Siteground Sucks. I a loyal customer of Siteground has now shifted to Bluehost, and I love it. I have been unhappy with Siteground, And I will explain in detail Why I shifted from Siteground to Bluehost.
Well, the customer support which was said to be the best, was decent, but certainly, some issues remained unresolved for weeks. Their speed for which they recieve a lot of praise, is good, for a site owner. But if I use Cloudflare and all speed optimizations, Bluehost is as good as Siteground. And don’t get me wrong, Bluehost isn’t slow, but surely Siteground has a 10-15% performance benefit, but with CDN, plugins you can easily cover-up.
Few of the problems were unique to me, but there are many reasons why Sitegroud Sucks, caused me to shift to Bluehost.
Siteground Sucks: Here’s Why
Siteground has a better Affiliate Program if we consider the fact that they release money after the very first payment, but Siteground pays $50. In contrast, Bluehost gives a flat $65, making it a much better idea and perfect for affiliates.
Siteground has lots of Business Partners and recommendations, which is a good thing. But they don’t have any interface to leverage their UI. Other than Cloudflare they don’t have much to offer.
Bluehost offers lots of Integration. These include Site Security and Backup with code Gaurd. Code Gaurd does not come with shared hosting plans at least at a nominal cost it’s a steal.
Also, recently we decided to test Hostingrer. So, do checkout our Hostinger Review 2022.
No need to remember dozens of additional passwords.
They have Marketing Integrations. In Manage Site Section, they have Marketing Center, where you can manage Google Ads goodness. They also give you a generous $100 ad credit when you spend your first $25 on Google Ads. Which is pretty sweet. None of it is provided by Siteground in its Hosting Interface.
While things like Marketing Center don’t necessarily make Siteground Suck, but surely these small details unite to makeshift from Siteground to Bluehost
They have Add Ons. These are additional features you can add to your hosting, some are free others are paid, but all of them feel promising. Things like Google My Business Add Ons are free, the SEO Add On is paid, but at an economical cost, it is a pure steal.
SSL Certificates, G Suite, Domain Privacy, and many cool things come in these Add Ons. I never need to remember passwords, just log into Bluehost and you have got everything under 1 roof. Overall I loved it.
I Shifted from Siteground to Bluehost for a Better Bang for the Buck
The Law of Diminishing Returns tells, that as we spend more and more, the increment in performance for the money spend, decreases massively. And it’s true everywhere.
The price difference was certainly an important factor for me that influenced why I switched from Siteground to Bluehost.
But Siteground has increased its prices over the years. And Bluehost does more than Siteground and costs less. Sure Siteground has an Advantage as it runs on Google Cloud, and has faster SSDs, but the Unlimited Bandwidth and storage, got me lured towards Bluehost.
Also, if you want an in-depth review of Siteground along with its various plans, check out the SiteGround Hosting Review – the honest truth.
Below is the image, of the GoBig Plan, I bought 1 year ago. it cost by 74USD, it was a perfectly justifiable cost and granted that they are known to have great customer support and high performance I happily spent it.
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But in about 11 months, the cost increased to $119. This is a $45 increment in less than a year. I mean even Apple does not increase prices this quickly.
And well if higher prices meant better performance, I would have gladly shifted to it. There is not much difference in features. Besides the fact, they are now on Google Cloud, and they now run PHP 7.4, though PHP part is industry standard.
In contrast, Bluehost does not have Google Cloud, but they provide unlimited storage, and their performance has improved a lot in the past few years.
The Choice Plus plan, which is recommended plan of Bluehost, coated $107.4, do note that based on the country you buy, you can get cheaper than this too. If you buy from India, it can be around 85-90 USD too, though for fair comparison I still consider $107.4
So Bluehost costs less but is it better?
When I bought Siteground, at that time Bluehost had a negative reputation, as it was acquired by EIG, and got as bad as any other EIG one.
But in the last 8-12 months they improved. UpTIme is better, and their Control Panel is awesome. As far as what you get with Hosting is concerned, in terms of speed, everything from RAM, to PHP is the same, but Bluehost gives unlimited fast storage and Unlimited Bandwidth, both of which have been limited by Siteground. The prospect of not having to worry about storage won my heart and drifted me to switching from Siteground to Bluehost.
They have done a lot of smart work. Depending upon where I test, I get almost similar results most of the time. I can say Siteground has a slight edge, but it’s like 52-48.
The Cloudflare Hassle: A Personal Issue to Shift from Siteground to Bluehost
You may have heard of Cloudflare, a CDN service that is popular these days. But about in 2018, they launched their domain registrar, which sold new and renewed domains at Whole Sale prices. I shifted my domain to Cloudflare.
Siteground told me that Cloudflare, is a “trusted Business partner r” and therefore Siteground and Cloudflare integrate nicely. But as it turns out reality is the opposite.
Domains bought from Cloudflare cannot change Nameservers, and Siteground requires me to change Nameservers. So, I could not host my site properly.
My site remained down for 3 days after which also I had to transfer the domain to GoDaddy. C’mon Siteground and Cloudflare are trusted Business Partners, and I was promised that they would “Integrate Nicely”
Well, it’s a Limitation of Cloudflare, but Siteground customer support made promises, that cost me 3 days. And this frustration and loss of trust, cause me to slowly lose confidence in Siteground and switch from Siteground to Bluehost.
I did the same on Bluehost, just to test if they would lie to me, to ensure I buy Bluehost, and they outrightly said no. (Again it’s a fault of Cloudflare to not allow domain name server change, but Siteground even after knowing it did not inform me)
Also, Bluehost gives 1 free domain bundled with Hosting, so you can either get a new domain or transfer the existing domain for a years extension.
Accessibility is the Real Benefit of Bluehost
This is a great thing, I love it. Bluehost has made a lot of WordPress settings into their hosting.
It happened, that when I was transferring my site, due to some typo, the site went down. I had not set up FTP yet, so could not deactivate via FTP.
So I headed to Bluehost and went to “Manage Sites”, and boom I can deactivate plugins directly from there. I have the reset user password link for each user, I can see my installed themes, installed plugins users, etc, directly from hosting.
Then I also find, that I can toggle auto-update for core, plugins, or themes from there. Toggle Comment settings, revisions and more.
A guy with a wp-config file can do it easily. But it’s always good to have some cool stuff with it.
This thing was nowhere in Siteground. It was never a complaint, but after shifting to Bluehost, I realized that Siteground Sucks. And it justifies my decision to why I shifted from Siteground.
Feature Richness
This was a forte of Siteground, they had a lot of small features, to help customers. There contextual articles, clean UI, Grid layout were all much appreciated. And their approach of dividing site tools per domain was great and successful. And 2 years ago, that feature richness was what got me to #Siteground, but as it turns out they are pretty basic. Cloudflare CDN, SSL, and Error Log tools never were useful to me in their 2 years.
But now, Bluehost is at parr. Bluehost provides automated full site backups. They all run servers on SSDs and are providing the latest version of PHP, as of writing this post.
Their Servers are having Tier 3 certification. Tier 4 is the highest possible certification for Servers. The 30 Day backups, unlimited emails, Cloudflare CDN, etc are really good.
Bluehost also has a Weebly Page Builder built right in. The Page Builder can be used if you need a simple site at ease. They have the standard cPanel system, for much better usability.
Siteground has its File Manager. And it’s bad. Siteground’s File Manager does not allow me to ZIP or un ZIP the files. This means if there are 15 files to upload, I have to upload each one separately, making things slow. Now on Bluehost, I can directly upload the zip and unzip it with a click of a button.
Siteground File Manager sucks on phone. I get it coding should not happen on phone, and FTP is the better thing, but options are good. The File Manager lags and is unusable. On 100% of the phones which I tried, the cursor would randomly jump. Pressing enter would do nothing. Spacebar would take the cursor to Line 1. And many weird issues.
The cPanel File Manager, isn’t responsive, as it needs to be open in Desktop Mode, on phone but it works amazingly. The Lack of a good File Manager was one of the reasons why I thought Siteground Sucks and a thing due to which I shifted from Siteground to Bluehost.
Renewals Are Important
Moreover, renewal costs are insane. Siteground takes an unjustifiable $300 for renewal of one 1year. Which is not good. No one right mind should buy it.
Siteground and Bluehost both have Introductory places, which are relatively lesser than the actual price.
But renewal prices, are significantly higher but still, Siteground remains outrageously high kind of similar though.
Bluehost is cost-effective when compared hosting to hosting, though it is worth taking note, that Bluehost gives the domain also, with the same cost, you get better performance, and domain renewal bundles making Bluehost a much better deal.
Bluehost is officially recommended by WordPress, and is an old company, with lots of experience, it has been there for over 25years now. They surely can be trusted with quality standards.
My experience with Customer Support
Siteground customer support was quick and responsive and looked professional in talking. But what is the point of a good-sounding agent, who solves no issues?
I already narrated how their support lied about Cloudflare, and that was one issue, the second one was even more annoying.
As a developer, my work remains with Backend. I need staging sites often, and for making them, I make and delete many stagings.
Siteground was painful with it. I would create a Staging, and the next day come back to Siteground to see, the Staging disappears.
The Staging itself would be there on the internet, and files would be there, but it would reflect in my Siteground Site Tools.
Every time I had to delete a Staging, I would have to launch a ticket, telling them my issue. And then ask them to bring it back to my account. They would do it, and then only I could delete on manage it.
I shifted from Siteground to Bluehost about a few weeks ago.
One thing that stood out to me was the Customer Support flexibility. I had a Long 3hr conversation with a customer support representative, at Bluehost. And somehow my laptop battery died the issue queue seemed almost close to being fixed when the connection was lost.
I was disappointed, but I still did a hopeless effort of retrying Bluehost customer support and asked them to connect me to “Varun U”, that’s the guy with whom I talked earlier. It took 1-2 mins, but they got me with the same guy. And he solved the issue quickly.
Had I not gotten back to that same person, it would have taken at least 1hr again. (It was a tough problem)
Siteground does not transfer like that. So there is a huge technical plus point for customer support of Bluehost.
Ultimately Siteground isn’t bad, but Bluehost seems much more viable to me.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Bluehost is a better bang for your buck and overall a much more balanced solution for your web development needs. However, if you want peak performance without worrying about cost, then Siteground is a better idea.
However, if you are planning on spending that much, we would recommend you go for a VPS or a Cloud Hosting service. To maximize performance without breaking the bank, checkout our list of 8 best cloud hosting for websites
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