So you’re doing research to start your WordPress blog from scratch, and you can’t help but notice and the majority of bloggers are promoting Bluehost to you as a beginner.
If you’re wondering whether it’s worth it…
…Or whether you should go with a different host, then I’m glad you found this page.
I’m going to share my review and experience with Bluehost vs Siteground hosting…
…Why I don’t recommend Bluehost for beginners (yes, you read that right!), despite the fact that the majority of bloggers promote it.
I’ll also share when to use Bluehost…
…And when you should choose Siteground instead.
Please read through this post as I’m going to share my personal experience with both hosts so you can hopefully learn from my beginner blogging mistakes.
Full Disclosure: This page contains affiliate links. If you decide to purchase through my links, I’ll receive a commission. But you won’t pay more.
Bluehost Review As A Beginner
Just like you, I heard about Bluehost because that’s what the majority of bloggers or blogging gurus promote.
I was very excited to start my blog and I learned everything on my own from scratch, so it was a good learning experience.
I signed up with Bluehost in March 2016. And I left in November 2016.
I moved to Siteground and never looked back.
Overall, I think Bluehost offers relatively cheaper prices which may be a good thing if you’re starting on a very tight budget.
The problem with this is…
Because it’s very cheap, the majority of people decide to sign-up with them which I feel is the reason why their service quality got terrible over time.
Issues I Experienced With Bluehost:
Right off the bat, with just a couple of blog posts, I was already getting warnings that I was using up so many resources and needed to upgrade to avoid service interruption (meaning…taking my website down)
What?
I had barely any content and I had to pay more? I honestly felt like the cheap price was just a tactic to dupe people into signing-up and then get them to upgrade. (Something I never experienced with Siteground)
My website was down all the time. This was very frustrating. Whenever I’d receive a tiny bit of traffic, my website couldn’t sustain it and it’d go down. I’m talking like barely 100 visitors per month.
My website was new and I was barely getting 10-20 visitors per day. So nothing crazy.
I remember trying to fix this over the customer service chat (which I’ll get to in a second), and the person, again, just told me I had to upgrade to the Cloud hosting (which I don’t even have now with my big website. It’s still on the GoGeek plan despite going over the threshold so many times)
My website was extremely slow. This hurt my Google ranking and just made the whole experience frustrating. I’m thinking that this probably has to do with the number of websites that sign-up with them (due to the low price) all occupying the same servers space. (Just a guess)
I avoided dealing with customer service. To me, customer service is a top priority especially with hosting. If I experience a problem, I need to get to someone asap.
I remember waiting 40 minutes to get to someone on the chat. And then have them try to upsell me.
That was when I decided to move to a different host. I honestly avoided this for so long because I was scared to move. But the truth is…
…I’m so glad I did it early in my blogging journey. Because doing it now with a lot more resources would definitely be more challenging.
This is why I always recommend for beginners to choose a good hosting company so you start on a good foundation.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can change later…because later, your website will be bigger, with more resources, plugins, software, visitors, sales pages, etc. and you may run into issues.
It’s better to just do it in the beginning when no one is visiting your blog (or very few people that it won’t really affect them)
When To Choose Bluehost
After sharing my feedback you may be wondering why I’d recommend Bluehost, if ever. Well, to be completely honest with you. I would only recommend Bluehost if you’re just planning to start a personal blog…
…And you don’t have big goals or plans to turn your blog into a business or grow it so it gets thousands of visitors per day.
If you just want to have a hobby blog where you can share your thoughts and ideas whenever you feel like writing, then I’m sure Bluehost will be fine.
But if you’re serious about growing your blog into a full-time business. And you know you’ll be writing a ton of content, installing plugins or membership software, creating sales pages, then, I highly recommend you start in a solid foundation.
Why I Recommend Siteground
I currently run both my blogs on Siteground. Since I moved from Bluehost in 2016, I’ve been extremely happy with their service.
My websites have never been down. Whenever I encounter a technical roadblock or issue, I contact them, and within seconds (yes, seconds) I’m talking to a customer service rep in the chat. I never left the chat without having my issues solved right away.
I happily pay for the plan I have for both websites because I know my sites are in good hands. If you’d like to know how to set-up Siteground and WordPress, I have a full tutorial here on how to start your blog from scratch.
Siteground people are also extremely helpful. I have actually experienced a few very high traffic days where I went beyond my plan CPU threshold and I was considering upgrading to avoid any interruptions. When I contacted them, they happily increased my CPU and told me I should be okay and not to worry about it.
Overall, I believe that we get what we pay for. As I mentioned before, if you have any goals of growing your website to get tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, you want to be on solid grounds.
And you want to invest in a good hosting service. After all, your website is your number 1 asset. And signing up with a good hosting company will improve your site’s performance in the long-term.
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I moved to Siteground after a similar experience with another vendor. They are more expensive but I love not getting the constant “overusing resources” messages (which I believe are due to the host’s inability to shut out bots in the end). Nice to hear another good experience!