Best Bluehost alternatives you can use

Bluehost hosts several million websites. It is recommended by WordPress.org. If you have hosted your site on BH and for some reason, you’re not happy with the support or performance of the network/server or you want to try out a new hosting service, you can use one of the Bluehost alternatives I’ve shared below.

Best alternatives to Bluehost

Hostgator

Bluehost and Hostgator are the subsidiaries of one company but both the firms operate independently. The Hostgator baby plan is one of the most popular hosting plans on the web. What does this plan offer? For below $4 per month, you can host unlimited sites on the server and you can manage your website/server through CPanel. The other two plans of the company are the Hatchling plan and the Hostgator Business plan.

No matter what plan you buy from HG, you’ll get a free domain. Hostgator support staff responds within a few minutes when you use its live chat tool. You can also write an email to the company if you want to ask some questions or the problem/issue you’re facing isn’t a serious one. Hostgator staff, on request, will transfer one of your websites to their servers for free.

Interserver

Interserver is not as popular as Bluehost or Hostgator but it offers excellent service and has good hosting infrastructure. The Interserver engineers have built a security software that scans the file system for viruses, monitors traffic and blocks malicious IPs/requests, finds malware, and more. You can also run a custom scan with the “Virus Scanner” tool you’ll find in the CPanel.

To improve the performance of websites hosted on their server, the company saves the web pages sized below 2MB in the RAM and serves them without fetching the data from the database. Interserver’s shared hosting plans are powered by the LiteSpeed webserver. They support 440+ web applications and the LSCache plugin. In addition to shared hosting, Interserver offers cloud hosting plans. Thus, if you’re looking for a Bluehost VPS alternative, you can switch to Interserver VPS. The price of the Interserver VPS hosting plans starts at $6 (1 CPU core and 2GB RAM).

WPX Hosting

WPX is a cloud hosting company that bundles several cool features with each of its plans. For example, WPX ensures half a second response time for websites and it lets users activate free CDN for their sites. The content delivery network has been built by WPX engineers.

In addition to CDN, users of WPX also enjoy the free malware removal and anti-DDOS service which means you don’t have to use a security plugin or monitor your server log files to detect DDOS attacks and block the IPs using IPTables (or any other firewall). WPX Hosting has three plans – Business, Professional, Elite. The plans are priced at $20.83, $41.58, and $83.25 respectively.

Cloudways

Cloudways, unlike WPX, lets users choose the company they’d like to host their websites with. The company lets you create a server with popular cloud hosting service providers such as Linode, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Google Cloud as well as Amazon AWS. Once you create a server, you only have to focus on your site and monitor its performance with the Cloudways monitoring tool. The technical things will be handled by the Cloudways staff. If you think that the performance is not great, you can contact Cloudways support staff.

WP Engine

WP Engine offers plans wherein you’ll get access to premium 35+ StudioPress themes and the Genesis Framework. For those who are not aware, StudioPress is a leading theme development company. StudioPress was acquired by WP Engine in June 2018. WPEngine hosting plans are priced between $25 to $241.

Themes from StudioPress are priced between 60 to 180. If you’re looking for a hosting company that is offering top-notch premium themes at no additional cost, you can use WP Engine. Some of the features you’ll enjoy as a WP Engine customer are CDN, unlimited SSL certificates, staging areas, 24 x 7 support, etc.

Also read: Best Bluehost plans

Siteground

Siteground’s web hosting plans are of a managed type i.e. You’ll get support from WP experts and you won’t have to update the server software, configure the web/DB server for great website performance, etc by yourself.

Siteground has three shared hosting plans – StartUp, GrowBig, GoGeek. The three plans cost 6.99, 9.99, and 14.99 USD respectively. Siteground supports staging areas, WP CLI, live chat support, etc. It lets you activate Cloudflare CDN and allows you to create unlimited databases. Its servers are powered by Nginx. Although SG is a great WordPress hosting service, if you don’t want to use WordPress, you can use the Siteground’s Weebly powered website builder to create a new site. Siteground has recently moved its infrastructure to Google Cloud as a result of which the user’s websites will be handled by a faster processor.

WP Engine, Siteground, and WPX Hosting are ideal for business sites or websites that are making money. These 3 companies support staging environment i.e. you can clone your website and test the cloned version of a website before making changes to a production/live website. Hostgator and Interserver is a great choice for users that are looking for a cheap shared hosting company or an alternative to Siteground.

The hosting companies I’ve covered above support PHP 7.x. They either offer an automatic backup service or provide an option to backup the database via Control Panel. They support SSL certificates as well (free).

Final thoughts: In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Bluehost, because of lack of options, was one of the first choices of experts. As time passed by, new companies started offering better/additional custom-built services which BH doesn’t offer. The companies I’ve shared above are the best alternatives to Bluehost.