Siteground vs BlueHost – Our Choice (2020)

Updated on July 10th, 2022

Siteground vs Bluehost
Recently I faced the difficult decision of choosing between Siteground vs Bluehost for hosting when setting up my blog.  Both offer excellent value for money.  Which one did I choose and who would I recommend?  Well, it depends on exactly what your needs are, but after much benchmarking our choice was Siteground.
 

Bluehost – a solid solution & super low-cost entry point

 
Bluehost certainly has eye-catching pricing for web hosting – currently starting at US$2.95 per month.  
Bluehost hosting new homepage
Some other great advantages:
  • It’s rock solid, being a top recommended host by WordPress since 2005
  • Huge coverage with over 2 million active websites worldwide.
  • You’ll get an unmetered bandwidth website so you won’t be up for any unexpected bills.
  • Free domain name if you register for one year or more.
  • You can cancel any time without penalty and receive a pro-rata refund.

SiteGround – Compelling Speed & Service 

Siteground is also great value for money.  It has plans currently starting from US$3.95 per month
Siteground Main Screen
Some of the main pros:
  • All SSD drives!  Siteground utilises only Solid State Drives.  This really is a game changer for SEO as the read/write times on SSD drives are estimated to be 1,000X the speed of regular solid state drives.  It’s widely known that page loading speed is a critical factor for improving your search engine optimisation and page rankings.
  • Free CDN included.  This is so important if you are wanting global readership of your website and will mean that your web pages are delivered from the nearest server to you.  For example, if you are in Australia using their Content Delivery Network,  a reader of your website will draw data from Singapore rather than say Europe.  This usually gives the reader a faster page load time.
  • Free Super-Cacher for WordPress, Joomla & Drupla which will further turbo-boost your page speed.
  • 24/7 support by ticket, phone or web chat with industry leading response times.
  • 99.99% uptime using SiteGround pioneered security solutions.

Balancing it all up – Siteground vs Bluehost

If you’re looking for one of the lowest cost entry point host providers with a free domain name for the first year and really solid hosting, we  recommend Bluehost.
 
On the other side, if you’re looking for faster hosting to get your site ranking highly on Google search results, we recommend spending a little extra to go with Siteground.  
 
 

Our recommendation – Siteground vs Bluehost

If you’re really looking to grow your website, speed is critical for SEO.  So if you’re not concerned by the slightly higher cost & the lack of a free domain name we recommend SiteGround based on the higher speed that your website should achieve.  
 
Furthermore, if you are looking at setting up a website or blog, we’ve written a useful step-by-step guide to assist you with this process.
 

Frequently Asked Questions – Siteground vs Bluehost 

Which type of user is Bluehost most suited to?

Blue host is particularly suited to people who want very low level pricing and a free domain in the first year. It’s also quite suited to novice WordPress users.

Which type of user is Siteground most suited to?

Siteground is well suited to people who want the best technology in shared hosting services. They would be prepared to pay slightly more than the lowest cost hosting on offer. Siteground also suits those people who want a more advanced level of customer service.

For these reasons, intermediate level WordPress users are well suited to Siteground.

Can I get free WordPress hosting?

There’s currently no financial incentive for any hosting provider to have a free service offering.  This is because there aren’t any ways to subsidise the service with advertising.

Is there a way to blog on self-hosted WordPress for free?

The only way to do this for free is to effectively setup your own hosting. To do this you would need to install hosting software such as Apache on your own server.  This server needs to be continuously connected to the Internet.

Is it better for SEO to use a blogging platform or self-hosted WordPress? 

Self-hosted WordPress is better for SEO. This is because you have full control over the speed of your website.  This page load speed has consistently been shown to be a critical ranking factor for Google.

Speed can be optimised through your choice of hosting provider, theme and plugins. Alternatively, with blogging platforms such as Wix, you have very limited ways to increase speed.

What free features does Bluehost come with?

Bluehost comes with a free domain name for the first year, a free SSL certificate and up to 5 email accounts. Bluehost is also now offering free site migrations (from other hosts).

How does Siteground technical support compare to Bluehost technical support?

Siteground’s phone support is excellent for beginner issues all the way through to advance support. In comparison, Bluehost’s support is slightly more skewed towards beginner users.

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