A dependable web hosting platform is crucial to the success of a website. Whether it is a blog or a business selling products or offering services, the role of the hosting service provider is as important as the website itself. It is essential to choose a platform that will allow the business to focus on its main goals, while the platform takes care of the underlying technical aspects. With people spoilt for choice of providers, only a few move the needle positively based on millions of trusted reviews. Bluehost and GoDaddy are two giants of the hosting world. We compare the features of Bluehost and GoDaddy to help you select the best provider between the two that meets your requirements. This Bluehost Vs Godaddy comparison is all you need to make the right choice for you.
Bluehost Vs Godaddy Company Overview
Bluehost, owned by Endurance International Group, started in 1996. It focuses mainly on hosting services, although it has added domain registration services in the recent past. Outside of the hosting world, Bluehost has a limited presence.
GoDaddy, the largest ICANN-accredited domain registrar, began in 1997. It offers additional features, such as domain registration and website marketing, in addition to hosting. GoDaddy is popular due to its all-in-one umbrella of services and omnipresent advertising.
Here is an elaborate comparison of Bluehost and GoDaddy based on important features. We assess the winner of each feature next to it.
WordPress Integration
Winner: Bluehost.
A massive 455 million websites use WordPress in 2020. WordPress owns 35 percent of the market share of all websites. It is no surprise that top-rated hosting service providers strive to integrate seamlessly with WordPress.
The Bluehost control panel supports a one-click, easy process of WordPress integration from sign-up to installation, and publishing content. The Bluehost interface is user friendly for new bloggers and websites on WordPress.
GoDaddy has gone a long way to attract WordPress users but still lags behind Bluehost.
WordPress recommends Bluehost as its preferred provider since 2005, so the winner is obvious on this one.
Bluehost Vs Godaddy Performance and Reliability
Winner: Both Are Equally Good
The performance and reliability of the hosting providers are key aspects of your website. You do not want to leave website visitors in a lurch waiting for certain functionality to complete. A website that suddenly goes down is terrible for business.
Bluehost and GoDaddy both have robust data centers spread over a wide geography. Bluehost is miles ahead in Linux-based hosting and provides a high degree of performance.
GoDaddy is one of the few big-ticket, powerful Windows-based hosting providers. It also supports Linux-based hosting well.
Both providers compete neck and neck in the battle for performance. Best-in-class RAID servers with multiple CPU cores are the backbone of reliability and performance.
Uptime and User Response Time
Winner: Bluehost
The downtime of a few hours or a day is enough to turn users away from your blog. People expect websites to work 24*7, give or take a few hours for maintenance. Can you tolerate that your blog is down for a few days when the daily visitor numbers peak?
Bluehost uptime is about 99.9%, which comes to less than 9 hours of downtime in the year. High-traffic websites seem to work better with Bluehost due to fast response times. In terms of uptime and reliability, Bluehost has a significant lead over GoDaddy.
GoDaddy claims a guaranteed uptime of 99.9%. However, in reality, customer reviews indicate a high number of outages for GoDaddy. Latency and page load speeds are almost the same for both providers.
Bluehost Vs Godaddy CPanel
Winner: Both Equally Good
The industry-standard cPanel is the control panel for both providers. Both providers have an easy to use and flexible user interface. Both offer to install applications with a single click.
Bluehost can easily manage multiple sites. It gives access to unlimited MySQL databases, which is useful for running multiple blogs in different niches. The cPanel offers automatic backups as well as manual without cost. However, the backup schedule is opaque.
GoDaddy offers an additional panel for Window-based hosting. The shared hosting plans have access to a limited number of MySQL databases. Backups are manual but without additional costs.
Bandwidth
Winner: Both Equally Good
Hosting plans offer advertise unlimited bandwidths. However, unlimited bandwidth is true only until your website registers a few hundred clicks a month. The truth emerges when the website visitor numbers surge.
Bluehost and GoDaddy are similar in this aspect. Both will chase you to upgrade to higher plans, with seemingly unlimited resources. Many tools and services sell as add-ons, so allocate a bigger budget for hosting than what the plans advertise. Most plans are sold at a discount earlier, and renewals revert to the original price after the first term.
Bluehost Vs Godaddy Site migration
Winner: Both Equally Good
What if you want to move your existing website to Bluehost or GoDaddy?
Experienced developers and, to some extent, experienced bloggers can migrate website files on their own. However, as the file numbers, sizes, and use cases increase, the site migration may be too complex to handle without external help.
Bluehost offers free migration of WordPress websites on its hosting plans. The process involves consultation with experts after a review by an expert team. It is naive to assume that complex website migration will be free.
GoDaddy has handy guides to migrate your website along with their shared hosting plans. Experts are willing to help you. However, the charges are based on a review of your website.
Plans and Prices
Winner: Bluehost
Bluehost promotional plans start at $3.95/month, which default to $7.99/month on term renewal. The basic plan comes with 1 website, free SSL certificate, 1 domain, and unmetered bandwidth. Plus plan comes with unlimited websites, free SSL, and unlimited domains. Choice Plus comes with additional features, such as domain privacy and protection, site backup, and Codeguard Basic. Pro plans are the costliest at a promotional price of $13.95/month, which default to $23.99/month on term renewal. Pro plans come with dedicated IP and high performance. Except for the basic plan, all plans include a Microsoft 365 mailbox free for 30 days and have spam experts.
VPS hosting plans vary from $29.99/month to $119.99/month. Virtual private servers use SSD storage and have dedicated IP’s. These come with 2 to 4 cores, 2 to 8 GB RAM, 30 to 120 GB SSD storage, and 1 to 3 TB bandwidth.
Dedicated hosting gives ultimate control, security, and flexibility. Dedicated plans are between $119.99/month to $209.99/month. These include 4 cores, 4 to 16 GB RAM, 500GB to 1 TB mirrored storage, 5 to 15 TB bandwidth, and 3 to 5 IP addresses.
WordPress plans are affordable between $7.99/month to $14.99/month. These allow fast, secure, and easy WordPress hosting in minutes. Except for basic, other plans offer unlimited websites, free SSL certificate, free domain for 1 year, and unmetered SSD storage.
GoDaddy plans start from $3.99/month and go all the way up to $16.99/month. The starter plan comes with 1 website, 30 GB storage, 256 MB RAM, and 1 database. The economy plan offers 100GB storage and 10 databases. Deluxe and Ultimate plans have unlimited websites, unlimited storage, and unmetered bandwidth. Only the Ultimate plan has free SSL for 1 year.
Business hosting plans range between $29.99/month to $49.99/month. These come with multiple cores, 60 to 150 GB storage, 2 to 8 GB RAM, unlimited traffic, websites, and bandwidth, and a standard SSL certificate.
VPS hosting plans offer root access and optional control plans. These range between $19.99 to $69.99 and offer 2 to 8 cores, 4 to 16 GB RAM, and 100 to 400 GB SSD storage.
Dedicated hosting is on top-of-the-line bare metal servers and costs $129.99/month to $399.99/month. These are RAID servers and offer a wide range of hosting options.
WordPress plans are a little costlier between $9.99/month to $24.99/month, although promotional periods offer up to 30% discounts on plans. Plans offer 1 website only. The free domain is only for the hosting period, and free business email is for 1 year. Higher plans offer unlimited visitors and unlimited storage.
GoDaddy offers plenty of piece-meal options, which are chargeable separately. These include SEO optimizer, automatic malware scans, 1-click testing site, and many more services. GoDaddy also offers Windows-based hosting and reseller plans.
Bluehost offers a wide range of options that are suitable for beginners as well as experienced people. The plans are easy to choose without going into many intricacies that are best left to the provider. Prices are transparent, and plans are good value for money.
Bluehost Vs Godaddy Refund
Winner: Bluehost
Bluehost offers a 30-day moneyback guarantee. If you cancel within 30 days, Bluehost provides a full refund on the hosting service but not on the add-ons. If the plan comes with a free domain, Bluehost will deduct a non-refundable fee of $15.99. The domain is not transferable to another provider during the first 60 days. There is no refund after 30 days.
GoDaddy offers a 30-day refund on annual plans and 48-hours on monthly plans. Add-on services have a different set of rules, and most are non-refundable or partially refundable based on conditions. The GoDaddy website has an exhaustive list of services and a refund policy on them.
Based on customer reviews, it is easier to get refunds from Bluehost than GoDaddy.
Customer Support
Winner: Bluehost
The Internet is a leading channel in today’s digital world, and a website is the face of a business. You cannot afford your website to remain down, slow down, or the stoppage of essential functions of the website. Quick and satisfactory resolution by customer support needs a good L2 and L3 support team.
Bluehost provides timely responses, and customer support is entirely reliable, according to the majority of customer reviews.
GoDaddy support team is occasionally found behind the curve by several customers. Customer response times can be long.
Both provide 24*7 support through chat, email, and toll-free numbers.
Bluehost Vs Godaddy Ease of Use
Winner: GoDaddy
Bluehost integrates seamlessly with WordPress and Weebly. For websites that are not based on these, the interface is more suitable for people who have at least some experience in website building. For WordPress websites, use Bluehost without any questions.
GoDaddy has an in-house website builder that offers an easy user interface. The setup is simple and especially suitable for newbies who want to build and host websites quickly. GoDaddy also supports WordPress, but it is not their bread and butter.
All-Around Solution
Winner: GoDaddy
It is nice to have a provider who offers all services under one roof. After all, who would want to compare hosting providers for every service they offer? Imagine the difficulty in managing ten different services from as many providers!
GoDaddy is a platform that offers everything under one umbrella. Services include domain name registration to website building, hosting, migration, and management. Digital marketing tools come as add-ons in premium plans. A professional email is a necessary addition for most businesses.
Bluehost is trying hard to compete as an all-in-one platform. However, to date, it remains way behind GoDaddy in this aspect. Bluehost does not offer reseller hosting, which allows a company to host the websites of its clients. GoDaddy is miles ahead of Bluehost when it comes to domain registration and auctions.
Bluehost vs. GoDaddy The Final Verdict
Winner: Bluehost
Bluehost is the overall winner due to its reliability, uptime, and high performance. It scales better with high traffic and offers a more secure environment. The WordPress integration is top-class, and it ticks most other boxes. Many useful features come along with the plans and do not throw big surprises with an increase in website traffic. It is suitable for websites that want to go the extra mile, attract more attention, and always be available.
GoDaddy has more number of tools and services than Bluehost. It is more suitable for beginners and those who prefer Windows-based hosting. Basic plans are cheap, but upgrades to premium plans cost more in the long-run. Overall, considering the price of individual services sold separately, the plans are costlier than Bluehost. The platform provides an all-in-one solution for needs, such as domain registration, hosting, and marketing.
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