Bluehost VPS vs SiteGround: what's the best step up from shared hosting?

SiteGround and Bluehost both have a strong reputation as two of the best web hosting providers, but most people use them for shared hosting. How do they compare if you need to upgrade your business website to VPS hosting? To find out, we judged them on hardware, price, features, ease of use, management options, and measured performance using benchmarking tools.

We found that Bluehost’s managed VPS offers a good progression from shared hosting. SiteGround's offerings are more powerful but do come with a steeper price tag.

Plans & pricing

Bluehost offers managed and unmanaged VPS plans while SiteGround offers 'managed cloud hosting' which is essentially VPS plans. For this comparison we've just looked at Bluehost's managed plans.

These plans – Standard NVMe 4, Enhanced NVMe 8, and Ultimate NVMe 16 – are available on a 36-month term, with 35-36% discounts depending on the plan. A standard monthly rolling plan (e.g., $59.99/mo for Standard NVMe 4, compared with $34.99/mo over 36 months) is also available, as are 12- and 24 month deals, each with discounts.

SiteGround has four similar plans – Jump Start, Business, Business Plus, and Super Power – are available. Jump Start is $100/mo, while Super Power is $400/mo. As with Bluehost, discounts are available with 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month plans, 5% on the 3 month plan and 10% on the longer options.

Both hosts offer a 30-day money back offer, should you decide to host your website elsewhere. Note that plans renew at the end of chosen terms without the discount applied.

Infrastructure

Bluehost’s VPS plan runs on hardware equipped with an AMD EPYC-Genoa CPUs. There are datacentres around the world

Meanwhile, SiteGround’s hosting is based on Google Cloud servers (we used an Australian data center), with our benchmarking unable to definitively confirm any further details about the CPU, RAM, or storage.

Features

SiteGround

With SiteGround’s cloud-based VPS hosting you get dedicated resources, a dedicated IP and daily backups, along with free SSL, email, and CDN, as well as automated scaling for traffic spikes. Unlimited websites are accommodated too. Support for developers and clients is provided with dedicated accounts, staging and Git support, WP-CLI and SSH.

In addition, a quick start for your online business can be achieved using the SiteGround Website Builder, which we found to be excellent.

Bluehost

Managed VPS plans from Bluehost come with a free SSL certificate, SSH and SFTP access, and support for unlimited applications. Optimized caching should ensure sites load efficiently, and backups and staging environments are also included. Along with 24/7 support (see below), 24/7 real-time monitoring and SiteLock security are included, to ensure your website is not hijacked, subverted, or otherwise hacked.

Bluehost also has website building options, but relies on Sitejet. This is not a bad choice, but it is inferior to SiteGround Website Builder. Both hosts offer AI-guided template selection and theming via WordPress.

Support

Both hosts offer 24/7 support, aiming to resolve technical issues. However, as these are managed VPS solutions, Bluehost and SiteGround offer different approaches.

Bluehost provides support via AI chat bot (“BLU”), live chat, and a telephone chat team. In our experience, the AI chat bot seemed to be trained on outdated material – for example, it was unable to assist with accurate steps for setting up a website. Further interactions with a human agent were hampered with cookie cutter responses that failed to resolve a specific database-related query. That aside, Bluehost has a searchable knowledgebase and operates a free WordPress course.

SiteGround operates credits-based support model. These need to be purchased in advance of requiring support, or can be retained on a subscription basis. This has a couple of shortcomings. First, it adds considerable cost to an already expensive plan (Bluehost plans include support). Second, (perhaps most crucially), you cannot initiate contact for a specific problem without paying first. If your budget stretches to a subscription for Expert Care credits, it is worth considering if you’re already edging towards SiteGround.

Performance comparison

To get an idea of how these hosts handle a typical WordPress-powered store, we set one up with WooCommerce. This was then tested with WordPress Benchmark, a plugin for the CMS that rates CPU and RAM, network speed, and object cache, before offering an overall score.

We also used the YABS benchmarking script to assess the the server infrastructure and environment, confirming it matches the advertised specification and offers adequate bandwidth.

Verdict

SiteGround and Bluehost managed VPS hosting plans are closely matched in terms of features, but there is a clear gap between them in terms of pricing and performance. Even when comparing both hosts over a 12 month plan with a discount, Bluehost is around 30% less than SiteGround, and that’s before considering the option of support credits. Everything is bundled with Bluehost’s managed VPS – the same is not true of SiteGround.

That said, the implementation of the SiteGround Website Builder is impressive, delivering a straightforward and effective solution to instant website building. This tool is on par with Wix, a website building and hosting tool that has become a popular alternative to WordPress. SiteGround Website Builder is superior to the WordPress-based builders; Bluehost only offers WordPress builders or the comparatively disappointing Sitejet.

In terms of plans, features, support, and performance, Bluehost edges it, making it a strong option for any web project that has outgrown shared hosting. SiteGround has a lot to offer in terms of ease of use and enjoying a quick launch, but its additional costs and the prospect of keeping support on what is effectively a retainer might not suit your small business budget.