Bluehost, Site Ground and WP Engine: How Do They Stack Up

When you set up a WordPress website or an E-commerce store, you’re going to need a hosting account and a domain name. Which hosting account should you choose? I have to admit that this is a really tough question. There are so many different hosting providers out there that even some experienced users have a hard time choosing one.

My Experience with 3 Major WordPress Hosting Companies

In this article, I want to cover 3 of the hosting companies I have used in the past on my own and my clients’ websites. These hosting providers are Bluehost, Siteground, and WP Engine.

I’ll explain their pros and cons and discuss the differences between a budget and a premium hosting account, but at the end of the day, I’ll let you decide for yourself which hosting provider to choose.

Bluehost

I can tell you from my personal experience that Bluehost offers a great service and the customer support is really good. I have myself a Bluehost account and I would recommend the plus package. It costs 6.95 USD per month. With the plus package you get 150 GB of storage, and more importantly, you can host up to 10 websites. On the other hand, the basic package, 3.49 USD per month, gives you 50 GB of storage and allows for just one website to be hosted.

I would recommend Bluehost to somebody who is on a budget and isn’t particularly concerned about speed and server hardware. Both the basic and plus packages are shared hosting accounts, so your website is hosted with other websites on the same machine. But the plus side is that Bluehost is very easy to handle and makes deploying new WordPress websites a breeze.

One of the other advantages of Bluehost is that it makes migrating new WordPress websites from your local machine very straightforward. This happens when you create a new website locally and want to migrate it over to your web hosting account. I’ll show you the details about that in another post, but I can say from my personal experience that Bluehost makes it a charm.

Another feature that one should keep an eye on when choosing a hosting company is SSL support. When enabled, SSL or HTTPS show a green padlock to the left of your browser’s address bar. SSL support basically enables you to have a secure and encrypted connection with your visitors’ browsers, and third parties can’t “sniff” the traffic between your web server and the visitor. Personally, I won’t set up a website with E-commerce functionality without SSL support. Bluehost’s Business Pro plan supports one SSL certificate free of charge. Otherwise, you have to pay about 50 USD per year to get SSL.

Siteground

Siteground is another hosting company that I use quite often. With Siteground, I prefer the GoGeek package, because it offers great value for money. For 14.95 USD per month, they allow you to host multiple websites and have a lot of professional features, including but not limited to 24/7 customer support, a free daily backup and a free CloudFlare CDN. I can tell you from my own experience that their support is really good. This package is suitable for up to 100 thousand visitors per month.

One of Siteground’s special features is staging, which allows you to have multiple copies of your website on their server. There is one copy that you’ll work on and another copy that your visitors will interact with. When you’ve made changes on your staging website, you can simply press a button and deploy those changes to your live server. This feature allows you to prevent a broken website that costs you valuable traffic. In other words, you are able to dry run any customization and updates you like, before committing it to your actual website. This way, you’ll never loose traffic again by embarrassing error messages or out of control layouts.

Starting with the GrowBig package for 7.95 USD per month, Siteground also offers you free SSL support, which is very competitive compared to Bluehost’s 14.95 plan with SSL support.

WP Engine

The last company I wanted to talk about is WP Engine. This is a WordPress specialised hosting company. Their minimum package starts at 29 USD per month and they don’t give you as much as Siteground for the money. For example, Siteground gives you 100 thousand visits for just 14.95 per month, whereas with WP Engine, you have to pay 99 USD per month to get the same visitor quota.

You should also keep in mind that WP Engine only works with WordPress websites. They also offer a great customer support and can swiftly help you with any WordPress issues.

Another feature of WP Engine is their staging environment that basically works like Siteground’s.

WP Engine won’t offer you a free SSL certificate with any of its packages. You have to pay 49.99 USD per year for 1 SSL certification, but if you have a 3rd party SSL certification, WP Engine will let you use it for free, starting with the Professional plan.

Conclusion

The most cost effective hosting provider is Bluehost with its 6.95 USD plan and a set of features that can’t be beaten by any of the other two competitors for the same price. But if you are ready to pay a little bit more for Siteground’s GoGeek package (14.95 USD per month), you will definitely get more for your money. WP Engine, on the other hand, is the most expensive provider among the 3. If you are not on a budget, don’t have any websites but WordPress, and are ready to pay a few 100$ more per year, you could choose WP Engine and get excellent support and high-quality services for your good money.