Bluehost vs Godaddy, which is better for value, ease of use and other categories?
I mean I’m sure you’ve heard that both are great and very popular, because these two are GIANTs in the industry, as they serve millions upon millions all over the internet, but what’s the difference and which one is right for you?
They are both similar in some ways, but very different when it comes to others.
If you want the TL;DR version:
Overall, Bluehost is better to use for hosting IMHO after thorough research because it’s dedicated to web hosting, and their primary business model is to provide great hosting.
And from research it provides a Bluehost provides a slightly better user experience, better value and better technical support.
However, GoDaddy is not a slacker either.
GoDaddy specializes in domain registration.
And when they entered the website building and hosting space, they are now a great all-in-one solution to have everything you need to get your website up and running.
Read on for a detailed head to head comparison.
I’ll be breaking down the strengths of each, weaknesses, and specializations to help you make the proper decision for you and your business.
Here are some of the comparisons I’ll be making:
- Ease of Use
- Performance & Uptime
- Features
- Wordpress Integration
- Ease of Transfer
- Security
- Best VPS Hosting?
- Best for Beginners?
- Support
- Value for Money - Hosting Plans & Pricing
Let’s dive into it.
Bluehost vs GoDaddy - Ease of Use
Bluehost and GoDaddy are both very easy to use and logically intuitive.
One of the first things I look for when choosing a good web host (or any product really), is ease and simplicity of use.
I just want the thing to work and do its job and get out of the way, so my creative process can take over.
And to be honest when comparing Bluehost versus GoDaddy, in terms of ease of use, they are very similar, as both companies have decades of experience in the industry.
For ease of use, they both offer 1 click installations of popular CMS platforms such as:
WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and more!
Bluehost comes with a special, drag and drop Smart AI website builder built on top of Wordpress that guides you as you design your site, so you won’t mess up your own website!
You get to layout your sites in real-time just as you visualize it without knowing code.
GoDaddy also comes with its own built-in Website Builder and tons of templates you can choose from so you don’t have to start from scratch.
They both come with the ability to customize fonts, colors, add custom CSS for full control, with many drag and drop features such as images, text boxes and widgets.
But personally, I find Bluehost a bit more intuitive and easier to use than GoDaddy, so in terms of Ease of Use, it goes to Bluehost.
🏆 Bluehost vs Godaddy - Ease of Use Winner:
- Bluehost
Bluehost vs GoDaddy - Performance & Uptime
Uptime is excellent for both, as they are both above 99.9% which is the standard for most excellent web hosting.
Bluehost boasts 99.98% uptime
Compared to GoDaddy’s 99.99%
This totals to a little less than 3 days of downtime a year!
It sounds like a lot, but 100% uptime just isn’t possible due to many external factors.
It’s kinda like wanting 100% sunny days of weather.
Even in Southern California, this isn’t possible 🙂
So these are as good as you can get when it comes to website hosting uptimes.
But how does this translate to real life?
Do they really have these uptimes as they state?
Here’s a little comparison from real-life monitoring since 2017 conducted by Pingdom.
Bluehost also comes with a network server uptime agreement that says any extreme issues should be solved within 15 mins.
Source: Pingdom
Source: Pingdom
Both GoDaddy and Bluehost uses cPanel control panel for their backend, which is the Universal control panel for most hosts.
Both offer great, clean interfaces, but I think Bluehost just edges out a little because it offers some more tools.
For DiskSpace
GoDaddy wins in this area because it offers unlimited disk space compared to Bluehost’s 100GB of Disk Space.
But of course if you have a small website, people will rarely hit this limit.
On thing BlueHost does better than GoDaddy, is it offers Free backups, which gives you a good sense of security, because in the rare event that something were to happen to your website, you have a backup copy you can revert back to.
For Storage Type
This is for all your pictures and content, but I honestly don’t see a lot of people reaching anywhere near these limits. And if you for some odd reason do, you can probably afford to upgrade to the higher plans anyways.
So, even though GoDaddy offers less storage, you’ll probably be fine with either of these awesome hosting.
The thing that I like both about GoDaddy and Bluehost is that they both use SSD Hardware technology.
In fact, they use SSD for all their servers.
It’s 2022 and in today’s world SSDs have become the standard now and this is especially true in the web hosting world.
SSD are a lot more dependable, faster, and reliable than the older traditional standard hard drive disks. They allow the disk to function without any moving parts, so it’s a far more reliable than the old hard drives.
The best part is that it is uber fast.
Both Bluehost and GoDaddy uses this tech, so you can be sure that your website is very speedy and will have the most reliable uptimes.
For CPU
Let’s looks at another perspective of performance and it’s the CPU department.
Bluehost offers something special here called CPU Throttling (Dynamic frequency scaling).
How it works is it balances out the shared resources for any shared hosting plan.
Meaning when one website is using too many resources within the shared system, CPU throttling protects all the other users speed, by throttling the website that is using excessive resources, so that it becomes fair for all the other users.
🏆 Performance Winner:
- Bluehost
I would say it just edges out GoDaddy because of its unique features.
Bluehost vs. GoDaddy - Features
Bluehost
Here’s an overview of some of the Unique features of Bluehost:
GoDaddy
Here’s an overview of some of the Unique features of GoDaddy:
List of a Few Bluehost Features
- Free domain name
- Free SSL Certificate with a hosting package
- Custom Themes
- 1-Click Popular CMS Installation
- Built-in Website Builder
- AI Helps Build Website
- Unlimited Bandwidth (on most plans)
List of a Few GoDaddy Features
- Custom Domain Name
- Accept Online Payments
- Ability to add a Fully Featured Online Store
- 1-Click Installation of over 150 Free Apps
- Global Data Centers
- 24/7 Network Security
- Unlimited Bandwidth
And of course there’s much more!
Here’s a little comparison chart between the two:
Some of their features changes when you upgrade to their higher plans.
For example, for both Bluehost & GoDaddy, they give you more storage space as you enter their higher tiers.
And for Bluehost, their 50 GB of SSD disk space is their entry level plan ($2.95), but if you use their plus plan ($5.45, which is cheaper than GoDaddy’s entry level), then you get unlimited SSD disk space and unlimited bandwidth!
As you can see, they’re both powerhouses when it comes to features.
GoDaddy beats Bluehost in uptime and disk space, but Bluehost edges out GoDaddy in storage, SSL certificate, and free backups.
But because Bluehost offers a cheaper plan (half the price), AND another price point that matches GoDaddy which offer similar features and more including the Free SSL, this one goes to Bluehost.
🏆 Features Winner:
- Bluehost
I would say it just edges out GoDaddy because of its unique features.
GoDaddy vs Bluehost - Wordpress Integration
I’m giving Wordpress its own section, because it powers a huge portion of the internet.
In fact, according to W3Techs, Wordpress is used by a staggering 64.4% of all websites whose content management system (CMS) we know of – and this powers about 43% of all websites! Crazy how dominant Wordpress is.
So which one is better suited for Wordpress?
It’s Bluehost.
Bluehost is the better platform for Wordpress Integration, because even Wordpress themselves recommend using Bluehost to host their CMS (along with Siteground and Dreamhost)
It’s actually listed on their official site:
Bluehost
Here’s an overview of Wordpress Integration with Bluehost:
Wordpress even said this about Bluehost:
“We’ve dealt with more hosts than you can imagine; in our opinion, the hosts below represent some of the best and brightest of the hosting world.”
Source: Wordpress
Aside from Wordpress, Bluehost also has a special Woocommerce hosting plan as well if you’re looking to running an e-commerce store.
Bluehost’s Woocommerce hosting comes with lots of selling features like:
- Payment processing
- One-click woocommerce integration
- E-commerce store themes
- And much more.
GoDaddy
Here’s an overview of Wordpress Integration with GoDaddy:
Let’s talk about the installation process:
With both Bluehost and GoDaddy, installation is super easy!
With just one-click on BOTH Bluehost and GoDaddy you’ll have a fully functioning Wordpress website so you can’t go wrong with both of them.
With GoDaddy, they give you the option to have one-click restores with backup protection. But this is only on their higher priced Wordpress Plans ($8.99 /mo).
With Bluehost, daily backups come with all their plans including their uber cheap basic plan ($2.95)
But the clear winner here is Bluehost because it has some extra perks 🙂
You click a few buttons and you’re up and running once you have confirmed which hosting plan you want to start off with.
🏆 Wordpress Integration Winner
- Bluehost
Bluehost has actually been recommended by Wordpress themselves since 2005!
Talk about long term reign!
Bluehost has faster wordpress installation, better integration and support from Wordpress itself. It also has woocommerce options for e-commerce based small businesses.
So for this round in Bluehost vs GoDaddy, Bluehost takes the cake.
GoDaddy vs Bluehost - Better Transfer Process
If you are already with another hosting service and are wanting to make the switch to either Bluehost or GoDaddy then I have a great answer for you, between the two.
Bluehost is also a clear Winner here.
Bluehost offers a pretty much hands-off, none technical professional switching service for a one time fee of $149.99.
With this service you’re able to switch up to 5 websites and 20 email accounts.
You don’t do any work. Bluehost handles all the work for you.
So it’s perfect if you don’t want to deal with the headaches of migrating things manually.
What if you rather not spend the money?
No worries!
Bluehost also offers a complimentary switching service for Wordpress based websites that meets its criteria.
This is available if you’ve signed up for an account with Bluehost and there will be a form to fill out in your Bluehost dashboard titled “free migration contact form.”
After you’ve filled out the form, Bluehost’s team will review factors like your Wordpress version, PHP version, database size, etc and determine whether your site is eligibility for a free migration.
GoDaddy also offers a free migration process, but it requires a little bit more work an isn’t completely hands-off.
If your website is NOT based on Wordpress, it has to be migrated manually, which means downloading your sites files and then uploading to GoDaddy in the backend.
Wordpress sites are a lot easier to migrate into GoDaddy.
You can go into the “My Products” section within your GoDaddy account and you just choose the hosting plan that you want and give some info about the site you are transferring.
🏆 Better Transfer Process Winner
- Bluehost
Bluehost wins it this round.
Bluehost has both a paid and free option – the free option is quite easy if it’s a Wordpress site, and the paid option is completely hands-off.
GoDaddy has a free option, but it’s best if you’re old website is based on Wordpress.
But because Bluehost has more options and flexibility, Bluehost is the easier host to transfer your site to.
Bluehost Security vs GoDaddy Security
Security measures is super important, especially as your website gets more popular and you hit a lot of traffic to you site.
You need to protect yourself from malicious DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service) as well as having automatic backups in place an attack does happen.
CDN (content delivery network) is also very useful and speeds up your site because it allows your content to be hosted at over 200 locations globally, therefore transferring that speed to the end user.
GoDaddy also take many safety precautions such as fraud, virus and spam protection along with 256-bit privacy encryption.
Bluehost uses mostly the same and they mention security protections, including some third party sources such as Cloudflare. Some other type of protection they offer are spam protection and password protected directories.
The main difference between Bluehost & GoDaddy is that Bluehost offers free SSL certificates (Secure Sockets Layer) with any of their shared hosting plans!
As for GoDaddy you get the free SSLs on their higher priced plans.
🏆 Security Winner
- Bluehost
Both web hosting services offer impressive security measurements, but Bluehost has the edge because it allows even their cheapest plans to have lots of security benefits along with a complimentary SSL and automatic backups.
Bluehost VPS vs GoDaddy VPS
VPS (Virtual Private Server) is great when you need a lot of flexibility and more power.
With a shared hosting plan (the cheaper plans) you are usually sharing the resources of the hosting with other people, but with a VPS you have semi-private resources.
VPS is great when you are running multiple websites and don’t want to purchase separate hosting for each of them – you can have them all on one VPS.
And the beauty about a VPS is that you can upgrade in increments whenever you need the extra resources.
If for example, you need more CPUS or RAM because you are getting more traffic to your site, you can slowly increase the resources you need until your needs are met.
For GoDaddy they offer a VPS machine for $4.99 a month BUT…
It doesn’t include a control panel like WHM cPanel (the industry standard), and only comes with 1 GB which may not be enough especially if you’re updating to a VPS.
What’s great about WHM is that it comes with some amazing features:
- Manage all your websites using a single cPanel.
- Create a separate control panel for each of your websites.
- Allocate resources to each website as needed.
Comes with tons of flexibility and control over your hosting resources.
So on the surface it may seem like a good deal, but they left out a lot of the perks.
With Bluehost their starting plan is $18.99 /month and it comes with:
- 2 Cores
- 30 GB SSD Storage
- 2 GB RAM
- 1 TB Bandwidth
- 1 IP Address
- cPanel/WHM
And with GoDaddy their next tier up starts at $19.99 /month and it comes with:
- 2 CPU Cores
- 4 GB RAM
- 100 GB NVMe SSD Storage
- 2 additional IPs available upon request
If you are getting more traffic to your site and are on the verge of maxing out your shared hosting resources, then Bluehost or GoDaddy VPS hosting is for you!
Some of their other features include:
Free Email Services
- Unlimited Domains & Sub-domains
- Custom Installation
- Other Configuration Options
- And more!
🏆 VPS Hosting Winner
- GoDaddy
For this round, I’ll have to give the slight edge to GoDaddy because they offer more RAM and SSD for just a $1 more a month when compared with BlueHost.
Bluehost Support vs GoDaddy Support
Support is crucial when it comes with the technical aspects of any web hosting – especially if you’re new and don’t know much about websites!
That’s why both GoDaddy and Bluehost comes with 24/7 customer support so you can get help even if you’re having website trouble at 2AM in the morning!
Source: GoDaddy
Source: Bluehost
Both GoDaddy vs Bluehost support features:
- Live Chat
- 24/7 Phone Support
- Emails
- Knowledge Centers
- Informative Tutorials
But looking at both the knowledge centers, Bluehost does have the edge here as it is more thorough.
The difference between the support systems is that Bluehost offers a support ticketing system while GoDaddy doesn’t offer ticketing.
GoDaddy does have phone and live chat (like Bluehost), but just having more options might make it easier for some people.
Verdict
Bluehost vs GoDaddy – Support
Bluehost slightly, but GoDaddy is also great.
GoDaddy vs Bluehost - Best for Beginners
Setting up a new website isn’t that difficult once you get the hang of it, but for a beginner it might seem like a daunting task.
But fret not my friends, GoDaddy and Bluehost make this very easy to do!
They both offer:
- One click Wordpress Installation
- 24/7 customer support
- Installation guidance
- User friendly UI
Honestly, you can’t go wrong with either of these options that’s why both hosting services are great for beginners.
So for this section, I’ll have to conclude them as a tie!
🏆 Best for Beginners Winner
- Tie!
Pricing & Value for Money
Here’s a little comparison chart showing the prices of Bluehost vs GoDaddy:
Most of these website hosting providers will have lots of upsells and fake “scarcity.”
It’s an old marketing trick and nearly every business uses it.
They will all say that there is a “sale” going on, but it’s just creating the illusion that you will get a discount, when it’s the actual price.
Plus, when you make a purchase they will try to sell you a bunch of add ons, which you may not need (some, you might), but neither Bluehost or GoDaddy goes to the extreme with these upsells.
With both GoDaddy or Bluehost you can get your website up and ready for just a few dollars a month, without needing all the bells and whistles of their best possible package.
In general, I would give the edge slightly to Bluehost over GoDaddy though.
Because they offer one of the most affordable hosting packages online with long term reliability.
You can get started for just $2.95!
They both offer a 30 day back guaranteed so whichever path you take, there is no risk to you.
🏆 Value for Money Winner
- Bluehost
$2.95 /month for hosting is best to get your feet wet and start your own website!
GoDaddy vs Bluehost Conclusion
Honestly, these two are such big and reliable companies that going with either of them, you’ll be in great hands.
They’ve been around for DECADES for not only do they know what they’re doing, but you can’t last decades if you don’t bring good products and services to the world 🙂
But, IMHO, if you want the best bang for the buck, some extra perks, and want to use the Wordpress platform…
Then my final recommendation is:
- Bluehost
If you want an all-in-one solution including a Domain name provider, then GoDaddy is known for its domain services, and the one you want to go with.
That’s a wrap!
Thanks for reading! That’s my full assessment of Bluehost vs GoDaddy, which web hosting do you think best fits your website needs?
You can choose yours here:
For further reading, check out some of these posts:
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David Chun
I love to write, teach and try to add as much value to other people as I can. With 20+ years experience in blogging, online entrepreneurship and digital software, I hope I can provide some light for you & my wish is to inspire. I hope I can help forge your own path to a life of freedom – using all the amazing tools along the way.
The “Rebels” journey is about your journey of trailblazing away from the normal path. It’s about you finding freedom, whatever that means to you.
My mission is always to serve. I hope these posts can provide some kind of service to you – no matter how small it is, I hope to add value to you, my friend. With love & much appreciation.
