Hi I’m Praneeth Kumar.
In this blog I will compare 3 different web hosting companies bluehost vs Godaddy vs hostgator.
After reading this ultimate guide all of your doubts and queries regarding the three web hosting companies and which web hosting company you should choose will be solved.
So without further ado let’s get started.
Here’s a 30000 foot view of the blog post.
bluehost vs godaddy vs hostgator: A head to head comparison.
We will compare the three web hosting companies in four different factors and decide which web hosting company is the best and why it is so,
We will take a look into consideration the following factors,
- Ease of use.
- Performance.
- WordPress Optimisation.
- Price.
So let’s dive right in the blog post.
Affiliate disclosure:
Some of the links to the products in this blog post are affiliate links which means I make money whenever you purchase the product and service from one of my links at no additional cost to you.
This will help me pay my bills and continue creating helpful content for free for you guys.
You can read my affiliate disclaimer for more details.
Now let’s get back to the blog post.
Ease of use;
In this section we will discuss lots of important details about the web hosting companies like how easy to use the hosting companies are especially for beginners,
how reliable the companies are, some top features and USP’s of these hosting companies.
Let’s dive right in.
Bluehost:
Bluehost is one of the largest web hosting companies in the world.
It is an American based web hosting company which was founded in 2003 and so far over 2 million websites are hosted on bluehost worldwide.
As a matter of fact bluehost is also one of the top three web hosting companies which is officially recommended by WordPress.
Here are some interesting things & features about bluehost.
- Bluehost offers a cPanel which is very easy to use for beginners.
- In all the plans bluehost offers a free domain name and SSL certificate for 1 year straight.
- You can easily take the refund from Bluehost if you don’t enjoy their service within 30 days of purchase in the hosting.
- Bluehost gives unlimited storage and bandwidth in all of its shared hosting plans.
- In Terms of customer support, they give you lots of options to connect like phone calls, live chat, and access to lots of helpful guides, tutorials.
Bluehost is a great deal for beginners and small businesses with less and medium sized traffic.
GoDaddy:
Godaddy is another popular American based domain registrar and web hosting company.
Godaddy is considered one of the largest web hosting companies in the world even bigger than bluehost.
The fact is that over 77 million domain names are hosted and registered on Godaddy. Although it was founded back in 1997, the company has over 20 million customers worldwide.
The company is more popular for domain registration services compared to its web hosting service.
But above all let’s take a look at some interesting things and features about Godaddy as a web hosting company.
- Just like bluehost even Godaddy offers a cpanel which is very easy to use and beginner friendly.
- Except the starting plan of the web hosting in all the plans you get a free domain name and professional email address to your website for absolutely free for 1 year.
- With Godaddy you can be able to locate your website in different servers with Global data centres located in different countries.
- In terms of customer support, you get a 24/7 expert support and phone call option.
- It also offers a 30 day money back guarantee so that you can get your money back if you don’t like the service within 30 days after purchasing the service.
Even Godaddy is a good option to host websites apart from domain registration service but the web hosting is not as better and popular as domain registration.
Hostgator:
Hostgator is another popular web hosting company based in America.
It is another web hosting company which started in 2002 and more than 2 million websites hosted on hostgator.
An interesting fact about hostgator and bluehost is that both the web hosting companies are owned by the same company called endurance International Group.
Take a look at some of the interesting things and features of the hostgator.
- You get a free domain name and SSL certificate in all the plans of hostgator hosting for a year.
- You also get unlimited storage and bandwidth so that you don’t need to worry about the limit in future in all plans.
- You also get 100 dollars Google ads, Microsoft ad credit for free.
- In terms of customer support you get a 24/7 customer support option, you can connect with the team in different ways like call, live chat, on social media like Twitter, and helpful knowledge base.
- You get a 45-day money-back guarantee.
Hostgator is a better option for established websites which have a lot of traffic. Now let’s take a look at the performance features of the 3 web hosting companies in detail.
Performance;
In this performance section we will take into consideration the following aspects of the web hosting companies which are most important for websites,
You guessed it right,
- Website loading speed.
- Website uptime guarantee.
- Additional features for improving Speed and Uptime.
These are the most important part of any web hosting service because your web hosting is the most important aspect to determine how fast your website will load and what will be the uptime of your website,
a good web hosting company can give you a good loading speed and uptime which can directly help you to increase your rankings in search engines and also get more conversions and sales for your business.
As a matter of fact, A 100-millisecond delay in load time can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%, so website loading speed is the most important factor which you should not ignore.
Let’s dive right in and look at the loading speed and uptime of the hosting companies on this list.
Bluehost speed and uptime:
Even though bluehost ensured that it would provide 99.99% uptime guarantee, when the real tests were conducted, the result was quite similar,
The result was the average uptime of bluehost in the twelve month period was 99.96% and you should also learn the fact that no web hosting company on the internet would provide 100% uptime because there will be lots of things involved like maintenance of servers and security checkup, etc.
And when it comes to the loading speed of bluehost shared hosting, the average server response time of bluehost shared hosting is 688 ms.
Apart from that, here are some additional features that Bluehost uses to improve performance of Websites.
- It uses SSD storage drives.
- It has advanced caching enabled.
- It gives free cloudflare CDN.
- It gives the latest PHP version for Websites.
- It has HTTP2 system while loading websites.
Now let’s look at the other hosting companies.
GoDaddy speed and uptime:
The average uptime and server response time of Godaddy hosting servers in the 12 month period is 99.94% and 531 ms, you can check the stats here.
Apart from that, some features that GoDaddy offers to improve and enhance the performance of the websites.
- It has the latest version of PHP.
- It has a CDN to increase the speed.
Hostgator speed and uptime:
The average uptime of hostgator hosting servers in the twelve month period is 99.93% and the average server response time for 12 months is 734 ms, you can check the stats here.
Other than that, some additional features that contribute in performance of Websites that hostgator provides are,
- It uses a cloudflare CDN.
- It uses SSD storage drives.
Important note:
Despite the hosting companies are loading websites fastly, there are lots of other factors which determine the website loading speed other than the servers like,
- CDN.
- Caching.
- Html, JavaScript, CSS files minification.
- Image size and format.
- The theme and plugins the website uses.
Because of this based on different websites ,the loading speed will differ.
WordPress optimization;
We will compare 5 different features of wordpress Optimisation for different websites and whether the following web hosting companies have the features in their hosting packages or not.
|
WordPress features: |
Bluehost. | GoDaddy. | Hostgator. |
|
Easy single click wordpress installation. |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
|
WordPress security features like free SSL, CDN, Malware scanning, DDoS protection, SSH access, firewall protection, backups, etc. |
✓ | ✓ |
✓ |
| Free website migration service. | ✓ | × paid feature |
✓ |
|
Managed wordpress hosting built especially for wordpress websites performance. |
✓ | ✓ |
✓ |
| Free Staging area to make changes on your website without letting your website go live by creating a duplicate of your website. | ✓ | × free in higher plans not basic |
× not there |
Now that you have learnt the different features of the hosting companies and its wordpress Optimisation, we will dive into the pricing section and different plans the hosting companies offer.
Pricing;
Now in this section we will take a look at the different plans and their pricing of different web hosting companies.
Let’s dive right in.
Bluehost:
Bluehost sells different types of web hosting services from shared hosting to wordpress managed hosting, e commerce hosting, VPS and dedicated hosting also.
But for now, we will only consider the shared hosting prices of bluehost, because bluehost is popular and widely used for its shared hosting services only.
In shared hosting there are 4 different plans in bluehost and you can purchase the hosting for three different time periods like for one year, two years or three years at a time, you cannot purhcase the bluehost hosting for monthly plans.
The different shared hosting plans and their pricing are as follows.
- Basic plan-2.95$/month.
- Plus plan-4.95$/month.
- Choice plus plan-5.45$/month.
- Pro plan-13.95$/month.
You will have more features and better benefits by choosing higher and bigger hosting plans at lower cost if you purchase it for a longer period of time at once.
Now let’s take a look at the other 2 web hosting companies and their pricing.
GoDaddy:
Just like bluehost even Godaddy offers different types of web hosting services other than domain registration service which is the popular service.
You can buy different web hosting plans with Godaddy like shared hosting, eCommerce hosting, managed wordpress hosting, VPS and dedicated hosting.
But for now we will only consider the shared hosting plan prices of Godaddy.
In shared hosting of GoDaddy, there are four different plans and unlike bluehost you can purchase the hosting from anywhere between 1 month to 10 years period at a time.
The different shared hosting plans and their pricing are as follows.
- Starter-3.99$ a month
- Economy-4.49$ a month.
- Deluxe-7.49$ a month.
- Ultimate-8.49$ a month.
Now let’s see the prices of the hostgator.
Hostgator:
Hostgator is also not an exception in terms of selling different types of web hosting service.
You can buy services like, shared hosting, wordpress managed hosting, cloud hosting dedicated and VPS hosting, application and Windows hosting as well which is not present in the other 2 hosting companies on this list.
While in the shared hosting of a hostgator there are three different plans, you can purchase the web hosting either on a monthly basis or once every 3 or 6 months or 1, 2 or 3 years at a time.
The plans and prices are as follows,
- Hatchling plan-2.75$ a month.
- Baby plan-3.50$ a month.
- Business plan-5.25$ a month.
The prices for the different plans of shared hosting are only for 36 months time period, if you want to purchase the hosting for lower time period like for one year for a couple of months then prices will be relatively higher,
this is the same case for the other web hosting Companies listed above.
bluehost vs godaddy vs hostgator: which one is the winner?
After doing all the analysis and thinking about different web hosting companies I would like to choose and promote bluehost as the better option compared to the other two hosting companies on the list.
Visit bluehost with my special link and get your 65% discount on your hosting plans.
Here are 5 main reasons why bluehost is better than other web hosting companies on this list.
- Bluehost is officially recommended by WordPress.
- Bluehost offers better wordpress managed hosting.
- Bluehost is also quite good with speed and uptime and considering the extra features that it offers for improving the performance.
- Bluehost is also very easy to use with cpanel and it also has a website builder.
- Overall, bluehost is cheap and best value for money for beginners especially for the extra features like unlimited storage and free domain name.
By the way you can also read my ultimate Bluehost review.
You can purchase the bluehost hosting with my special link and activate your 65% discount.
You can also learn how to start a blog on bluehost in a step by step guide.
The Other hosting companies on this list have some important issues like,
- They have bad customer support issues mainly GoDaddy.
- There is no staging site.
- It is not really good value for money compared to price and features.
Because of that I recommend you to start a blog/ website on WordPress using bluehost.
Ending remarks;
There you go these are all the things you need to know about these web hosting companies.
Do comment down what you think about the blog post and which web hosting company you are going to choose.
Consider sharing the blog post with your family and friends if you have found it helpful.
Sharing is caring.
If you are interested in reading about more of the web hosting companies you can read my another blog on,
I will catch you next time till then keep learning and keep growing.