You know there's a weird feeling, I have talked a lot about Hostinger and
Bluehost on this channel yet somehow I never did a direct
comparison. So, buckle up because we're going for a
ride.
I'll take a look at the performance and the different technologies
both companies use I'll also take a look at the different pricing models,
the support, extra features and stuff like that to determine
which provider works best for what type of website and what type of user.
Let's start from the pricing. Hostinger has its cheapest
single shared hosting plan for $0.99 a month
a 4 year plan is a single payment of and $47.52. While Bluehost's cheapest
plan comes in at around $2.95 cents a month or a maximum of
3 years will set you back around $106.
On average Bluehost tends to be around 50% to 55%
more expensive at every tier. They're an older company, they do
a lot of marketing so they have a little bit of a premium
on the top of the regular price. But people talk about an old prophecy
about the chosen one who will use the discount codes in the description
and save hella crazy cash money. In all seriousness you can get an
extra 10% of Hostinger plans this stacks with other promotions
or a discount when buying Bluehost plans by using the links in the description
down below. But full disclosure mode online I want
to let you know that whenever you use those links
yeah you get a discount, but I also make a commission.
That's how I monetize this YouTube channel and I found it to be the perfect
solution where I can still be objective and tell
you what i think about web hosting providers
and yet still make enough money to keep making videos full time.
So, get the biggest discounts available online in the description down below.
And support the channel at the same time. One feature that Bluehost has over
Hostinger is that you do get a free domain name
with their cheapest plan. Hostinger only offers a free domain name
if you buy the more expensive plans, but you can buy a domain name with
Hostinger separately and it's still gonna be more than twice as cheap
compared to Bluehost. It's just a small little inconvenience.
And here's where these 2 web hosting providers really start going their
separate ways. Hostinger, while being the cheaper
option is actually extremely performance focused.
They use Litespeed servers, take advantage of PHP 7.4
and HTTP/2, have part of their infrastructure on the Google Cloud
platform and use SSD storage over HDD. In simple
terms, it's some good stuff. On the other hand,
Bluehost is a more feature focused hosting provider, the
last performance update that Bluehost had
was back in 2017. So, they're running on a bit of a legacy tech at this point.
Just to see how much of a difference in terms of performance there is between
these 2 providers I've actually created completely new
empty Wordpress websites and since Hostinger comes with a caching plugin
already pre-installed I've also installed the third-party free
caching plugin on Bluehost as well. Just to make it a little bit more fair.
By the way, both Bluehost and Hostinger have automatic WordPress installers
available and made it extremely easy to create a
new website. Hostinger with a $1 plan loaded
the empty website in 1.2 seconds completely standard stuff. Anything below
or close to 1 second is what you would expect from a fast
hosting company. Bluehost though, yikes 2.9 seconds loading time
more than double that of Hostingers the legacy tech of
Bluehost is really starting to show here. Okay but this isn't like a
definitive answer. Remember these websites are empty
no users. In reality, you would have some users on your website
performing some..I don't know... whatever users do on your website.
So, I did what I usually do in these types of tests, I send some virtual users
to simulate real users to see if the performance takes a dip.
And took a dip it did... Hostinger wasn't able to reliably
handle 50 users at the same time without slowing down the whole website.
The $1 per month plans are just not equipped for this kind of load
Bluehost and their cheapest plan though slower in speed were able to
handle the 50 users at the same time no problems. While it's fun doing these
performance tests and seeing the graphs go
up and down, what does this actually mean? Well, on average every single Hostinger
plan will be around 2 times faster than the Bluehost
counterpart. However, if you're looking at strictly
the cheapest plans Hostinger does limit the user count a bit
to keep up its fast performance, bluehost doesn't do this. But if you're
getting a substantial amount of users you shouldn't be sitting on the cheapest
plan. So, in my opinion when it comes to cheap plans, speed
matters more than how many users they can handle.
Bluehost just kinda wins this one by default.
At the time of making this video Hostinger has their live chat completely
disabled. They also don't offer phone support of
any kind. So, you're only left with email. Actually
you can buy live chat support but it will cost you around $2 a month
extra which is more expensive than some of
their hosting plans. However, I have contacted Hostinger in
a previous video and asked them about this
and they basically told me that they plan to bring back free 24/7 live chat
support to everyone as soon as the world goes
back to normal-ish. Though with Hostinger you still get an
extensive knowledge base of information to browse through
if you like to fix problems yourself. They have detailed articles with
pictures and step-by-step instructions that they constantly update and you
don't even need to buy a plan to access all of this knowledge. You can just visit
their website and it's there. But as i mentioned before Bluehost just
straight up wins in this category because they're offering free
24/7 live chat support, email and phone support. As per accuracy of the
answers of the support agents I can't really give much insight on that
because it really depends on the person that's supporting you. In general I had
better experience with Hostinger but these were such edge cases that I
don't even think they're relevant and it's
anecdotal evidence at best.
One of the most important, unique features of Hostinger is that they allow
you to select the data center you want your files to
be stored on. They have servers in all parts of the world,
why is this important? Well, the less distance there is between your users and
your website files the faster the information travels.
Bluehost only has data centers in the United States.
One in the west coast and one in the east coast. However, Hostinger has data
centers all across the world. In the United States, Asia and Europe. So,
if you're looking to create a website and you know that your readers will be
european or asian, I would recommend choosing
Hostinger. Just because they have more data centers or have data centers
in the locations that you need. However, Bluehost has some advantages
when it comes to managing your website. They offer automatic WordPress updates.
However, this feature became obsolete in
WordPress 5.5. Because, WordPress version 5.5 already
automatically updates your plugins, themes and the core WordPress version if
you wanted to. But, you do get 1 more unique feature which
is called website staging. This allows you to create a copy of your
original website and test out the changes you make
before you release them to the public. So, you reduce the risk of stuff going wrong.
By the way, remember when I said that Hostinger is more focused on
speed and performance? Well Bluehost is more focused on helping you with the
business side of things by offering consultations and tools to
better manage your business. In short, Hostinger features are better
tailored to host international websites with a big emphasis on speed and
performance while bluehost will help you grow in the US market
and build your business.
With all of that taken into account, who should choose Hostinger and
who should choose Bluehost? I think that Hostinger is best for people that want
an extremely low price and good performance. But, you will be
left in charge of managing your website and your business without much external
help. Bluehost is for people that are new to starting a business and want some
help with their digital strategy. Yeah the performance isn't all that
great but when you're just starting a business, customer acquisition
is much more important than top of the line performance. Because,
you do need visitors in the first place to utilize
your fast website. If you already made a choice you can get
the biggest possible discounts that are available online
by using the discount links in the description. But for now, my name is
Emit and good luck with your businesses and your websites.
websites
you