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

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Noor B

Noor is a well-known webhosting blogger and industry analyst. Since 2006, he has tested a wide variety of web hosting services and posted the results on his popular blog, InlineHostBlogger.com. For each review, he extensively tests each web hosting company personally, or with his hand-picked team of technicians.

Latest posts by Noor B (see all)

• HostGator Vs GoDaddy(Apr 2018)-Why Never Use GoDaddy? - April 2, 2018
• SiteGround Vs Bluehost (April 2018) : 7 Tests, 1 Winner – IHB - April 2, 2018
• WP Engine Vs SiteGround(Apr 18)–Weighing the Pros and Cons - April 1, 2018

Updated: April 2 , 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 found in 2003, whereas SiteGround made its entry into hosting in 2004.

SiteGround Vs Bluehost tests

• 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.

SiteGround and Bluehost – Live review by current user

Lets start with live user review of SiteGround and Bluehost by current users, posted by them in twitter.
Tweets about @siteground support

Tweets about @bluehost support

These tweets are live tweets, that are updated every second. So, you can clearly see the satisfaction of SiteGround users and dissatisfaction of Bluehost users.

Bluehost vs SiteGround – Performance, Reliability and Speed test

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 lacked a bit of everything for the last 2-3 years.

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

Apache VS  NGINX Servers – Which are better ?

SSD vs. HDD: What’s the difference?

A recent yearly survey conducted on SiteGround shows that their clients are more than 95% happy with their services.

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

BlueHost Vs SiteGround – Uptime Test

Both Bluehost and SiteGround offer 99.99% uptime guarantees. In previous blog posts, I have mentioned Bluehost’s consistent downtime  which give them an uptime of less than 98% every 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 reliable servers in the entire web hosting industry.

It is plain to see that SiteGround has a much better uptime percentage then Bluehost.

We were tracking around 150 websites hosted by Bluehost and SiteGround powered by Host-tracker,  to understand a rough estimate of their uptime. To see different estimates for uptime percentage, you can plug-in various data points into the following interactive graph.

The above graph gives a rough estimate about the superiority of SiteGround over Bluehost when it comes to uptime. To make it more appropriate, we also had a chance to test a personal blog hosted on SiteGround and the uptime for that website looks really good for the last year. They had a whooping uptime of 99.99% throughout the duration of the whole year we tested it.

Uptime Report of SiteGround

Uptime Report of SiteGround(December 2014)

Uptime Report of SiteGround(March-April 2015)

Bluehost Vs SiteGround – Server Response Time

The time taken by the server to respond to our queries helps us in determining the quality of servers used by web hosting companies. For that reason, we tested a set of websites hosted on SiteGround and Bluehost using Load Impact App.

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

• Each site is a WordPress site of Installation 4 with the same theme installed and same number of images, page size, content and request.
• All the plugins and catching systems were disabled
• The test was conducted several times and the best results are displayed here.
• Server location of the Hosting companies are in Ashburn, VA, and Portland, Oregon.

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

This test can be used to conclude that response time of SiteGround server’s are 2X faster than Bluehost.

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, make your website increasingly fast.

Here is a speed test of a test websites hosted under SiteGround and Bluehost.

Note: For the authenticity of the testing, the two websites used are same. i.e, they have equal page size, same number of requests, elements and images.

SiteGround Cloud hosting plan starts at an 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 to your project only and on technology that is proven to be the most reliable one nowadays. SiteGround servers can be scaled up to 16 CPU cores and 16 GB of RAM, which is quite a lot of power on par with dedicated plans. Moreover, Cloud comes with the HHVM, a revolutionary tool from the Facebook team for faster PHP execution.

Meanwhile, For Bluehost Cloud Hosting which starts at a price of $8.95, as the price tag clearly shows  ( they have same prices for shared accounts ), it barely differs from a shared solution as it uses a shared network of VPS resources. So its not really the same dedicated power – therefore, SiteGround cloud hosting are more suitable for a lot more popular sites as  they normally come with a lot more power.

Bluehost vs SiteGround Cloud – Uptime

Bluehost Cloud Uptime

Test website name: bh-inlinehosting.com

Testing website’s name server and hosting details is given below.

Uptime statistics for Bluehost Cloud

SiteGround Cloud Uptime

Test website name: sg-inlinehosting.com

Testing website’s name server and hosting details is given below.

Uptime statistics for SiteGround Cloud

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

SiteGround vs Bluehost Cloud – Speed

• Same website used in the above test was used for this test as well.
• We used load impact app to send upto 100 concurrent visitors to website hosted under both these hosting. This test can be used to estimate of how much time, as experienced by a user, it would take to load your web page when your site was accessed by a certain number of concurrent users. That means , it can determine how many visitors can be handled by your website at same time if it’s hosted under these hosting servers.
• In most situations, it is correct to say that If you get a flat or falling graph, it means your hosting can handle the load comfortably.
• If there was significant slow down in how fast the site responded,  It will show steadily increasing values as the load level increased. 

SiteGround Cloud speed test result

• There was just couple of initial spikes, the graph was flat till it reached 100 concurrent users with an average response time of 515ms.
• SiteGround servers were able to handle this traffic without much hiccups or slowdown.

Bluehost Cloud speed test result

• As you can see from the above result, once the concurrent traffic reached above 40, the response time started jumping higher and higher. The highest response time was recorded at 16s and then the server stopped responding.
• Bluehost cloud server were not successfully 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 and can be ordered for $3.95 per month even if your initial period is one year.

The entry plan of Bluehost allows hosting 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

Bluehost Vs SiteGround Dedicated Hosting Plans, Prices and Features

 

★ 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 downtime issues, server connectivity issues or security issues. A reliable and fast customer support team is what you should be looking for if you wish to solve these problem quickly, without affecting your website.

• SiteGround customer service offers 24/7/365 days 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 chat. 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 less than a 10 minute wait time for their ticketing system.
• Bluehost offers the same features, they have friendly representatives and an attractive chat box. Their support team doesn’t have the urgency and expertise in solving some high-end issues instantly. 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 get connected whereas SiteGround managed to reply within few seconds of connecting. This easily proves the superiority of SiteGround customer support.

Bluehost Live Chat Waiting time:  5 Minutes

SiteGround Live Chat Waiting time:  0 Minutes