Bluehost vs GoDaddy Comparison Guide

Bluehost has been around for a long time and are considered veterans of the hosting industry. They were founded in 1996 and now host millions of domains. Read more about them in our review.

GoDaddy has been around since 1997. They have grown significantly since they hit the hosting scene with provocative ads. Read more about them in our review.

Bluehost comes with a ton of free software that come prepackaged with cPanel. You can manage unlimited domains, databases, emails, and FTP accounts right from the control panel. This is great for those who know how to use a lot of these features. It gives you full access to them at no extra charge.

If you are using WordPress you may need access to the databases, ftp accounts and other things. GoDaddy does not make it easy to access and change files in the database or use FTP. Usually extra products have to bought in order to have access to those features. Some people complain that Godaddy will make you pay extra for services that you can get for free other places.

Both Bluehost and Godaddy have an easy way to install WordPress. For either you will have to purchase hosting with them then you will have access to their tools. With Bluehost you can set up and install WordPress manually.

• Read our Bluehost install guides

It’s terrible to be stuck alone when you need help. We know this from years of hosting, when we had a problem, waiting for the answer can be the most frustrating part to resolution. Godaddy has decent tech support from what we have experienced. We haven’t needed a whole lot of help from them so we may not be the best judges. We have heard other customers say that they have not been thrilled with the service.

We have used Bluehost for a long time. When it comes to their customer service we have been very satisfied. They have gone out of their way to help us with tasks that may have been out of their required assistance. For us being able to reach them 24/7 about any problem certainly helps us like them better than the competition.

Shared servers are never expected to be as fast as dedicated servers by any means. But their are somethings that slow down servers. Having too many customers on one makes it run slowly. Another is the bandwidth usage. Simply put, some say that GoDaddy has more users per server than Bluehost. We’re not sure if that’s true.

According to this post: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=696324 Bluehost has about 500 accounts per server. This was several years ago. Now we are looking up domains using reverse ip. This shows approximately all of the sites that are hosted on the same server as yours.

• Our GoDaddy account has 12,961 other domains on it.
• Our Bluehost account has 2,393 other domains on it.

This means that Godaddy is squishing more accounts on to one server. This could be because their servers are powerful enough to handle it and runs fine or it could mean that they are screwing their customers into sharing very little space.

We have used Godaddy for a couple of websites. It’s not enjoyable for professionals to use because everything is tailored to beginners. They make it too difficult to set up databases and use the FTP. With Bluehost you are expected to be able to use the features at a basic level (which you will need to know regardless since you’re starting your own site). Bluehost has shown better performance in our experience and we like the tech support better there. For more info check out their website at http://bluehost.com