If on this particular page you ended up here, you’re probably comparing Bluehost and GoDaddy to decide which host is the better. It’s also possible that you’ve come across other review sites that don’t offer much (if any) objective information and just try to push you to click on a sign-up icon to receive a reward. Let me warn you that you’re not going to find something here.
Cybers guards has been created to be a truly informative website that offers real and honest reviews of web hosting. On this article, you will see that Bluehost and GoDaddy are contrasted critically and subjectively using a number of criteria to help you figure out which host might be the best fit for your needs once and for all.
Taking things a step further, I’ve been hosting two WordPress sites— one on Bluehost and one on GoDaddy for a whole year and running a number of experiments on them to obtain a lot of data. In fact, you will have the opportunity to read my expert opinion on both Bluehost and GoDaddy as someone who has been successfully creating websites for over a decade.
Now that some of the initial information has been covered, let’s look at Bluehost compared to GoDaddy and see how they match each other. Get to know about godaddy malware removal here.
GoDaddy vs Bluehost: Evaluation and Contrast
When evaluating site servers, there are so many things to consider, it’s enough to render you dizzy. To keep things simple, I usually like to look at five broad categories to see how one web host is stacking up against another. In other comparisons you will see these metrics on this site as I really believe they are the best snapshot of the quality and value of a web host.
The metrics I use are:
- Speed & Web Performance
- Reliability (Uptime and Downtime)
- Quality of Support
- UI/UX and Ease of Use
- Pricing, Hosting Features, and Plans
The remainder of this article breaks down all hosts in each group using different test data to help you appreciate how they relate. If you still don’t like there server after you buy it, you may delete bluehost account any time.
Speed and Web Quality: Bluehost vs GoDaddy
I usually put the group “Speed and Web Performance” first when contrasting web hosts because it is really one of the better “measuring sticks.” It really distinguishes a successful hosting company from a poor web hosting company. If a host slackers in handling their infrastructure and resources, the speed (or lack thereof) of their servers would typically be noticeable instantly.
Speed is also an important part of a website’s user satisfaction because website visitors don’t have much patience for sites that load slowly or freeze in the current age of broadband and LTE. There are plenty of data suggesting that 3 seconds is the user concentration threshold— when a web page requires longer to load than that, it often results in people skipping from that platform.
I went ahead and put Bluehost and GoDaddy against each other to decide which host had the best load time to put things into perspective. To do that, on two separate WordPress blogs, I conducted a web page speed test— one hosted on Bluehost, and the rival version hosted by GoDaddy. The Dotcom-Monitor app, available at Dotcom-Tools.com, is the speed monitor I used here (and my personal favorite). I like it because you can run a single test and verify it from multiple locations around the globe. I used their “Global” network, which covers North and South America, to keep things simple for this study. You will see the check times outlined in the tables if you take a moment to study the screen shots below.
You can note above that the quickest load period for Bluehost was just under 2 seconds (1.4 to be exact) and its average load time was 3.3 seconds, right at the app bounce level. For example, if you look at the picture below, GoDaddy’s highest load period was 3.4 seconds and its worst load time was 16.8 seconds from Argentina’s South American data center.
Looking at the averages, you can see that Bluehost was faster across the board and had an average load time that nearly matched GoDaddy’s best effort, which doesn’t look all that good for GoDaddy.
The Speed and efficiency champion: Bluehost.
Although I wouldn’t suggest GoDaddy had a bad show per se, they also didn’t seem to have the same snappiness as Bluehost did to their server response times. I can say that this also reflects my personal experience with the hosts. Based on years of hosting websites for myself and businesses, I’ve found that Bluehost is relatively superior to GoDaddy from my perspective in terms of web performance and speed.
Bluehost and GoDaddy—Reliability (Uptime and Downtime)
Uptime and latency are two very significant hosting indicators, and the reason is simple— if your web server is down, no one can reach your site because your site is down as well. If you are running a business, this can be very negative and can result in lost revenue and lost customers. If you’re a blogger, journalist, or owner of a website, it can be very detrimental to your image and can be particularly problematic if you have some viral content on the website. Imagine the frustration of your followers trying to access a wonderful piece of content just to find out that your website is down. It should be obvious, therefore, that your server is very important online and not down.
Many hosts have a Service Level Agreement (also referred to as an SLA) that outlines their uptime and downtime policies. The uptime industry standard is normally 99.9% or a very similar number. The SLA percentage of GoDaddy’s uptime is 99.9 percent, but they will only refund at the time of writing for the duration the system was down, not a full credit for a month’s operation. Some hosts, such as HostGator, also give a free month in case the percentage of uptime fall below the amount defined in their SLA. Bluehost does not have a defined percentage of uptime at the time of writing so compensation would have to be sought on a case-by-case basis, which is not the best policy either in my view. However, they offer no-fee refunds on the unused portion of your hosting cost in case you decide to terminate the hosting downtime account.
I allowed skilled testing for 12 straight months on two self-hosted WordPress websites (one hosted on Bluehost and one hosted on GoDaddy) to see who had the better uptime between Bluehost and GoDaddy. For these tests and their ServerView application, I used Dotcom-Monitor. I had their device ping per site at 3 hour intervals for an uptime / downtime test. To see the uptime results, have a look at the pictures below.
As you can see, Bluehost had an uptime of 99.81 percent for the year after 12 months, which is quite respectable. It’s really close to the proverbial industry standard of 99.9 percent, although they don’t adhere to that specifically or give a specific percentage in their SLA.
GoDaddy comes in at 98.5 percent year-on-year, which may not seem much less than the standard set for a month of service in their SLA, and is also below the industry standard of 99.9 percent.
Bluehost is the clear winner in the group of durability with that said.
While GoDaddy did not necessarily have poor uptime figures, they seemed to dip somewhat below the 99.9 percent golden standard. Sadly, in my mind, their SLA scheme stinks as they pay only for the time the web is down. While Bluehost does not specifically specify a reimbursement schedule for uptime / downtime, after talking to customer service, I have been successful in receiving a reimbursement for more than the time a site was down. While there is no certainty that they would do this on a regular basis, in this situation, I think the sheer statistics lead to Bluehost being slightly better consistent.
Help Quality— Bluehost Compared with GoDaddy
Aid is one of those issues where views differ a little. Although one person might have had a great experience with a single server, with that same hosting company, another individual might have had a terrible experience. Often people may get offended when it’s not really warranted, and in other situations a single host’s bad review is really justified. Whether or not a host is at fault for something that occurred or whether a guest just had a single bad encounter can be hard to know from one party to another.
I’ve been actively designing websites for over a decade, so that’s why I’ve had multiple experiences with most traditional hosting companies in both business and personal capacities. So you’ll get my opinion in this section, but at the time of writing, you’ll also get some facts about the type of support that each company offers.
Let’s glance first at Bluehost. To continue with, they provide all forms of support— phone, speak, ticket, fax, etc., and are providing 24/7/365 service, which is a must for any web hosting company. I’ve seen some firms with limited support hours and that’s really inexcusable for a modern web hosting company. I’ve found that the consistency of Bluehost’s service seems to have decreased somewhat in the last six months or so in terms of waiting times. That may have been just my subjective experience, however.
Another feature about GoDaddy that I really like is that they have great phone service. It’s not impossible to get an individual from the U.S. on the line, but they’re certainly concentrating the assistance on their domain company. It’s tougher to get a web hosting service skilled person, which can lead certain users looking for alternatives to GoDaddy. Actually, my talk experience was pretty bad… it’s been something that’s really missing at the top. One of the most frustrating things about their conversation is that I found it took the chat technician a really long time to address questions / exchanges between them.
In my opinion, Bluehost is clearly the winner of the support category.
Although GoDaddy does have outstanding domain service, there is no assistance for their storage and I have had trouble getting professional technicians on the line or talk that can assist or really understand the problem at hand. While this may also be a challenge with Bluehost, as they are solely a hosting service and not a domain registrar, I consider their hosting help significantly stronger than GoDaddy.
UI / UX and user-friendliness: Bluehost vs GoDaddy
This is an interesting comparison because GoDaddy has a fairly smooth design but Bluehost does so. If we were thinking about the domain app, it would be nice for me to send this one to GoDaddy; their domain interface rocks and navigation is very simple. Because they are not first and foremost a hosting company, however, their hosting interface leaves something to be desired. They have some weird ways to integrate cPanel and in my experience it’s a bit clunky overall.
Nevertheless, Bluehost has an impressive layout that is “newbie-friendly” when it comes to being elegant and user-friendly. I used a web hosting forum to have users with very no expertise doing quite well in trying to navigate the Bluehost backend. Many big hosts have their own unique cPanel configurations and apps, but Bluehost performs one of the finest and most organized jobs I’ve ever seen.
We make it extremely simple to install WordPress on your hosting site, get responses to all repositories, etc., and have a pretty good support / wiki section where you can find answers to common questions. Their support staff always seem to grasp the backend very well and when questions are asked they do a decent job of communicating this through conversation.
Therefore, Bluehost is definitely the winner in terms of UI / UX and ease of use.
It’s not that GoDaddy has a poor system because they’re using cPanel, but it certainly leaves something to be desired and it’s clear that hosting isn’t their business’ priority. Bluehost is really shining here, making beating GoDaddy relatively easy.
GoDaddy vs. Bluehost: Pricing and hosting features
Planning is an interesting thing in the web hosting world because there are so many coupons and things that can change prices. For fact, the original rates are always higher than the replacement costs, close to the cost of cable TV. Hosts are somewhat popular for offering low promotional rates and then jacking up costs quite a bit during the renewal period, so it is important to understand what your renewal pricing will be when signing up for any web host.
That said, both Bluehost and GoDaddy compete for their web hosting pricing. Bluehost’s lowest price is around $2.95/month with our unique Bluehost voucher on their best shared hosting package.
GoDaddy plays the same game as almost all web hosts, and their lowest price shared hosting is $3.99/month if you sign up for multiple months (36 months to be exact). Most people aren’t interested in joining up at the same time for so many years, so increasing revenue is a good strategy, but not always realistic for most people looking to check a host — in that case, 12 months is a bit more common in terms of time.
Bluehost provides 1 platform, 50 GB of storage, unmetered bandwidth, 1 domain, and 5 email accounts as to how the cheapest options stack up on each host. GoDaddy provides 50 GB of storage, but 95 more Bluehost email addresses (100 vs. 5). Basically everything is available if you step up to the next package (Bluehost’s $4.95/month plan and GoDaddy’s $4.99/month plan). GoDaddy restricts email addresses to 500 where limitless email addresses are provided by Bluehost. When you probably start to see, shared hosting is so commodified that most things are actually the same. While I’d say if you’re looking for a non-profit hosting, Bluehost may be your best price bet in the long run. Apart from that, they are basically equal in price alone (which shouldn’t be the biggest factor in selecting a host as help and reliability is much more important).
That’s why it’s a tie in the price category.
Since Bluehost and GoDaddy have pricing that’s so close, it’s really better to pick one or the other depending on some of the other parameters since pricing really doesn’t provide any differentiation.
And the overall winner is…
Bluehost!
Why do I believe Bluehost is the better of the two? Okay, they have great pace scores and improved uptime based on totally objective criteria first and foremost, not my view at all. These are two of the most important specific variables in the choosing of a web host.
Bluehost scores again in terms of customer service and user-friendliness. The only place where they are truly similar is in price, but Bluehost still outshines GoDaddy in almost any direction in all other ways. GoDaddy isn’t a bad choice, I honestly believe it’s because GoDaddy is first a domain registrar and second a web host, and that shows in the quality of their support and how they manage their servers. Bluehost also provides domain ownership, but for that hands I will prefer GoDaddy. That said, if you’re trying to make a web hosting choice between Bluehost and GoDaddy, it’s my strong belief that Bluehost is the way to go.
