Looking for the best hosting service? Bluehost and GreenGeeks are 2 of the top hosting providers out there. But which is truly the best web hosting service: Bluehost or GreenGeeks?
Since not all web hosting services are created equal, it’s important for you to understand how these 2 hosting providers differ from each other, regarding their pricing plans and features, before settling on a choice. Our unbiased comparison between HostGator and GreenGeeks, we’ll help you decide which one is the perfect choice for your websites.
Bluehost vs. GreenGeeks – Overview
Bluehost is one of the officially recommended hosting providers by WordPress.org. Bluehost’s hosting options run the gamut from cheap hosting to WordPress hosting, all the way up to a full-fledged dedicated server.
They offer 3 different WordPress-centric hosting options: Shared WordPress hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and WooCommerce hosting.
GreenGeeks is one of the leading eco-friendly web hosting providers on the market. Aside from providing a super fast web hosting experience to customers, they’re also committed to offsetting carbon footprints produced by their data centers. They plant a tree with every plan they sell.
Regardless of which hosting plan you choose, you’ll get Solid State Drive (SSD) storage, which has proven to be 2x faster than hard disk drives (HDD). If you’re not fully satisfied with their service, you can request a full refund within 30 days of your hosting subscription
Bluehost vs. GreenGeeks – Page Speed and Uptime
Bluehost constantly strives for excellence by regularly improving their server hardware infrastructure. They use industry-leading technologies like KVM and OpenStack to make sure your website is as fast as it can get.
GreenGeeks, on the other hand, gives you some of the best in-house developed speed technologies such as PowerCacher, which serves your application efficiently and guarantees blazing fast page load times to your visitors. They also offer free CloudFlare CDN integration to speed up your site.
To put the web hosting guarantees of Bluehost and GreenGeeks to the test, we decided to conduct a few different speed and performance experiments on their hosting servers.
To perform the tests, we signed up with both hosting services, created a WordPress website on each, and installed a default theme on our sites. To mirror a production environment, we published dummy content and uploaded some images.
According to Pingdom, our Bluehost site took 689ms to load when tested from New York City. That’s faster than 94% of tested sites. The loading time for our GreenGeeks site was slightly higher: it took 697ms to load the site.
After our Pingdom tests, we conducted a test with Load Impact to examine how our hosting servers handled a traffic surge.
According to Load Impact, Bluehost’s performance remained the same regardless of the number of visitors.
For our GreenGeeks site, there were a few small spikes in the loading time, which means the site slowed down slightly.
After our Load Impact tests, we used a tool called Bitcatcha to analyze server response times from 8 different geographical locations: New York, LA, London, Brazil, India, Singapore, Japan, and Australia. The speed for each location was measured 3 separate times, and then the results were averaged.
According to Bitcatcha, our Bluehost and GreenGeeks sites were both rated C.
Winner: Bluehost
Bluehost vs. GreenGeeks – Ease of Use
The best thing about Bluehost is that they make it super easy for anyone to launch a new website. With their guided onboarding, you can easily install WordPress on your web hosting account, choose a WordPress theme, and install recommended WordPress plugins. The entire process is quick and painless.
GreenGeeks’ onboarding experience isn’t as sleek as Bluehost’s. That said, it’s not difficult to get started with GreenGeeks thanks to their extensive documentation; it just takes a little longer. They also offer a great website builder to create your website the way you want without hiring a developer.
Winner: Bluehost
Bluehost vs. GreenGeeks – Features
When it comes to features, both Bluehost and GreenGeeks have a lot in common, such as SSD storage, a free domain name with a hosting plan purchase, free SSL, 1-click WordPress install, etc. However, when you compare their differences in-depth, you’ll see that GreenGeeks stays further ahead of the curve.
Before we examine how GreenGeeks stands out in terms of features, let’s take a look at the few areas where Bluehost excels in comparison to GreenGeeks:
- WordPress Hosting: Bluehost offers 3 different WordPress hosting options: WordPress shared, WordPress managed, and WooCommerce; whereas GreenGeeks only provides WordPress shared hosting.
- Popularity: Bluehost powers over 2 million domains across the globe. Without a doubt, they rock the shared web hosting industry.
- Massive discount: Bluehost provides massive introductory discounts on their web hosting plans.
Now let’s take at some of the key features GreenGeeks provides that Bluehost doesn’t:
- Unlimited websites: On their Pro plan, you can host unlimited websites with GreenGeeks; whereas Bluehost only allows you to host up to 5 websites.
- Free site transfers: If you’re already hosted on any other hosting platforms, you can transfer your sites to GreenGeeks for free.
- Site builder: With every web hosting plan, you’ll get a free website builder.
- Email accounts: You can create unlimited email accounts even with their Pro web hosting plan.
Winner: GreenGeeks
Bluehost vs. GreenGeeks – Support and Documentation
GreenGeeks provides 24/7 support via 3 modes: live chat, phone, and ticket-based support. Their extensive documentation guides you through every aspect of building a website with the GreenGeeks hosting platform.
In an effort to focus on providing direct support via live chat and phone, Bluehost has retired ticket-based support. This may be frustrating to users with more advanced issues that may take a bit longer to resolve.
Winner: GreenGeeks
Bluehost vs. GreenGeeks – Pricing
Let’s take a look at a head-to-head comparison between the prices of different hosting options from Bluehost and GreenGeeks:
| Shared | WordPress | Managed WP | VPS | Dedicated | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bluehost | $1.99 /mo. | $1.99 /mo. | - | $29.99 / mo. | $179.99 / mo. |
| GreenGeeks | $2.95 / mo. | $2.95 / mo. | - | $39.95 / mo. | $169.00 / mo. |
As you can see from the table, Bluehost provides more affordable hosting services for beginner-level users. They even provide a managed WordPress hosting solution for growth anticipating WordPress sites.
Winner: Bluehost
Recap – Bluehost vs. GreenGeeks
We believe that Bluehost is a better hosting provider than GreenGeeks overall. Bluehost offers affordable hosting options for beginners. Their easy onboarding process makes it super easy for anyone to kick off a new site, regardless of their skillset.
If you want to launch a small WordPress site, then you can choose their WordPress hosting plan. If you don’t want to handle the technicalities of optimizing your hosting server as your website grows, then you might want to choose WP Pro, their managed WordPress hosting solution.
They also offer WooCommerce hosting, which comes with everything you need to get your WooCommerce site up and running. With WooCommerce hosting, you can also have a free 2-hour set up call with a WooCommerce expert.
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That’s it! We hope this guide helped you find the best hosting solution for your needs. If you liked this article, check out our complete Bluehost review or our full GreenGeeks review.
