Alternatives to Bluehost : 3 Web Hosting Services to Consider
Tags: bluehost, hosting, website, devops
Published: 2022-11-11 14:47:08

Alternatives to Bluehost : 3 Web Hosting Services to Consider
Alternatives to Bluehost : 3 Web Hosting Services to Consider
Choosing the right web hosting service is never an easy task. While Bluehost is often recommended among the very best available options, it still comes with its limits. In this article, we’ll present you with some Bluehost alternatives in order for you to choose the one that best matches your expectations.

The popularity of Bluehost is widely associated with two factors: its recommendation by the World’s largest CMS — WordPress.org, and its pool of affiliate marketers actively telling people only the good stuff about the hosting company. And then you think, Bluehost must be the best.

Well, lad, that is not the case!

Although, we can testify that Bluehost is a powerful hosting company that offers outstanding hosting services that range from shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS, and dedicated hosting. Plus, they have been in the business for more than 20 years, and therefore have great experience in the field.

Nevertheless, that does not mean it will suit your needs or give you the best value for your money. This is where considering your best alternatives to Bluehost comes in. You would want to weigh your options, wouldn’t you?

Why You Should Consider Bluehost Alternatives

Before presenting you with the best Bluehost alternatives, let’s check out what are its limits and why some people might want to consider other options.

Aside from all the good news you have read or heard about Bluehost, people often forget to mention or purposely leave out where Bluehost lag and needs improvement. They often just hit you with the idea that they are very recognized in the business — they are on top of the 3 recommended hosting companies by WordPress — they give free domain and SSL certificates for the first year. However, this post will tell you the ugly truth about their services.

Here are a few reasons you should give Bluehost alternatives a chance:

Speed and Performance


When it comes to how search engines and visitors perceive and enjoy your website, speed and performance are very important. Ideally, your website should not take more than 2 to 3 seconds to load, or else visitors will leave before the page is displayed. This results in a high bounce rate which, in the end, will impact your SEO performance.

During our tests with Bluehost, despite the advertised 797ms load time, our test website could only be 1.2 seconds fast with a Time to First Byte (TTFB) of 378ms. This is with only the Astra theme installed with no further customizations. And we calculated our site uptime to only be around 99.89%, rather than the 99.98% they promised us. This is below the belt for a company that big, and the cost of their services. This calls for additional investments in caching plugins to perform better; a requirement that does not exist with most Bluehost alternatives.

Unimpressive Customer Support

One of the reasons that often comes up when people look for Bluehost alternatives is the very disappointing customer support.

With the cost of the services, you would expect more from customer support. But that is not the case with Bluehost. Back when I was using their services, I once had a problem with their in-house caching that was displaying the wrong page to my visitors and kind of broke my site.

I contacted the support, but they couldn’t provide a permanent solution to my problem, and this haunted my site for months as I kept contacting them. In the end, I had to move to another hosting company; Hostinger.

Aside from their customer support’s low expertise in WordPress, using their support system is quite stressful. The live chat feature requires you to provide a validation token sent to your email to confirm that you are who you claim to be, even if you are already logged in. That is pretty unnecessary to me. Plus, it usually took me extra minutes to get to my real point.

Response Time

Lastly, the support response time is not very encouraging. Imagine having to wait more than 30 minutes just to talk to someone about your problem. A service that you paid for, and a Live Chat for that matter.

Recently, they put it out on their Live Chat pop-up that you should not expect them to reply to you immediately because they are experiencing delays. To me, this can only mean two things; too many people are complaining about their services and the support staff are overwhelmed, or they fail to invest in customer services, and thus, have only limited support staff available.

Pricing

When choosing Bluehost alternatives, pricing is also an important factor. The Basic Shared Hosting plan at Bluehost starts at $2.95 per month and renews at $9.99 after the first year. The renewal price is a bit pricey because only one website, 5 parked domains, and 25 subdomains can be hosted on this plan. Plus, you will only have 10 GB of storage space which is pretty bad for a media-heavy website.

Ease of Navigation

As a beginner, it is quite tasking to know your way around the Bluehost account dashboard. Firstly, you will often click through a lot of links and land on irrelevant pages before the right one. Sometimes, you still have to reload the right pages before you can get them to display the necessary information. Lastly, the account area is not optimized for mobile, and this makes it practically impossible to use it on the go. Of course, unless you carry your PC around. We didn’t like the redirection to cPanel particularly.

Backups

Another reason users tend to look for Bluehost alternatives is the lack of automatic backups on most of their starter shared and WordPress plans.

Nothing is scarier than the absence of a restore button. At least to me, because I am often trying something new on my website. Could be you too. And sometimes, I mess things up, or the site crashes due to a bug or attack. Nevertheless, it is always a relief that I have an un-do button — a means to return things to how they were. This is where regular automated backups come in.

Although Bluehost has a backup feature for all its plans, we do not particularly like it. This is because it is not automated. At least, not until you subscribe to a minimum of the PRO plan at $28.99 per month.

As a result, you will have to dedicate time to start saving a backup manually from your Bluehost dashboard. This is both time-consuming and stressful. It is even devastating especially when you miss your routine manual backup, and your website goes under attack and/or crashes. You may be stuck with an outdated backup of your site, at most. A disaster like that can throw your business into turmoil; especially for regularly updated websites!

Migration

Unlike other web hosting services that offer free migration services when you are transferring your existing site from a different host, Bluehost charges a hefty amount per migration; almost $150. This becomes burdensome, and expensive when you have more than one site to move to Bluehost.

However, it should be noted that Bluehost offers a one-time free migration offer to new customers for a single site. But it is just a hoax. They have stated that the site’s file size must be less than 2 GB, and the database should not exceed 40 MB. This is not an easy feat for established websites that are bigger than this. But do not be deceived, 99% of Bluehost alternatives offer free site migrations for multiple sites without restrictions.

Add-ons and Upsells

Finally, what people might hate most and really push them to look for the best alternatives to Bluehost is the feeling of always having to pay extras.

Bluehost is synonymous with upsells. Some features like automated backups, domain privacy, and free SSL certificates that are free on alternative hosting services require additional payments or upgrades on Bluehost.

For instance, to run an online store with Woocommerce, you need to get the Woocommerce add-on. Or you can buy the new Store hosting plans, starting at around $10 for the first year, and almost $25 on renewal.

Additionally, the starting prices for all plans are designed to get you to sign up and expect to be charged 3x the initial amount on renewal.

The Flexibility of Data Centers Location

Bluehost has about 6 data centers (DC) on 3 continents. These DC are located in Utah, USA (2), London, UK, Hong Kong, China, Mumbai India, and Shanghai, Mainland China. The locations are pretty good, but the power to choose which data center to host your websites on is not given.

As we know, data centers are the physical locations of your hosting servers. These are where the posts, media, and all other resources you host on your site or applications live, and where they are pulled from when a user requests them by visiting your site.

As a result, it is better if you have your website hosted close to where your target audience or visitors are coming from due to network latency issues — the delay before the transfer of data is initiated. Because this way, you can harness a fast initial response, and loading time, which will in turn decrease your bounce rate, increase page views and boost SEO performance — there will be no problem with passing Core Web Vitals with flying colors.

Its Implications

However, unlike some of the best alternatives to Bluehost, you cannot choose or change your data center(s) as they will be automatically assigned to you upon hosting account setup. This limits your options if you prefer a particular data center location because you are targeting a greater number of your visitors there or the market seems to be better there, and you want to give them a swifter experience in terms of speed.

For instance, if Bluehost hosts your website in Utah, USA but the majority of your visitors are from Germany, you may have trouble delivering the fastest loading speed to your visitors due to the distance between Germany and USA. This could hurt your SEO rankings badly for your targeted audience too.

Nevertheless, Bluehost is still a very good hosting service. They have a 4.2/5 average rating on Trustpilot with about 60% of these reviews with a 5-star rating.

Visit Bluehost’s website

3 Best Bluehost Alternatives to Consider

Now that we have explained some of the reasons why you may need to weigh your options when choosing a web hosting company, here is a list of the top 3 Bluehost alternatives, and why they may be a better fit for you.

1. Hostinger (Hostinger.com)

Hostinger is one of the best alternatives to Bluehost and currently ranks as our favorite web hosting service for 2022. It is built with the latest Litespeed technologies, HTTP/3, and SSD servers, and offers unlimited bandwidth to give your website a blazingly fast speed to retain all your visitors.

They do not joke with security as all their servers are equipped with WebApplication Firewall (WAF) to overcome Brute force and DDoS attacks. Also, with their Cloudflare-protected Nameservers, your visitors will not feel a thing when something goes wrong with your nameservers.

As a WordPress beginner, you have nothing to worry about when it comes to WordPress installation. You have the option to install WordPress with a single click from your CPanel. With this, Hostinger’s automated system does the heavy lifting for you. Plus, the drag-and-drop website builder allows you to build your website visually, on a WYSIWYG level — What You See Is What You Get. This means that you can customize your website as you want by just placing the elements the pages on for both desktop and mobile versions in minutes. And you can rest assured they will be optimized for both SEO and user experience.

Visit Hostinger’s website

Hostinger’s Features

Here are the features that qualify Hostinger as one of the best Bluehost alternatives:

Shared/WordPress/Cloud/VPS hosting
Free unlimited sites migration
Automated daily and weekly backups
Unlimited bandwidth & Databases
Optimized for WordPress and eCommerce with one-click installation
DDoS protection through Cloudflare & free SSL certificates for life
LiteSpeed Cache & Free CDN
Prices start at $1.99 for 48 months and $2.99 for 12 months
Customized control panel (CPanel)
24/7/365 support
99.9% uptime guarantee
30-day money-back guarantee
Staging sites
Why Hostinger is One of The Best Bluehost Alternatives

Hostinger is a better choice than Bluehost when it comes to pricing and the quality of services, and this makes it one of its greatest alternatives. Its shared hosting plans start from around $3 per month (Single Shared Hosting) and renew at $6 while Bluehost’s Basic plan starts at about $3 per month and renews at almost $10.

We discovered that the value of Bluehost’s plan is unjustified because Hostinger is cheaper and offers free migration, email hosting, 50 GB SSD storage (40 GB more than Bluehost’s offer), LiteSpeed servers, and free SSL certificates for life, unlike Bluehost.

Visit Hostinger’s website

Improved and Optimized Control Panel

The panel is a very incredible alternative to the cPanel, and Hostinger has greatly optimized it. We think it is one of the reasons they have cheaper plans; no extra money is charged for cPanel services.

On the panel dashboard, navigation comes very easily since we do not have to redirect to a third-party website (cPanel). You can add domains, change DNS records, upload files and folders to your File Manager, and create FTP and email accounts easily with just a matter of clicks. We also particularly enjoyed the free drag-and-drop website builder because it is very beginner-friendly and anyone can design a beautiful-looking, and website in a matter of minutes.

Data Center Location Choice

The ability to choose the data center location of your choice on all of Hostinger’s hosting plans makes it one of the best Bluehost alternatives. You can choose your server location either at your initial account setup, or when you discover your audience is more pronounced in a particular. And you want to reduce the network latency for your visitors.

Fortunately, Hostinger also analyses your traffic and may give you the best Litespeed web server that can the majority of your visitors better. The best part is that you can do this all for free! However, you can only change your data center once a month per hosting account, and it takes about 48 hours for your new Domain Naming System (DNS) to propagate worldwide. The DNS is what tells browsers where your files are located. If your domain is not registered at Hostinger, you will have to change your nameservers to the new ones that will be provided to you.

Visit Hostinger’s website

Why Hostinger is a Good Bluehost Alternative

7 data centers on 4 continents, and Cloudflare CDN
Best value for money
Free email hosting
Free unlimited sites migration
Better speed and performance
Improved control panel (CPanel)
Save up to $204 yearly on shared hosting
Another reason why Hostinger is one of the best alternatives to Bluehost is that has an outstanding rating of 4.5/5 Trustpilot from more than ten thousand (10,000) customers. This is a great indication of the quality service they provide as more than 83% of their users give a 5-star rating. They particularly commend their onboarding process, customer services, site migrations, uptime, and hosting services in general.

Bluehost Alternative: Hostinger (At a Glance Comparison) Bluehost Hostinger Ratings (Trustpilot) 4.2/5 4.5/5 Hosting Plans Shared/managed WordPress/dedicated/VPS Shared/WordPress/Cloud/VPS/CyberPanel/Minecraft Pricing Starts around $3 per month Starts around $3 per month Renewal Renews at around $10 per month Renews at around $6 per month Website Migration 1 Free & Premium $150 Free unlimited sites Data Centers the USA, UK, India, China the USA, Europe,the Netherlands, Lithuania, the UK, Brazil, Singapore, India Data Center Location Choice No Yes — on setup, and relocation request free of charge Uptime Guarantee None 99.90% Account Management/Dashboard Unoptimized account area with cPanel integration Modern, customized and beginner-friendly CPanel Loading time 1.2s 901ms Customer service Expertise and Response Time Average Excellent Freebies A free SSL certificate and domain for one year Unlimited SSL certificates forever, free domain for a year, email hosting, automated daily and weekly backups 2. PlanetHoster ( PlanetHoster.com)

While searching for a credible list of Bluehost alternatives, PlanetHoster must pop up. PlanetHoster is a big player in the hosting industry that specializes in shared web hosting and hybrid cloud hosting; otherwise known as Dedicated Cloud Hosting. It focuses on security, speed, performance, and the provision of high-quality hosting services to clients to meet their personal needs.

What makes PlanetHoster so special, is the never-ending features it has packed in, even in its lowest plan, the degree of flexibility and affordability of the services. You can customize it to your needs. Plus, they offer a free domain for life! Yes, you read that right!

It readily supports multiple Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop, Drupal, Magento, XenForo, Moodle, and Bulletin with a state-of-the-art optimized environment.

PlanetHoster also allows users to choose which server-side programming languages to use; be it PHP, Python, Ruby (RoR), or Node.js. All without a fuss! So, if you have some custom applications to deploy as a developer or site owner, you are good to know!

Try out PlanetHoster’s hosting plans

PlanetHoster’s Features

Here are the features that make PlanetHoster a qualified alternative to Bluehost:

Shared/WordPress/Cloud hosting
Free domain and WHOIS protection for life
Unlimited websites, bandwidth & SSD storage, or disk space
Unlimited email and FTP accounts
Premium automated backups for free (twice daily)
99.982% uptime guarantee
LiteSpeed & LiteSpeed Cache (LS)
24/7/365 support
Free SSL certificate for life
Free site migration
One-click activation for CMS (WordPress, PrestaShop, Magento, etc)
Data centers in Canada, Switzerland, & France
Why PlanetHoster is Preferable to Bluehost

Here are some of the reasons PlanetHoster is better than Bluehost:

Value for Money

Being one of the best Bluehost alternatives, PlanetHoster does it better in terms of value for money. For instance, the lowest plan on PlanetHoster starts from around $7 (Standard) for the first time and renewal, while Bluehost’s lowest plan (Basic) starts from around $10 (neglecting the first time $2.95 price). However, even at this price, PlanetHoster gives more features than Bluehost will ever give without emptying your pocket.

First of all, you will get a free domain for life, multiple free SSL certificates, unlimited websites, hosting accounts, bandwidth, email accounts, disk space, and databases. And then, you will enjoy LiteSpeed Cache (VIP only), a one-click installation of any CMS, site migration from Bluehost or any other hosting company at no extra cost, and automated daily backups. Whereas, the more expensive Bluehost plan (about$10) will only allow you access to host one website, 10 GB disk space, a one-year free domain, and an SSL certificate — with add-on purchases and upgrades required to enjoy other features.

Try out PlanetHoster’s hosting plans

Also, the admin area is easy to navigate on both desktop and mobile devices. And you can easily manage your services, and domains without requiring much expertise.

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