Without a doubt, Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting providers.
They’ve been officially recommended by WordPress for years and are one of the biggest brands in the EIG portfolio. But they are certainly not without their detractors, and sometimes the negative reviews have been for good reason.
If you find yourself unsatisfied with the service provided by Bluehost then this post is for you.
Bluehost Alternatives
In this article, we’ll take a look at the best Bluehost alternatives and highlight their standout features in the context of speed, performance, customer support, and pricing.
Quick Links:
- The problem with Bluehost
- What to look for in an alternative
- Our top Bluehost alternatives
- Tell us who you think is the best alternative to Bluehost
The Problem With Bluehost
Although you’ll often hear that Bluehost is generally plain ‘bad’, we don’t think this is entirely fair purely on a performance basis given their performance in our own comprehensive testing.
That said, while Bluehost is one of the most widely-used web hosting providers, there are several reasons why you may want to try a different web host:
- Unsatisfactory customer support. Bluehost has ended its email-based customer support in order to focus on delivering instant support. This isn’t ideal for situations where you need help resolving advanced issues that may require more time or the need to share screenshots or files.
- Unavailability of monthly billing option. Bluehost’s subscription plans start at a 12-month package. In other words, Bluehost doesn’t offer a month-to-month plan so you need to pay for a minimum of one year in advance.
The good news is that there are many Bluehost alternatives out there if you really don’t want to go with Bluehost. In the next section, we’ll step through some of the key factors you should look for in a Bluehost alternative.
What to Look for in a Bluehost Alternative?
Here are the key factors you should look for in a Bluehost alternative:
- Technical performance. You need a hosting solution that offers fast page loading speeds and can handle a sudden increase in site traffic. Your hosting provider should have proven uptime guarantees and a good performance track record.
- Customer service and support. Go for a hosting solution that offers round the clock technical support through multiple support channels. You should be able to get in touch with customer support over the phone, live chat, and email. The customer support department should be able to help you troubleshoot WordPress issues and get your site back online as fast as possible.
- Pricing. Choose a hosting provider that’s cost-effective and gives you the most bang for your buck, and ideally one that atleast gives you the option of paying month to month (though often this comes at a premium) if you are not ready to commit to an entire year.
In addition to this, you should also consider other factors such as email hosting and automated backup services, based on your specific needs.
Top Alternatives to Bluehost
Below we’ll go through five of the top Bluehost alternatives on the basis of performance, customer support, and pricing plans:
Bluehost Alternative #1: SiteGround
SiteGround is a popular web hosting service that focuses on individuals, freelancers, and small businesses that receive 10,000 to 100,000 visits per month.
Its plans are perfect for users with modest hosting needs. Depending on the plan you purchase, you get the standard features i.e. 10GB, 20GB, 30GB of storage space.
The entry-level plan gives you access to one website, whereas other plans offer multiple sites.
Key features:
- Offers free CDN (Cloudflare Content Delivery Network) setup.
- Free SSL certificate.
- Automatically creates site backups and offers WordPress updates.
- Uses advanced caching techniques to deliver fast loading speeds.
- Helps keep your site secure by monitoring WordPress vulnerabilities.
- Offers automated migrations with the WordPress Migrator plugin.
Performance:
Based on our testing, SiteGround ranked highest with an impressive 82 YSlow Grade and 100% uptime. The homepage took 0.940 seconds to load and the host scored 0.614 seconds on average on Load Impact.
Pricing: Starting at $3.95 per month (see all plans)
Bluehost Alternative #2: GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks is a green hosting company that offers eco-friendly and energy-efficient web hosting. Founded in 2008, it has data centers located in Chicago, Phoenix, Toronto, Montreal, and Amsterdam.
It delivers fast, scalable, and secure web hosting along with 24/7 expert support. In addition to this, it’s hosting plans are nominally priced and come with many powerful features.
GreenGeeks’ Lite plan offers one website while other plans offer unlimited websites. Plus, you get unlimited storage space and data transfer. It’s perfect for blogs, freelancers, and small businesses that are just getting started.
Key features:
- Offers unlimited web storage space and data transfer.
- GreenGeeks embeds several technologies together including scalable computing resources, SSD, Optimized LiteSpeed and MariaDB, PowerCacher, and CDN.
- Free domain name for the first year.
- You get 24/7 technical support that can be reached over the phone, live chat, and email.
- Offers free website migration and a drag-and-drop website builder.
Performance:
In our performance testing, GreenGeeks ranked third with an 88 YSlow Grade and 100% uptime. The homepage took slightly over one second (1.230 seconds) to load and the host scored 0.612 seconds on average on Load Impact.
Pricing: Starting at $2.95 per month (see all plans)
Bluehost Alternatives #3: Site5
Site5 is a web hosting service founded in 2001 that focuses on providing high performance to its customers.
The company provides in-house customer support through live chat and documentation (knowledge base and FAQs).
Additionally, the company handles its own engineering and development activities and promises no hidden charges with their pricing plans.
Site5 is perfect for small websites that receive around 10,000 monthly visitors. Its entry-level plan offers one website while the other plans offer unlimited sites.
In addition to this, it offers free migration services.
Key features:
- Provides unmetered bandwidth and disk space for your website.
- Offers 24/7 live chat in addition to its wiki-based customer support as well as community forums.
- Nightly server backups are also available.
- Offers free migration.
Performance:
Site5 ranked number four with an 83 YSlow Grade and 99.94% uptime. The homepage took 1.055 seconds to load and the host scored 0.754 seconds on average on Load Impact.
Pricing: Starting at $6.95 per month (view all plans)
Bluehost Alternatives #4: Arvixe
Arvixe was established in 2003 and offers shared hosting, VPS hosting and managed dedicated hosting as well as Linux and Windows hosting.
Arvixe’s hosting plans are designed specifically for individuals, freelancers, and small companies and offer unlimited data transfer and disk space.
Additionally, it comes with a free site builder tool, email accounts, free online store, free domain (free forever upon purchasing a hosting plan), and control panel. Its 24/7 US-based customer support is available for an extra fee.
Key features:
- It offers scalable, fast, and secure WordPress hosting.
- Comes with WordPress pre-configured and pre-installed.
- Gives you access to international data centers.
- It offers unlimited bandwidth and disk space.
Performance:
In our performance testing, Arvixe ranked fifth with an 83 YSlow Grade and 100% uptime. The homepage took under a second (0.874 seconds) to load and the host scored 0.738 seconds on average on Load Impact.
Pricing: Starting at $7 per month (view all plans)
Bluehost Alternative #5: iPage
iPage is a web hosting company that offers unlimited bandwidth and disk space along with no restriction on the number of domains and MySQL databases you have.
It comes with a blog setup wizard, a free drag-and-drop site building tool that lets you create up to six pages, and photo gallery setup wizard in addition to other powerful features.
Key features:
- Thousands of free templates along with a drag-and-drop site builder.
- Ad credits worth $200 for various search engines like Google and Bing.
- Offers free domain registration for one year.
- No limit on the number of email addresses on your domain.
- Offers email forwarding and autoresponders capabilities.
- Comes with a built-in analytics tool for monitoring and tracking your website’s performance.
Performance:
In our performance testing, iPage boasts a 76 YSlow Grade and 100% uptime. The homepage took 1.323 seconds to load and the host took only 0.585 seconds on average on Load Impact. This is the fastest average load time in our performance testing.
Pricing: Starting at $1.99 per month (view all plans)
Bluehost Alternative #6: A2 Hosting
This company is a web hosting provider that has a specific focus on WordPress, which means that it has features that have been specifically designed with WordPress in mind.
The good news is that this provider owns all of its servers, and they have a data center that is located in the states, close to Detroit.
As well as being able to assist you with WordPress, they can also make it easy for you to put your website on Joomla, as well as other sites.
They have three hosting packages for you to choose from, and they also have a performance plus choice, just know that you will be paying a bit more for this.
If you want to keep the speed of your website up even when it is proving to be popular, this is going to be an essential feature. They can help you host with American and European server locations.
They offer 64GB of RAM with all of their packages, as well as a 12 core server. Just take note here that when it comes to their second plan, it is a bit of a jump from their basic plan, but it’s not going to cost you all that much more.
They come with a complete refund policy as well as a money-back guarantee, and they can easily bring your current website over to their host from the one that you are currently using.
Bluehost Alternative #7: DreamHost
This company is a provider that can help you and has been helping its clients since way back in 1986. They got their start in Los Angeles, and they have been helping people ever since there were only a few thousand webpages out there.
They have been around for a long time at this point, and we believe that they have a really good grip on what they are doing.
They offer their clients dedicated hosting, and they also offer them shared hosting options, as well as VPS.
The good news is that their features come with cloud storage, and they are a great choice if you are a small business or a developer who might not have a completely IT department to help you.
They host currently around one million websites, and they don’t have support via phone, but you can request that they call you back for some support, and they have a live chat feature as well.
They are a great choice if you are wanting to host and unlimited number of domains, and they can also help you set up as many email accounts as you need.
Their shared hosting plan can easily support any kind of site, including a blog or a retail store.
Bluehost Alternative #8: HostGator
This business is going to give you everything you need when it comes to your web hosting, so that you can sit back and relax and know that you have a great Bluehost alternative that you can rely on.
We love that they are really well known in the industry already, which means that they have managed to gain a really good reputation for what they do. They currently host more than 9 million website, but they only got their start back in 2002.
In 2008, they began to think about things like green hosting and unlimited hosting, and we think that they have one of the best basic hosting plans that we have come across. Also, you can add as many feature as you like to this.
They also offer reseller hosting as well as VPS hosting, and they have robust support in the form of a customer support team, and they even provide development assistance if you haven’t been in the game for too long.
They align with Weebly for site building, and they can also make it easy for you to transfer everything over to them.
We think that they are a great choice if you want to do everything through WordPress, and they have a 24/7 customer support email line, but you can also talk to them through their website.
Their money-back guarantee lasts for 45 days, which is pretty generous. Additionally, they offer 99.9% uptime.
Bluehost Alternative #9: GoDaddy
This company is another Bluehost alternative that knows what its clients want, and isn’t about to scrimp out on giving it to them.
They are another provider of web hosting that is very well-established in the industry, and they say that they currently are hosting more than 60 million sites, which is a pretty impressive number.
They also talk about how they follow an aggressive marketing strategy, and we think that they are the gold standard when it comes to web hosting.
They started back in the late nineties in Arizona of all places, and since then they have been helping clients far and wide achieve what they need to through their websites.
They have marketing tools that you can make the most of, as well as investor tools, and we think that they have some pretty competitive pricing, so that you can afford even some of their advanced features.
We like that they have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and we also like that you can ask for a complete refund within 48 hours of purchasing one of their packages.
Like the other providers that we have talked about on this list, they can help you easily migrate your website over to them.
Bluehost Alternative #10: Inmotion Hosting
This business loves being able to help its clients with their hosting needs, and they are now based both in Los Angeles and Virginia Beach.
They say that one of the things that makes them stand out from the rest is the fact that they can offer maximum speed zones for their business clients, and they let you choose the location of your data center, so that you can increase your loading speeds depending on where you are located.
They also talk about how they can provide direct data connections. We think that this is the kind of hosting provider that can help you if you are a bit more technically-minded, so if you are an amateur you might want to go for another company on the list.
However, we do appreciate their cutting edge technology, and believe that they are going to be able to help you with so much more than just basic web hosting.
They offer their clients the ability to chat with them online, call them or email them, and they are going to walk you through the feature setup process. Lastly, they come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Bluehost Alternative #11: Web Hosting Hub
This company is all about making sure that its clients are getting what they need out of their web hosting services, and we like that they have been doing their thing since 2010, meaning that they have a good gauge on what you are looking for and what you are going to end up needing, even if you don’t have that yourself.
They talk about how their features are best suited to individuals and small businesses, especially if you are someone who is looking for an affordable option that is also free of hassle.
They talk about how they offer their clients three plans, and one of these are going to break the bank thankfully.
Their basic plan is their quick starter plan, so that you can get started with everything straight away, which is helpful if you are someone who is brand new to it all and doesn’t exactly want a steep learning curve.
They also talk about how they make it easy for you to choose the best domain for your brand, and their packages incorporate more than 300 apps that are free and all to do with website building. You also get to benefit from 25 parked domains.
How to Compare Providers
When looking for the right Bluehost alternative for your website, you’ve got to think about what your goals are with your website in general.
Of course, it pays to understand what things matter and what things don’t really matter, so that you can make a true comparison.
We think that one of the first things to think about is whether you are going to be running a regular business website with just a few pages, or are you going to needs thousands of pages?
Another thing to ask yourself is whether you are going to need storage for a lot of big files, and are your file needs going to grow over time, or are they going to stay the same?
Are you going to have some type of interactive application on your site that is going to encourage your clients to engage, or is most of your website going to remain static?
Also, how many visitors you are hoping to cater for on your site? This is going to determine how much processing power they will need to provide you with.
The more you know when it comes to these kinds of questions, the better you are going to be able to choose the right web hosting provider for your needs.
Conclusion: Bluehost Alternatives
We covered the standout features on offer with some of the highest-performing Bluehost alternatives.
By comparing and contrasting different hosting providers, you’ll be able to find the right web hosting solution for your specific needs.
To recap:
- If you’re looking for a scalable yet cost-effective web host with powerful features and excellent performance, we recommend going with SiteGround.
- And if you’re a freelancer or startup, we recommend going with GreenGeeks. You’ll get access to round the clock technical support from experts in addition to eco-friendly web hosting.
- iPage is the right choice for those of you who are after fast page loading times. The hosting provider performed exceptionally well in our own performance testing and is a cost-effective option for individuals, freelancers, and small businesses.
What features do you take into account when choosing a hosting provider? Let us know by commenting below.
