Over the years, WpEngine has gained a significant popularity among its customers and the WordPress community for its excellent WordPress plans that are ideal for all kinds of website deployment. Bluehost on the other hand, there is one of the popular web hosting companies providing some of the excellent plans for shared hosting. Thus both the companies target quite different customers for hosting their websites. Although Bluehost also has a dedicated WordPress hosting plan, it is not that popular as its shared and cloud hosting plans are. WpEngine on the other hand only caters to people who want to host WordPress websites and nothing else. If you want to host a forum on top of WordPress on WpEngine, you cannot use any other forum software other than word press’s default forum application BBForum. But in the case of Bluehost, you can host literally any kind of web application top of its shared hosting platforms.
Thus the applications on top of it are rarely resource optimized as the WpEngine websites are. Therefore, WpEngine often scores better when it comes to website performance although it can host only WordPress websites on top of its servers. There are numerous other features that set these companies apart. Let’s dive deeper into the details and explore how each of the companies could be ideal for your requirements.
Wpengine vs Bluehost: Plans and Pricing Comparison
WpEngine doesn’t offer the usual plans for personal and business users. Instead, it has modified its plans to be more resource centric. All its plans are full of features that normally lack in most hosting services. Although it classifies the plans broadly into personal, professional, Business, Premium and Enterprise plans, it doesn’t sub-classify them further into multiple levels to restrict users based on a number of server resources they use. Below is a detailed explanation of the plans and their features ideal for all types of customers. Bluehost, on the other hand, provides traditional plans with shared, VPS and dedicated plans as per resources allocated to each use. Let’s dive deeper into each plan provided by the companies.
WpEngine Plans & Pricing
Unlike most web hosting companies, WpEngine provides a completely unique set of plans ideal for all kinds of website and application development. You can build any kind of WordPress based application on top of the servers and run even the most powerful e-commerce websites on the highly scalable platforms of WpEngine. Its plans are structures accordingly to allow users to have the best features at prices ideal for their consumption. The plans provided by WpEngine are:
- Personal: Ideal for personal blogs and small portfolio websites, the personal plans come with the allowance to host only a single WordPress installation. The plan can handle up to 25K visitors per month and allows local SSD storage of up to 10GB per user. The plans come staging, transferable installs and numerous other features. However, it also lacks a number of features like priority support, CDN, SSL and other premium features that could help commercial websites to be run on the platform. It is priced at $29 per month and is ideal for most websites that do not take up transactions on their website.
- Professional: A more powerful plan that includes a number of features absent from the personal plan is priced at $99/month. It includes a content delivery network along with support for 3rd party SSL and allows the users to host up to 10 WordPress websites. You can easily build a WordPress multi-site and host them all on a single plan. It allows 20GB local storage and unlimited data transfer. The plan can handle upto100K visitors a month. The plan is ideal for all kinds of professional WordPress installation that need higher resources for their growing customer base. Apart from the above, the plan also includes 24×7 support that is absent from its previous plans.
- Business: Ideal for businesses running fully on WordPress based websites, this is an ideal plan that provides unlimited resources for running any kind of web application on top of the servers. It includes all the features provided by the Professional plan and also includes GeoIP support for WordPress applications. You can host up to 25 WordPress websites or run them all on top of a single WordPress multisite. It allows 30GB local storage and 400K visitors per month. Apart from unlimited data transfer, the plan also comes with numerous features that are ideal for business applications and high resource consuming websites.
Bluehost Plans & Pricing
Bluehost provides 3 types of plans for its shared hosting accounts named as the Basic, Plus and the Business Pro plans targeted at 3 distinct types of consumers. The cloud plans are actually the shared hosting plans and thus they each of the plans are ideal for unlimited resource consumption unlike most web hosting companies allow. As the unmetered bandwidth usage allows users to build and run any type of web application, the computing resources are limited for each plan and thus you have to upgrade to the next higher plan if your computing resources exceed the allocated limits.
- The Basic plan is ideal for beginners as it provides all inbuilt features for quick website deployment without deep technical know-how. Users can host one website and use up to 100 GB of web space. Although the website can consume unlimited bandwidth, the server load must be below CPU throttling limits. Users also get one free domain name that they can keep until they are hosting with Bluehost. Along with that, users can have up to 5 parked domains, 25 sub domains, 100 email accounts with 500mb of storage in each account. The plan costs only $3.95 per month.
- The plus plan is ideal for experienced website administrators or people who have already hosting and maintained websites before. It costs only $5.95 per month and offers unlimited resource usage for all parameters including the number of websites that can be hosted, bandwidth usage, server space, email accounts and storage per email accounts. The plan includes a free domain name and comes with marketing offers worth $200. Users can also deploy a global CDN and Spam Experts to further secure their websites against DDOS or penetration attacks.
- Priced at $13.95 per month, the Business Pro plan is one of the most powerful shared hosting plans in the market. All resources allow unlimited usage and the plan comes with free add-ons worth $180 per year. It also has 2 Spam Experts with one dedicated IP and one domain privacy feature. The associated SSL certificate is ideal for e-commerce websites and other secure online transactions. You can also backup your website with Site Backup Pro and therefore enable high maintenance features that increase your page speed and deliver your content through optimized content delivery networks.
Bluehost Special Offers:
Offer 1: Save Flat 20% on your purchase when you buy for 3 years.
Offer 2: Get a free domain name with your purchase.
Wpengine vs Bluehost: Performance and Reliability
Very few companies have remained popular for their web host performance and reliability. WpEngine and Bluehost have always remained among of the top hosting companies. With over a million customers and arrays of optimized server hardware that also compete with hosting companies like Godaddy and Hostgator, they offer some of the best plans to their customers. Fortunately, their performance is also average when compared to their competitors.
The server uptime, page speed and customer support benchmarks over a limited period have remained quite steady and have therefore proven to be invaluable to customers. When compared with major hosting companies that claim to provide exceptional services, WpEngine fares better in its benchmark tests than Bluehost. Let find out more about each of the parameters.
Wpengine vs Bluehost: Page Speed
Page speed is perhaps the most important aspect of any website. Without the necessary configurations on the server side, it is impossible to build any kind of web application that delivers its web pages without any lag. WpEngine excels at this by deploying all kinds of features including compression, browser cache and also server side caching. However, Bluehost is ideally suited for web applications that work like standard websites instead of high optimization and caching features. Bluehost only supports the standard mechanisms of page speed optimization and does not allow further modifications to its server.
However, WpEngine allows users to modify their servers as per their requirements and are thus the most powerful servers available to users. In our test, WpEngine served pages at 2.56s while Bluehost took up to 4.03s. As WpEngine leverages optimized CDN and browser caching the pages are already present in your browser unlike in Bluehost. This is a huge advantage when it comes to serving highly optimized web pages at faster page speeds.
Moreover, as WpEngine serves only WordPress websites, it has one of the best-optimized server architecture ideals for managing WordPress websites. Automation in terms of web application deployment and database integrity allows users to build any kind of application infrastructures on top of it. Moreover, the WordPress community already has excellent applications that help in performance improvement.
You may also like: SiteGround vs Godaddy vs Inmotion Hosting
Wpengine vs Bluehost: Serve Uptime
Bluehost is one of the major web hosting companies with its array of servers located all across the world. However, they still face some server outages and have to maintain their performance metrics with continuous uptime. Although WpEngine has a very limited and relatively smaller cluster of web servers, they serve web pages and remain up all the time in our tests, WpEngine had one of the best uptime ratios relative to major web hosting companies on the web. With more than 99.98% uptime guarantee, they definitely fare better than Bluehost that serves until 99.92% of the time. With its cloud scalability, WpEngine can easily deploy multiple servers to reduce server downtime but Bluehost cannot as its shared plans are also the cloud plans with additional resource usage for customers who top for them. Thus WpEngine often tends to provide excellent sever uptime by diverting customers to replicated servers even when their primary server fails at drastic conditions. These failover measures make the company one of the best WordPress enterprise hosting companies.
User Experience and Customer Service
Bluehost definitely has a better UI as compared to WpEngine. They have completely redesigned the CPanel to include all necessary features in an easy to access and manage pattern. This allows users to build and manage their server configuration quite easily in comparison to other web hosting companies. WpEngine also provides a familiar CPanel but it is not as good as Bluehost. They have stuck to the traditional CPanel and Softaculous that comes prepackages and use their inbuilt themes to modify the appearance of the control panel
When it comes to customer service, both the companies fare wonderfully. Although WpEngine provides support only in a localized area within certain business hours, they have the best support teams that can easily help you with any kind of queries relating to setting up your website, managing your server resources or even modifying your server configuration to suit your requirements. As Bluehost is a larger organization with a huge geographic span, they have customer service agents that are available all time. They are as helpful as the guys from WpEngine but they cannot help you modify their server as the company doesn’t allow such modifications in the first place.
Conclusion: Wpengine or Bluehost?
When it comes to selecting between the two, I would definitely go with WpEngine. It has much more resource flexibility when compared with Bluehost and also allows users to build custom applications on top of its server architecture. Although Bluehost is also a decent web hosting company, it lacks the resource flexibility that core developers and experienced web administrators require. It is great for starters but once you are a bit experienced, you will have to move on to other web hosting companies like WpEngine that provide better features at the same price. Moreover, the flexible cloud hosting solutions with easy scalability options provided by WpEngine attract most of its users. Thus, if you want a standard web hosting plan that can help you run any kind of web CMS apart from WordPress then Bluehost is your choice but if you want to host WordPress websites then there is nothing better than WpEngine.