by the web hosting server, and your visitor’s browser doesn’t have to do anything.
  

  

Furthermore, SiteGround is among the first hosting companies to provide QUIC speed technology for their websites. This technology helps websites load faster in areas with slow internet connections.

In fact, this protocol known as HTTP/3 is a new technology that promises to improve performance and security and will become the standardized version of HTTP.

On the other hand, Bluehost is 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.

SiteGround’s support is A+

SiteGround is mainly known for their excellent support in the web hosting industry, which is why many users choose to work with this company. This was evident when they won the Stevie Award for Best Customer Support for the year 2020, and 12 employer awards.

However, there were some complaints regarding long waiting times during April-June 2020. This was explained by SiteGround as one of those rare instances due to COVID, leading to a higher level of activity by all website users as online presence was becoming much more important for many businesses.

Bluehost, on the other hand, outsource their support to third world countries and teams who have little knowledge about Bluehost and web hosting in general. Their Live chat mostly transfers chat requests to a higher authority, which means it will take another 48 hours to get a response. This can be quite frustrating and lead to downtimes lasting many days.

Support waiting time for each host.

1. SiteGround 0-6 seconds
2. Kinsta 0-1 minute
3. Bluehost 2-3 minutes
4. HostGator 3-5 minutes
5. GoDaddy 5-10 minutes

★ Winner  SiteGround.  The best support in the industry with very fast and knowledgeable team.

Visit SiteGround Visit Bluehost

Bluehost’s customer support team is pathetic most of the time..

9. User Interface

SiteGround Interface	Bluehost Interface
Site Tools ( Custom made)	cPanel (Third party)
Rating: ★★★★★	Rating: ★★★★★
Rank: #1 in Interface	Rank: #1 in Interface

The User Interface is what we call the control panel. Both these hosting companies used to come with cPanel.

However, starting from July 2019, SiteGround hosting will use their own inbuilt custom-made control panel called SiteTool, replacing cPanel. Existing clients will keep using cPanel until they switch them to the new panel.

According to SiteGround, cPanel limits their ability to expand and integrate new technology to give you a secure and reliable website. Moreover, SiteGround has carefully analyzed years of data on which cPanel features most users rely on and incorporated those features into their new panel.

On top of that, they have added many cool features, such as the option to add collaborators to your site. You can use the collaborator feature to give and revoke access to your site to developers and clients without having to share your login details.

Here’s more on SiteGround Control Panel.

Bluehost uses cPanel User Interface

cPanel the easiest and most common control panel across the blogosphere.

Additionally, cPanel comes with more than 52 one-click installers for popular scripts such as WordPress, Joomla, Weebly, etc. This is a great advantage for newbies who might be unfamiliar with the coding aspects of a website.

Bluehost cPanel: Try Demo

SiteGround Staging Tool

SiteGround offers an amazing tool to help customers test changes and new features without breaking their live website.

In short, this tool creates a development copy of WordPress and Joomla sites, which customers can experiment on to their heart’s content.

Using the SiteGround Staging environment means that any changes won’t affect the live website, enabling customers to determine, beforehand if what they’re doing will help or hurt their site.

Bluehost Vs SiteGround FAQ