If you are looking for a reliable and affordable web hosting provider, you may have come across two popular names: Bluehost and Vultr. Both of them offer various hosting plans and features to suit different needs and budgets. But how do they compare in terms of performance, features and prices? In this article, we will review and compare Bluehost and Vultr based on their web hosting plans, performance grades, features and datacenters. By the end of this article, you should have a clear idea of which one is better for your website.
Web Hosting Plans
Bluehost and Vultr offer different types of web hosting plans, such as shared hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated hosting. Here is a brief overview of their web hosting plans and prices:
- Bluehost: Bluehost offers four shared hosting plans: Basic, Plus, Choice Plus and Pro. The Basic plan starts at $2.95 per month and includes one website, 50 GB of SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, free SSL certificate and free domain name for one year. The Plus plan starts at $5.95 per month and includes unlimited websites, unmetered SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, free SSL certificate, free domain name for one year and unlimited email accounts. The Choice Plus plan starts at $6.95 per month and includes everything in the Plus plan plus domain privacy protection and CodeGuard Basic backup service. The Pro plan starts at $13.95 per month and includes everything in the Choice Plus plan plus dedicated IP address and high performance servers.
- Vultr: Vultr offers various cloud and VPS hosting plans with different specifications and prices. The Cloud Compute plans start at $5 per month and include 1 CPU core, 1 GB of RAM, 25 GB of SSD storage and 1 TB of bandwidth. The Optimized Cloud Compute plans start at $28 per month and include 1 CPU core, 2 GB of RAM, 25 GB of SSD storage and 4 TB of bandwidth. The High Frequency Compute plans start at $6 per month and include 1 CPU core, 1 GB of RAM, 32 GB of NVMe storage and 1 TB of bandwidth. The High Performance Compute plans start at $24 per month and include 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of RAM, 100 GB of NVMe storage and 5 TB of bandwidth. The Dedicated Cloud plans start at $120 per month and include 8 CPU cores, 32 GB of RAM, 120 GB of NVMe storage and 10 TB of bandwidth.
Performance Grades
To measure the performance of each web hosting plan, we used the data from VPSBenchmarks.com, which ran various tests on the web servers, such as web performance, raw CPU power, performance stability, disk IO performance and network performance. Each test resulted in a grade from A to F, where A is the best and F is the worst. Here are the performance grades for some of the web hosting plans from Bluehost and Vultr:
| Plan Name | Web Performance | Raw CPU Power | Performance Stability | Disk IO Performance | Network Performance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bluehost Basic Shared Hosting | F | F | E | E | C |
| Vultr Regular 1GB 1 core | F | F | E | E | C |
| Vultr High Performance 1GB | C | E | C | B | C |
| Vultr High Frequency 1GB | B | E | B | B | C |
| Vultr High Frequency 4GB | C | D | C | C | B |
| Vultr High Performance 16GB | C | A | D | A | B |
| Vultr High Frequency 16GB | A | B | C | B | B |
As you can see, Vultr generally has better performance grades than Bluehost, especially for the high frequency and high performance plans. However, Bluehost may still be sufficient for basic web hosting needs, such as hosting a small blog or a personal website.
Features and Datacenters
Both Bluehost and Vultr offer a variety of features and tools to help you manage your web hosting account, such as cPanel, SSL certificates, backups, block storage, object storage, load balancer, DDoS protection and more. However, some features may be available only for certain plans or at an additional cost. For example, Bluehost offers free SSL certificates for all plans, but Vultr charges $1.75 per month for each SSL certificate. Vultr offers block storage for $1 per month per 10 GB, but Bluehost does not offer block storage at all. Bluehost offers free domain name for one year for all plans, but Vultr does not offer domain name registration at all.
Another difference between Bluehost and Vultr is their datacenter locations. Bluehost has only one datacenter location in the United States, while Vultr has 18 datacenter locations across the world, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, United Kingdom and United States. This means that if you want to host your website closer to your target audience or have more options for geo-redundancy, Vultr may be the better choice.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Bluehost and Vultr are both reputable web hosting providers that offer various hosting plans and features to suit different needs and budgets. However, based on our comparison of their web hosting plans, performance grades, features and datacenters, we think that Vultr is the better choice for most users who are looking for cloud or VPS hosting with better performance and more flexibility. However, if you are looking for basic web hosting with lower prices and simpler setup, Bluehost may be the more cost-effective option.
We hope that this article has helped you decide which one is better for your website. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below.
