GoDaddy vs. Bluehost : Why Neither is a Good Choice (and What to Choose Instead)

If you’re trying to choose between Bluehost vs. GoDaddy, there’s one very clear right answer:

None of the above.

Yes, apologies for throwing you a curveball here, but the fact of the matter is that neither Bluehost or GoDaddy is a good choice to host your website.

Instead, depending on your needs and budget, you’d be better off choosing options like SiteGround ($3.95+ per month), Flywheel ($25+ per month), or Kinsta ($30+ per month). And if you want our single quickest, best recommendation, it’s SiteGround:

Best Shared WordPress Hosting

SiteGround

In a field dominated by poor performers with huge marketing budgets, SiteGround is everything a WordPress host should be.

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Why are those options better than both GoDaddy and Bluehost? That’s what we’re going to show in this article.

We’ll use real data and objective analysis to explain why the only true winner in the battle between Bluehost versus GoDaddy is “neither,” as well as why we (and tons of happy customers) think those three other hosts are much better options.

About the Reviewer

Hi! I’m Fred Meyer. I’ve been writing about WordPress nearly every week for more than five years here on WPShout. I’m also co-founder of boutique web agency Press Up, where my day job is making WordPress websites for people, especially small businesses. I’ve worked with hundreds of sites hosted on GoDaddy, Bluehost, and all the other major hosts out there. More importantly, I’ve taken the time to dive into honest data about these hosts from thousands of real hosting customers, and that’s what I base my advice on.

Getting an accurate comparison of two web hosts can be very difficult, because most web hosting reviews are biased toward whichever company pays out the biggest affiliate commissions. I want to be clear: this article uses affiliate links when discussing SiteGround, Flywheel, and Kinsta, because thorough, unbiased analysis of their performance and customer satisfaction data leads us to happily recommend their hosting. We are not affiliates for either GoDaddy or Bluehost—despite the fact that we would earn significantly more revenue as affiliates of either host—because both hosts have the massive quality problems detailed in the rest of this article.

This post was not commissioned or altered by GoDaddy, Bluehost, SiteGround, or any other third party. It is an honest, unbiased hosting comparison of real performance and customer satisfaction data from both companies.

Bluehost vs. GoDaddy: The Data Says Both Aren’t Great

Broad surveys reveal that neither Bluehost nor GoDaddy customers are satisfied with the service they get.

When you compare GoDaddy and Bluehost in WordPress using objective performance analysis and broad customer satisfaction surveys, you can see a clear picture emerge:

Bluehost and GoDaddy do not perform as well as the competition, and neither Bluehost or GoDaddy customers are satisfied with the service they get.

On the other hand, the opposite is true for the three alternative hosts that we recommend: SiteGround, Flywheel, and Kinsta. These hosts have happy customers who rank them highly, and these hosts also perform well in objective benchmarks.

Let’s look at the data:

Customer Satisfaction

While you can certainly find positive one-off reviews of Bluehost and GoDaddy—usually from affiliates, rather than real customers—the picture is a lot different when you start aggregating customer satisfaction data from hundreds or thousands of real customers.

For example, look how Bluehost and GoDaddy fare in three popular surveys/review aggregators:

Even viewed in isolation, these numbers are simply not good. (Visualize, in your mind, a two- or three-star restaurant on Yelp.) They look even worse in comparison to actually good hosts—in other words, once you see what “good” numbers look like in these same surveys and aggregators.

If you look at the three hosts that we’re recommending, you’ll see a completely different story, and understand why we recommend these three hosts specifically:

To put it simply, people who host at SiteGround, Flywheel, or Kinsta are a lot happier than people who host at Bluehost or GoDaddy hosting.

Performance and Reliability

Your site’s performance has a real effect on your site’s success, so you want a host that will load your site quickly and reliably.

To objectively compare performance, we use Review Signal’s hosting performance benchmarks.

The most recent year that both GoDaddy and Bluehost participated was 2016, but the same general trends hold true in 2020-2021:

• While Bluehost did well in a one-off WebPageTest performance test, they only “did ok in the blitz test, but not in the LoadStorm test.”
• GoDaddy was a little better, earning Honorable Mention with “a stalwart performance marred by what appeared to be security measures.”

However, guess who was at the top of the exact same price category? SiteGround, who “got even better this year” and “jumped up from Honorable Mention to Top Tier status”.

In every year since then, SiteGround has either earned Top Tier or Honorable Mention status, while Bluehost and GoDaddy no longer participate in the benchmarks.

Customer Support

Objective numbers for both Bluehost’s and GoDaddy’s customer support are not very appealing.

Both GoDaddy and Bluehost offer 24/7 customer support, as do SiteGround, Flywheel, and Kinsta.

However, it’s not just about having access to support, it’s also about how helpful the support staff are and whether or not they’re able to solve your problem.

If you look at the objective numbers for Bluehost versus GoDaddy support, the numbers again are not very appealing.

In CodeinWP’s WordPress hosting survey, they asked two questions about each host’s support:

• Overall support quality
• WordPress-specific support quality

Here’s how Bluehost and GoDaddy fared:

Again, you shouldn’t be happy with a 3.3-star rating – you can do better.

How much better? Let’s look at SiteGround, Flywheel, and Kinsta again:

So whether you’re looking at Bluehost vs. GoDaddy hosting in general, or specifically looking at GoDaddy vs. Bluehost WordPress hosting, you’re just plain not going to get great support with either of those hosts.

Features

*GoDaddy’s WordPress-specific plans are a bit pricier, but come with extra features.

Beyond those features, all these hosts have multiple physical data centers…though it’s not always easy to figure out with Bluehost and GoDaddy:

Bluehost: main US data center in Provo, Utah, but they also have data centers in India, China, and the UK for those localized services. However, you cannot manually choose your data center – it depends on the Bluehost service you sign up for.

GoDaddy: for GoDaddy’s generic shared hosting packages, they offer data centers in Ashburn, VA, Phoenix, AZ, Amsterdam, and Singapore. Their WordPress plans only offer data centers in Ashburn and Phoenix.

SiteGround: has four data centers and lets you choose during signup – Chicago, London, Amsterdam, and Singapore.

Usability & Management

Both GoDaddy and Bluehost give you access to cPanel to manage your websites/server, as does SiteGround. If you’re not familiar, cPanel usually looks something like this:

cPanel is the standard option that most cheap shared hosts give you, and there aren’t really any major differences in how you’ll manage your site between GoDaddy vs. Bluehost (or, for that matter, SiteGround).

However, if you’re willing to bump up your budget, managed hosts like Kinsta and Flywheel offer user-friendly, custom dashboards.

Pricing

One thing Bluehost and GoDaddy definitely do have going for them is price. You might not get a good quality product… but at least it’s cheap, right?

Well, if you’re specifically looking for a cheap hosting comparison point, SiteGround can actually come pretty close to what Bluehost and GoDaddy charge for shared hosting packages—just with a lot better quality.

Let’s run through a quick comparison of GoDaddy vs. Bluehost pricing, as well as how both stack up to SiteGround.

But before that, it’s important to remember that there are two relevant prices for most cheap shared hosts:

Promo price: this is the teaser price that you’ll pay for your first billing cycle. So if you pay for three years up front, you’ll get this price for three years. But if you only pay for one year up front, you’ll need to pay the “regular” price when you renew for your second year.

Regular price: this is what you’ll pay for every renewal after your first billing cycle.

Entry Tier – The Cheapest Plan

The following prices are all for a one-year commitment.

Mid Tier – The Middle Plan

High Tier – The Most Expensive Plan

So while SiteGround definitely has the steepest renewal prices, its prices are still comparable to Bluehost and GoDaddy despite SiteGround offering a far superior product.

And if you’re willing to go a bit higher, Flywheel and Kinsta also offer great value for the money, just at higher price points.

Bluehost vs. GoDaddy? Neither—Choose SiteGround, Flywheel, or Kinsta (Depending on your Needs)

In the end, all of the objective data points to one clear conclusion:

There’s no winner when you compare GoDaddy and Bluehost, and you’d be much better served by choosing a different option completely.

So what’s the best Bluehost and GoDaddy alternative? Well, that really depends on your needs.

If you want the best option at a similar price point, SiteGround could be a really good choice for you: have a look at our SiteGround review. Or, if you’re willing to go a little higher, both Flywheel and Kinsta are great managed WordPress options.

How can you choose the one that’s right for you? To make that decision, we’d recommend checking out two other posts that we’ve written.

First, there’s our complete guide to the WordPress hosting space, where we use the same objective approach to rate all the popular hosting options in the WordPress space:

12 Best WordPress Hosting Providers of 2020 Compared and Tested

If you want an even stronger foundation for making an informed hosting choice, we also have a comprehensive guide to the most important things to consider when choosing WordPress hosting, including hosting type, performance, uptime, and price, as well as how to find the right hosting for your specific project.

Finally, if you want help from a real human to point you in the best direction for your site (and not just the best chance for an affiliate commission), you can contact us directly via email (contact@ this website dot com) or join our Facebook group and say hello.