Siteground vs Bluehost: Which is best for you?

WordPress is supported by all the best web hosting providers, given the platform’s popularity. Estimates indicate around 500 million websites run on WordPress, which is flexible to handle everything from news sites and portfolios to online stores and personal blogs (where it all started). While you might think that choosing the best WordPress hosting provider is like sticking a pin in a map, it’s not as simple as you might think. Various factors – from price and features, to support and reliability – come into play, and all of these will inform your choice.

Bluehost and SiteGround are both good choices, but which is most suited to you, and which host can help you take your WordPress site to the next level?

In short, Bluehost is best at helping you get a WordPress site off the ground and SiteGround is best for when you’re up in the air.

Pricing

Each host offers a range of plans suitable for web hosting at all levels. But if you’re just starting out, Bluehost has cheaper plans with a longer initial discount period. This is perfect for growing WordPress sites.

Bluehost offers a $9.99/month Starter plan for WordPress hosting, with a rolling contract, but this can be reduced to $3.95/month if you pay for a three-year term upfront. Bluehost also has slightly higher Business ($14.99/month of $6.45/month over three years) and eCommerce Essentials ($6.95/month or $17.99/month over three years) plans, which make good options to upgrade to if your initial project requires more resources.

SiteGround on the other hand is good value for established sites. Compared with WP Engine it’s considerably cheaper. The entry-level monthly subscription on the StartUp plan is $17.99 a month on a rolling deal, but paying for 12 months up front knocks this down by 83% to just $2.99/month. Growth options are also offered, with the GrowBig ($29.99/month rolling, $4.99/month over 12 months) and the GoGeek ($44.99/month rolling, $7.99/month over 12 months) plans.

Both hosts offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Features

Bluehost:

Bluehost offers a free domain for one year, and a free site migration tool. If you don’t have a site already, AI site creation tools are provided. All you need to do is enter a prompt describing the intended site, and the tools do the rest of the work – it’s a good way to get something live quickly. The great thing about Bluehost’s AI tools are that they create sites based on WordPress so you can migrate them anywhere, any time you might want to.

Caching, free CDN, free SSL, free malware scanning and firewall, and DDoS protection are included, along with weekly backups. There is also provision for a staging site – a fully functional site that you can test new plugins and themes on – and email marketing and SEO tools. If you need it, Bluehost also has support for SSH and WP-CLI, for remote command line access to your server. Further features are available with more expensive plans, such as domain privacy and commerce tools.

SiteGround:

This host’s WordPress hosting offers auto installation and automated migrations, along with plugins for speed and security. WooCommerce is also an option at setup, accompanied by free SSL and email. Interestingly, SiteGround offers unlimited databases, although these are subject to the physical constraints of the web space of the selected plan.

SiteGround offers support for “collaborators” – perhaps developers, or stakeholders – to access the hosting and admin screens. Daily backups and email migration are also available, while more larger hosting plans offer staging, PHP acceleration, on-demand backups, and more.

Support

Bluehost has a good collection of support tools, with telephone and 24/7 live chat, a blog, knowledge base, and a free WordPress course that anyone can access. Interactions with the sales and support teams are good, they present knowledgeable responses to queries.

SiteGround’s general support provision is strong, automated solutions on offer, a knowledge base, and 24/7 live chat. There is also a telephone support line option. Our experience with SiteGround support has been largely encouraging.

Beyond SiteGround’s basic support, SiteGround also offers additional support for more complex tasks and queries that can be purchased through credits.

One thing to note is SiteGround’s migration tool, SG Migrate. If you’re bringing a site from another host, you’ll find this plugin is recommended. Having tested the plugin, we found it did not complete migration successfully, even with multiple attempts. Minimal support is available for this tool, but there is an excellent alternative in Backup Migration.

Infrastructure

Essentially both hosts use cloud infrastructure and package their basic plans as shared hosting and provide the option to upgrade to cloud hosting should you need it.

On shared hosting, each website shares resources on a single server, any sites in your account are hosted on a single physical server with multiple other website owners. Because less physical server hardware is being used, the price can be kept low. Server resources are diverted to whichever websites are being visited, but note that if your website is using too many resources, the host can restrict access to ensure other sites are not impacted. SiteGround says that their shared servers have less websites hosted on them meaning there are more resources available.

Key aspects of a web host’s plans are determined by the server hardware. Bluehost's Starter plan gives you space for up to 10 websites, stored on 10GB of NVMe storage, and as stated suitabilities of 40,000 visits per month. This is a bandwidth limit, but if you’re hitting it regularly, you’re probably ready to upgrade to a larger plan.

SiteGround’s StartUp plan gives you just 1 website, and 10GB of space (unspecified storage media), with a limit of just 10,000 monthly visits, although traffic is unmetered.

Additionally both offer managed WordPress hosting, which means installation and upgrades for the platform are automated.

Performance Comparison

We’ve set up basic WordPress-powered web stores on both Bluehost and SiteGround WordPress hosting plans, ahead of performing testing.

The first test uses Siege, a command line tool that can simulate visits to a website. In addition, it also measures the speed of the server responses. We tested the Bluehost Basic and SiteGround StartUp plans with 9 concurrent visitors, then repeated with 15 visitors.

These results show that while availability and concurrency are similar for both hosts, SiteGround is able to handle a far greater number of transactions, and respond faster. However, it is likely that Bluehost has limits in place to restrict the number of transactions to protect its servers.

WordPress benchmarks

Our second testing uses WordPress Benchmark, a plugin that measures and rates everything from CPU and memory processes to network speed and object cache.

Based on these scores, it appears that Bluehost is more than good enough for hosting up and coming sites and SiteGround is more equipped to handle larger, more demanding sites.

Verdict

Each web host offers a collection of strong features to help you get your website launched quickly. Bluehost edges it with the compelling AI site creator, however. SiteGround have a website builder too but it’s still in its infancy.

With respect to the testing, both hosts offer a strong response to WordPress Benchmark, although SiteGround was able to shine in the Siege test. The striking difference between the results suggests Bluehost has placed greater importance on protecting its servers from being overwhelmed. It could also be that SiteGrounds servers are less crowded and are willing to allow more traffic in testing.

Price-wise, Bluehost is more affordable long-term if you stick with it beyond the first 12 months. Conversely, SiteGround’s prices are more expensive but you do appear to get more power for your sites making it worth it.

If you’re new to web hosting, try Bluehost – otherwise, if you have an existing site and need more power, try SiteGround.