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If you are planning to launch a new WordPress blog or a website, you may have shortlisted BlueHost and GoDaddy to host your site. Isn’t it? The reason why you may have chosen the two companies is their immense popularity.
GoDaddy uses TV channels as a promotion medium. BlueHost, being a decade old company is very popular among bloggers. Today, we have shared a detailed comparison of these two hosting providers so that it becomes easier for you to buy a hosting plan for your WordPress project.
CPanel aka Control Panel
Both BlueHost and GoDaddy offer a CPanel module through which you manage your website’s files, database, DNS settings, backups, and more. The CPanel provided by both the companies is easy to use. You can access it anytime.
The Control Panel is available all the time. You can download files to your PC or upload files to the server with it. CPanel gives you the access to one-click installer tool for setting up WordPress and other top frameworks. When I was a customer of GoDaddy hosting, I was not happy with the performance of the CPanel. Bluehost has a faster CPanel.
Customer Support
Bluehost provides live chat, telephone, and ticket based support whereas GoDaddy’s customer support is limited to just ticket and phone. Tickets raised by the customers of GoDaddy hosting are not answered/closed within two or three hours of raising the issue. The customer has to wait for up to 12 hours to get a response from the support team.
When you’re using Bluehost hosting, you don’t have to raise any tickets. Just sign into your dashboard and open the live chat module. Both companies offer 24 x 7 support for the entire year.
Latest Hosting Plans
GoDaddy offers three hosting plans i.e. economy, deluxe, and ultimate.
| Cost | Renewal fees | Plan name | Supported websites | Storage | Bandwidth | Email Addresses |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $3.99 | $7.99 | Economy | 1 | 100GB | Unlimited | 100 |
| $4.99 | $9.99 | Deluxe | UL | UL | UL | 500 |
| $7.99 | $14.99 | Ultimate | UL | UL | UL | 1000 |
Difference between GoDaddy Deluxe and Ultimate hosting plans
Deluxe plan provides free domain name on an annual subscription. With GoDaddy Ultimate hosting plan, your site will be provided premium DNS, and it will be hosted on a server with better specs.
Like GoDaddy, Bluehost offers three shared hosting plans for the customers:
| Cost | Renewal fees | Plan name | Supported websites | Storage | Bandwidth | Email A/Cs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $3.95 | $7.99 | Basic | 1 | 50GB | Unlimited | 5 |
| $5.95 | $10.99 | Popular | UL | UM | UM | UL |
| $7.99 | $14.99 | Business Pro | UL | UM | UM | UL |
UM: Unmetered.
Bluehost’s popular plan offers SpamExperts spam protection system for one site. The Business Pro plan lets you use SpamExperts on two sites. In addition to this, you’ll be offered one dedicated IP address, one free SSL certificate, SiteBackup Pro module for easy backups, and more.
Use this special link to signup for Bluehost and get a good discount + a free domain name.
Site speed
I used GoDaddy for a year. I decided to switch to another host because of the problems:
Site speed: As a newbie blogger, I had signed up for GoDaddy after the company offered hosting services at a very cheap rate. This was my biggest mistake. My site’s performance was not that great. The Pingdom page speed testing tool always reported “reduce server response time” error with I tested my website’s page loading speed with it.
Bluehost shared hosting servers are powerful. I’ve never come across a Bluehost review wherein the customer has complained about the site speed. If you want your website to load quickly, buy hosting from Bluehost.
Preview DNS: GoDaddy hosting gave me nightmares when I was using it. The biggest problem with GoDaddy is the preview DNS module which clones your website and allows Google to index it. PreviewDNS URLs, when indexed by Google will impact your site’s ranking during the Google Panda Algorithm update.
If you have bought domain names from GoDaddy, managing a website becomes easy because the hosting CPanel is just a few clicks away. This is the only advantage of being a GoDaddy hosting customer. If you want to avoid issues, then sign up with BlueHost.
Conclusion: GoDaddy is the best domain registrar in the world, but its hosting service is not up to the mark. Because of the preview DNS issue and lack of live chat support, I would recommend our readers to consider buying website hosting from Bluehost. One more reason to choose Bluehost is the free domain name + free AdWords credit which you can use to get traffic from paid advertising.
