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GoDaddy vs. Bluehost
When you’re launching an online business, designing a new blog, or running any other type of online venture, you need a quality hosting service that provides you with great features, good page load speed, and more. There are dozens of different hosting services to choose from, which can make picking between them quite difficult if you don’t know where to start.
Odds are you’ve heard of both GoDaddy and Bluehost before. They’re big names in the web hosting industry and are popular among e-commerce business owners and bloggers alike. But which web hosting provider is truly best?
To answer this question, we’ll break down the key features, pricing plans, and other major aspects of both GoDaddy and Bluehost. By the end of this review, you’ll know which of the two hosting services is best for your business plan, budget constraints, and personal preferences.
Table of Contents:
Features Compared
Features are key for anyone who’s looking for the best hosting service for their online business or website. As competitors, both GoDaddy and Bluehost have many of the same basic features you’d expect, ranging from a free domain name to good storage space and website migration.
They also offer free SSL certification, which saves you money and is necessary if you want to do international business. Automatic WordPress updates and security boosts are included as well.
But there are some differences between the features offered by these hosting providers you should be aware of.
GoDaddy Key Features
GoDaddy is a good hosting service if you want to run a WordPress site because it comes with customizable themes for this platform specifically. It’s also advantageous over Bluehost since it provides free website migration, whereas Bluehost requires you to pay a fee for the same service.
On the downside, you do have to manually download your website's files from your previous host, then upload them to your new GoDaddy server. This can be quite technically intensive and frustrating if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Bluehost Key Features
While GoDaddy may seem to be the best WordPress hosting service between these two, Bluehost is actually a little superior thanks to its WordPress-focused dashboard. This specialized dashboard lets you manage your site with a streamlined and intuitive user interface, a variety of WordPress themes, a WordPress staging environment so you can prep your site for a big launch, and even free WordPress migration.
On top of that, Bluehost is well known for its collection of WordPress experts who can provide you with tech support and migration assistance 24 hours a day. In this way, Bluehost makes it easy for you to both launch and migrate a WordPress website or online business using their hosting plans.
Additionally, Bluehost is much better in terms of pure security thanks to two-factor authentication, which makes it much harder for hackers or cybercriminals to access your WordPress account or sensitive information. It’s integrated automatically with Sitelock, which is a website monitoring tool you can use to check your site periodically for suspicious activity.
Winner: Bluehost 🥇
Performance Compared
You'll also want to make sure the hosting provider you go with has top-tier performance. After all, people are known to click away from websites that take just a couple of seconds to load. You'll want a hosting provider that offers fast page load times and almost perfect uptime (preventing your customers or visitors from seeing your website down due to a crash).
GoDaddy Performance
According to Pingdom, GoDaddy has a slightly better performance rating compared to Bluehost, offering an average website response time of about 773 ms. But you’ll also need to consider uptime when choosing between these hosting providers.
GoDaddy itself offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee, which means you should only experience about four minutes of downtime in a given month. GoDaddy is superior to Bluehost in this respect since the latter doesn’t offer any uptime guarantees.
Bluehost Performance
Bluehost, in comparison to GoDaddy, has a slightly lower average page response time of 531 ms. While Bluehost doesn't offer uptime guarantees, it does state that it will solve any uptime problems within 15 minutes as soon as you submit a ticket.
It’s ultimately up to you to determine which of these two promises is more worthwhile and indicative of quality performance. We personally think GoDaddy edges out Bluehost just slightly in this specific category.
Winner: GoDaddy 🥇
Customer Support Compared
Of course, customer service and support are just as important as other factors when choosing a hosting provider. Both GoDaddy and Bluehost have pretty standard and satisfactory customer service representation across phone, live chat, and email communication channels.
You can get help for your technical problem 24 hours a day from both providers, so they are very similar in this regard.
Now let’s take a look at some of the differences in customer support between both hosting services.
GoDaddy Customer Support
GoDaddy offers a comprehensive help center that includes FAQs, how-to guides, and tutorial videos to help you navigate through your website dashboard and solve basic technical issues. This is a phenomenal tool if you don't want to deal with customer service agents for a basic problem.
Bluehost Customer Support
Like GoDaddy, Bluehost also offers a distinct knowledge base on its website, which comes with the added benefit of a search button that allows you to find a tutorial or technical support you need within a couple of seconds.
On top of that, Bluehost has an impressive community forum where you can interact with other Bluehost subscribers, ask questions, and even get support from the community if you need assistance fast.
Because of the added forums and slightly faster customer service response times when we tried out both GoDaddy and Bluehost, Bluehost edges ahead of GoDaddy in this category.
Winner: Bluehost 🥇
Pricing Compared
Last but not least, you’ll also want to consider the price differences between both GoDaddy and Bluehost before deciding on one hosting service over the other. After all, the price of a hosting provider can dramatically impact its suitability for your business and budget plan.
GoDaddy Pricing
GoDaddy’s pricing scheme is split between three shared hosting plans if you want to start off basic. These are Economy, Deluxe, and Ultimate. Economy starts off incredibly cheap at just $4.19 per month, but it goes back up to $11.99 per month after your subscription ends.
If you want VPS hosting for more traffic and better server architecture, GoDaddy offers a VPS hosting plan starting at $6.99 per month.
If you want to be more focused, GoDaddy does have a business hosting plan that’s $19.99 per month that offers incredibly high speeds and cPanel controls, making it easy to use and intuitive for most online business owners.
Bluehost Pricing
Bluehost has a very popular and affordable shared hosting package starting at $2.75 per month for the first 12 months of your contract. Like many other hosting services, Bluehost that increases the price after the first year of subscription to $8.99 per month.
But you get a lot for this initial subduction package, including free CDN or content delivery network access, SSL certification, and a free domain name as noted above.
Bluehost also offers a slightly cheaper VPS hosting plan than GoDaddy, as it is purchasable for just $18.99 per month. On the downside, Bluehost’s VPS plan doesn’t have quite as much SSD storage or RAM as the GoDaddy counterpart plan.
Alternatively, you could check out Bluehost’s special hosting plans, such as WooCommerce hosting. As the name suggests, this hosting plan is dedicated to online store owners who use the WooCommerce platform. This comes with a whole host of excellent e-commerce tools, security features, and more for just $12.95 per month.
At the end of the day, both hosting providers have fairly similar plan options and pricing ranges. In our opinion, Bluehost is a little better if you’re a small business owner and use WooCommerce due to its affordability and cheap VPS hosting options. It’s slightly better in terms of pricing overall, although larger online business owners may wish to go with GoDaddy.
Winner: Bluehost 🥇
Final Verdict – GoDaddy vs. Bluehost
As you can see, it’s a very close contest! GoDaddy is certainly an excellent hosting provider for high-traffic or larger e-commerce sites, especially if you want to prioritize speed rather than affordability or special e-commerce tools.
The Winner - Bluehost
But in most of the above metrics, Bluehost edged GoDaddy out by just a hair, making it the overall better choice for most e-commerce business owners or bloggers. Its affordability, speed, and excellent spread of features make it a quality hosting provider through and through.
It’s also a particularly good choice for WordPress site owners since it makes migrating your WordPress site quick and easy and comes with a host of bonuses like free SSL certification and a free domain name.
It’s up to you to decide which of the two hosting services is better for your unique needs. Be sure to check out our breakdowns of other hosting providers for your online business or blog today!
