Bluehost and GoDaddy are two of the most renowned web hosts in the industry, with GoDaddy hosting over five million websites as the world’s largest domain registrar, and Bluehost powering more than two million websites.
Despite their similarities, Bluehost and GoDaddy differ in crucial aspects that can sway your decision.
Since I own multiple websites and I’m a leading expert in the web building industry, I’ve examined both hosting giants to equip you with the knowledge necessary to select a better hosting provider based on your specific priorities and requirements.
Table Of Contents
Bluehost vs GoDaddy: Comparison
Before we do an in-depth Bluehost vs. GoDaddy comparison, here’s a roundup of some of their key hosting features. Check out the table below for a snapshot of how they compare.
| Web Hosts | Hosting Type Offered | Storage | Uptime | Pricing | Support Core |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bluehost | Shared hosting plan, VPS, dedicated, shared WordPress, managed WordPress, and WooCommerce hosting | 100GB | 99.99% | Starting at $2.95 per month | 3.5/5 |
| GoDaddy | Shared hosting, WordPress hosting, Business hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated hosting. | 100GB - Unlimited | 99.90% | Starting at $1 per month | 3.9/5 |
1. Reliability
Whether you’re launching a new site or looking to migrate to a new host, you’ll need a provider that offers reliable uptime. If your server is down, no one can have access to your website.
In my years as an SEO specialist, I always tell my clients that consistent downtime causes long-term damage to your brand reputation and SEO.
Bluehost and GoDaddy have proven to be excellent and reliable providers based on my experience with the platforms. According to Pingdom data, Bluehost has maintained an impressive uptime of 99.9% consistently.
In contrast, GoDaddy has gone below its uptime guarantee of 99.9% a total of 5 times in two years.
Bluehost doesn’t provide a refund if you have downtime issues. However, they pledge to sort out any downtime-related issue in less than 15 minutes. Yet, in our experience, a fast response time hasn’t always been the case.
GoDaddy offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee refund. If your website servers are below the pledged limit, you can get your money back. However, they’ll only provide a refund for the time your server was down.
Overall, Bluehost seems more reliable regarding uptime guarantees although they don’t provide refunds when they default on their promise.
Winner: Bluehost
2. Performance
Loading time is an excellent metric for testing the performance of hosting providers.
We are in the age of broadband and Long Term Evolution (LTE)[1].
In my experience of managing multiple websites, site speed is a crucial factor. It directly affects the performance of the server and the productivity of the user.
The average user has a threshold of three seconds when waiting for a site to load. Websites that take longer to load end up with high bounce rates.
Clients and customers tend to leave slow loading websites, which would directly affect your business. Besides, a slow website would take even longer when adding media files like images, infographics, and videos.
Dotcom-Monitor ran a speed test to determine the fastest web hosting. They ran the test on two separate but identical WordPress websites. One site was hosted on Bluehost, and the other was hosted on GoDaddy. They used servers in North and South America.
Take a look at the summarized data on the speed test below.
If you look closely, you can see that Bluehost’s quickest load time was 1.4 seconds with an average of 3.3 seconds, which is around the three-second user threshold.
GoDaddy only managed a load time of 3.4 seconds and even had a 16.8 seconds site speed at a data center in Argentina, South America.
From the averages, you can see that Bluehost was a bit faster than GoDaddy’s. However, compared to other faster options like WPX, both providers are relatively slow. WPX has an average of less than 2 seconds.
Winner: Bluehost
3. Ease of Use
Starting out, I found out that Bluehost and GoDaddy have designed their dashboards for easy navigation which is an advantage for new-users or beginners.
Unfortunately, the GoDaddy hosting interface leaves much to be desired.
Bluehost provides a great hosting account for customers. Their customized cPanel makes it very easy to set up a WordPress account.
You can run your site on any number of Content Management Platforms with either provider. Both Godaddy and Bluehost support website builder tools like Weebly or Drupal for users who don’t want to use WordPress.
If you plan to use a specialized CMS like WooCommerce, though, you’re better off looking for a specialized WooCommerce hosting provider such as WPX or Flywheel.
Bluehost is the better hosting provider than GoDaddy because of its intuitive, easy-to-navigate, and customized cPanel.
Winner: Bluehost
4. Customer Support
Based on reviews from nearly 2,000 people, TrustPilot scores Bluehost 3.2 out of 5, while GoDaddy support scores an impressive 4.0 from over 20,000 reviews. On G2, GoDaddy has nearly 700 reviews, and the company has a score of 3.9. Bluehost has only about 200 reviews yet, at 3.8, scores slightly lower than GoDaddy.
After using both web hosts, I learned that Bluehost and GoDaddy provide 24/7 customer support throughout the year.
However, GoDaddy’s team seems more focused on dealing with domain name queries, a reasonable business strategy considering that is a big portion of their business.
These providers place a premium on providing good customer support. While GoDaddy seems to have a slight edge in online reviews, Bluehost is a worthwhile competitor.
From most of the online reviews we looked at, Bluehost received a commendation for having a crack team of experts to help with specialized queries, but their customer support is notoriously slow.
GoDaddy, owing to its fast customer service, is the winner in this section.
Winner: GoDaddy
5. Price Comparison
As with most consumers, one of my main considerations is the cost of the website hosting service and how it could be accommodated on my budget.
Both providers have reasonable plans. Here’s a quick Bluehost vs. GoDaddy pricing comparison to help you decide.
Bluehost offers shared hosting plans starting at $2.95 per month and renews yearly at an increased price of $8.99/month.
Each Bluehost plan includes a free CDN program (content delivery network), an SSL certificate, a free domain name, unmetered bandwidth, unlimited websites, domain privacy, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and unlimited storage.
GoDaddy offers three shared plans: Economy, Deluxe, and Ultimate plans. The Economy plan starts at $1, but like Bluehost, GoDaddy’s price is jacked up to a renewal fee of $8.99 after 36 months.
In addition, the plans come with unmetered bandwidth (meaning you are not billed according to the amount of disk space or bandwidth used) as well as 100 GB storage, and a free domain name.
Generally, we can see that both hosting providers have competitive plans and prices.
Winner: Draw
6. WordPress Integration
One-third of the internet is built on WordPress, and a good host should be optimized for the application [2].
Bluehost is one of the best hosting services for running a WordPress website since it is an official partner which rated the platform as one of “the best and brightest of the hosting world.”
Based on research, Bluehost has three WordPress plans to help you run your site:
- WordPress web hosting
- Managed WordPress hosting
- Online Stores
You’ll get an easy-to-use WordPress dashboard to help you set up, monitor, and customize your site’s appearance and performance.
Bluehost integrates with several themes and plugins such as Yoast SEO, Jetpack, WordFence Security, MonsterInsights, and WP Smush.
To ensure that you never have to worry about keeping your WordPress up-to-date, I always tell clients that Bluehost offers automatic WordPress updates with the right security features to keep your website safe and performing at an optimum level.
GoDaddy is not too far behind in WordPress web hosting. The host has four WordPress web hosting plans:
- Basic
- Deluxe
- Ultimate
- eCommerce
Each plan comes with a free SSL certificate, a free domain, and a free business email. Just like Bluehost, GoDaddy has several themes and plugins to help you run your site.
Overall, Bluehost and GoDaddy offer several features for running a WordPress website. If you have to choose between the two, we’d recommend going for Bluehost they’ve had WordPress’ stamp of approval since 2005.
Winner: Bluehost
7. Website Migration
Whenever I used to migrate from one site to a different provider, I avoid technical issues by officially closing my account. I found out that both Bluehost and GoDaddy fall short in this department as many other hosting providers offer migration for free.
Bluehost provides a professional website migration service for a one-off fee of $149.99. They will migrate up to five websites and 20 email accounts. They have specialists and experts that understand the process and specialize in delivering stable migrations.
Bluehost also has a free migration offer for WordPress websites, however, it is a one-time use only. This service is only accessible to you within the first 30 days of signing up for a Bluehost account.
GoDaddy doesn’t provide automated website migration. You’ll have to transfer files to your website manually. WordPress users can migrate their site to GoDaddy through your new account’s “My Products” section.
Overall, Bluehost is the only provider that offers a website migration process and a team to help you with any issues. Overall, while Bluehost and Goddady both scored poorly in regard to website migration, Bluehost is the better choice.
Winner: Bluehost (But both hosting providers scored poorly in this department)
F.A.Qs
What Is So Special About Bluehost’s WordPress Integration?
What’s so special about Bluehost WordPress integration is that installing WordPress on Bluehost is simplified. There are many different plugins available for WordPress, and Bluehost offers a staff of customer support representatives that are experts in the platform.
Can I Use Bluehost and GoDaddy Together?
You can use Bluehost and GoDaddy together. Using a combination of services to manage a website is a prevalent strategy nowadays. If you want to host a WordPress website, you can get a name through GoDaddy and then utilize Bluehost’s shared hosting.
Is Bluehost Good for Beginners?
Bluehost is good for beginners. It is simple and straightforward, and it serves both novice and seasoned webmasters well. Due to its user-friendliness, WordPress is the platform of choice for many inexperienced webmasters, and Bluehost offers an excellent hosting service.
Our Verdict on Bluehost Vs GoDaddy
After our team conducted thorough research and performance tests on both Bluehost and GoDaddy, I’ve realized that Bluehost stands out as the overall best provider of the two.
Bluehost has a better speed ratio and significant uptime based on proven data. The two features are the most important factors to look at when deciding on a web hosting provider.
Although GoDaddy isn’t a terrible web hosting provider, I’ll still lean towards Bluehost.
Our #1 Recommendation: Bluehost
Load Time
Support Score
disk space
security
pricing
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