Hosting Tutorial & Guide
Site5 VS BlueHost - Which Is the Better Shared Hosting Provider
With millions of customers and over 10 years’ experience in providing hosting service for individuals and business owners, BlueHost and Site5 have lots of similarities in their shared hosting services. So it is a little hard for webmasters to make a choice between them.To help our readers know the differences between the 2 companies, we have made a comparison based on our review on their price, features, reliability, performance, technical support and customer reviews.
| Rating |  |  |
|---|---|---|
| Price | ||
| Features | ||
| Hosting Speed | ||
| Uptime | ||
| Support | ||
| Read More | Site5 Review | BlueHost Review |
Price
BlueHost has released 3 shared web hosting plans which are priced from $7.99/mo. Now, the company is offering a compelling discount for visitors going through the promotional link below, with which the price is cut down to $2.95/mo only. Besides, a free domain name for 1 year, Google advertising credits, and Yahoo!/Bing Adwords voucher are included in the packages.BlueHost Promotional Link Activation
Site5 has 3 shared hosting plans to enable customers to find the most proper one according their current needs and budget. The 3 plans are available from $4.95/mo, $8.95/mo and 11.95/mo respectively. There is no special discount offered.
Features
As reputed web hosting providers, both Site5 and BlueHost offer rich features to support customers in the website building and management. All of their web hosting plans include the following things:- Unlimited bandwidth.
- Shared SSL and daily backups.
- 99.9% uptime guarantee.
- SSH, SFTP, Cron Jobs, custom error pages, etc.
- Webmail, POP3, IMAP, Email Forwarders, Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus.
- A 1-click installer which supports hundreds of scripts including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.
Another common point between the two web hosts is that their primary hosting plans allow hosting a single domain only.
Still, there are some differences existing in the amount of storage, database features, etc. In below, we have made a table to list the features offered by Site5 and BlueHost. The primary plans, BlueHost Basic and Site5 hostBasic, are selected for this comparison.
| Feature | | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | hostBasic | Basic |
| Hosted Domain | 1 | 1 |
| Disk Space | Unlimited | 50 GB |
| Control Panel | SiteAdmin | cPanel |
| Free Domain | ||
| Python | ||
| PHP 5 | ||
| Perl | ||
| PostgreSQL | ||
| Regular Price | ||
| Discount Price | $4.95/mo | $2.95/mo |
| How to Claim | - | Link Activation |
Reliability & Performance
Uptime and speed are recognized as two key factors for judging the quality of a company’s services. Both of the 2 companies are reliable web hosts that guarantee 99.9% uptime. Besides, to ensure their customers run websites without any sudden interruption, technicians and engineers in the 2 companies are monitoring the data centers and servers 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week.Site5 has done a good job in offering reliable shared hosting service for their customers. It has about 15 data centers worldwide. We have hosted 1 Joomla website with hostBasic for over 2 years, and kept monitoring the site closely with a 5-minute interval. According to monitoring, the uptime of Site5 is averagely 99.92% in the past year.
BlueHost, the largest shared hosting provider in the industry, has invested more than 20 million USD in its 3 state-of-the-art data centers in Provo, Utah. In the data centers, they use high performance dual quad processor servers with multiple independent cores, UPS power, and diesel generators. All of the first-rate facilities have achieved 99.97% uptime. Besides, BlueHost utilizes cutting-edge technologies, such as customized Linux Kernel for shared hosting, to enhance its hosting performance.Check out the statistics in the following chart that shows the uptime of BlueHost in the past 30 days.
By using the first-class facilities and infrastructures, both of the 2 companies provide fast speed for their customers. BlueHost designs and maintains their servers, and utilizes the advanced cloud technologies like OpenStack and KVM to set the stage to continuously upgrade, which enhances customers' servers to keep the hosted sites running fast. According to our monitoring result, BlueHost is much faster than Site5 in server response time.
Technical Support
Both BlueHost and Site5 provide quality technical support powered by hundreds of professional and knowledgeable technicians via toll-free phone call, email or live chat to offer help for troubled customers to deal with technical issues, which enables their customers to concentrate on business without any distraction.To help people get some basic information of web hosting and solutions of common issues, these two web host offers many useful channels and platforms, such as FAQ, community and knowledgebase.
The difference is, BlueHost allows customers to call them up 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week, while Site5 offers phone call support just from 10 AM to 6 PM EST Monday to Friday only). In this case, people who choose Site5 to host their site can not get solutions from in company via phone call at weekend, which is inconvenient for customers.
Additionally, BlueHost offers much faster support than Site5. As we tested, the response time of BlueHost phone support and live chat support is about 30 seconds, while that of Site5 is nearly 5 minutes.
Money Back Guarantee
Both of Site5 and BlueHost provide refund guarantees to ensure users a risk-free hosting experience. The former allows refunds for the first 45 days for all the web hosting plans, while BlueHost offers full refunds within the initial 30 days upon account activation. There are some non-refundable fees with either provider, such as the domain registration, dedicated IPs, website transfers, etc.You may now think that the policies of Site5 are more favorable, but you should note that BlueHost has some other rules in terms of the refund guarantee which benefit customers a lot.
- For those who cancel the services within 3 days, BlueHost issues refunds for all the fees that have been paid. No reduction happens.
- For those who cancel the services after the first 30 days, BlueHost stills issues pro-rated refunds for the unused months.
Customer Satisfaction Rate
As a highly recommended web hosting provider, BlueHost receives a lot of compliments from the customers. According to the 1041 customer reviews we have collected, 99.1% customers are highly satisfied with the hosting service. On the contrary, just 78.6% of Site5 customers are satisfied with the overall service they have purchased.Below are the detailed statistics of BlueHost customer satisfaction.
Conclusion
According to the comparison, both of the 2 companies provide reliable web hosting services to webmasters. However, BlueHost does offer much affordable and fast shared hosting service than Site5, so it is the better choice for individuals and small to medium sized business owners. Besides, the technical support of this company is much faster and effective than that of Site5.To learn more about BlueHost shared hosting, visit http://www.bluehost.com/
