A2hosting, Godaddy and Bluehost are among the most established and trusted companies in web hosting industry. All of them offer a variety of cPanel plans, WordPress integrations as well very competitive pricing. When faced with a decision to pick one of the three, it is surely a heavyweight fight. It is my hope that the comparison below will enlighten you on the specialities of each one of them, and consequently helping you pick out a favourite.
A2hosting was started by Bryan Muthig in 2001. It grew gradually and became one of the leading web hosting companies, providing super fast internet speeds and easy to manage web services. Today, A2hosting offers VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting and domain services.
Bluehost is another heavyweight web hosting company. It is a sizeable player that has over two million domain and a dozen of valuable services. It was founded by Matt Heaton in early 1996, which was later bought off by Endurance International Group in 2010. It has over a million domains and a wealth of other valuable services. Today, this giant web hosting company offers WordPress hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting among others.
Godaddy, on the other hand, is a web hosting company established in 1997. Just like the first two, it offers basic web hosting services and advanced ones like SSL certificates and domain registrations. It is one of the largest ICANN accredited registrar with over a billion domain names under its management. It also provides online services for various small businesses.
When these three companies are merged, it can be very stressful to chose which one of them will be your designated web host. It is for that reason that we have done in depth research about them and provided information regarding their pricing, performance, support, ease of use and speed. At the end of this article, you should be able to make an informed choice to see whether Godaddy, A2hosting or Bluehost suits your website better.
The table below gives a summary of the comparisons we will be discussing about.
| A2hosting | Bluehost | Godaddy | |
| Pricing | The cheapest plan goes for 3.92. Basic Hosting Plan $3.92, Swift $4.90, Turbo $9.35. | The cheapest plan goes for $2.4. The Basic Hosting Plan $2.4, ChoicePlus $3.8, Pro $8.9. | The cheapest hosting plan goes for $3.99 while the most expensive hosting costs around $10.6. |
| Support | You can get in touch with the technical team through messaging, live chats, ticket based emails among others. | Access to technical support team can be done through phone calls, emails and live chats. | You can get in touch through dedicated social media pages,phone calls, SMS and emails. |
| Speed | It has a page load speed of 330ms and uptime record of 99.94%. | Has a page load speed of 400ms snd uptime record of 99.93%. | It has a page load speed of 405ms and uptime record of 95.94% |
i) Pricing
A2hosting offers various web hosting plans that are mostly three. These are Lite, Swift and Turbo. Lite is the most basic plan that costs $3.92 per month. This package comes with one website, unlimited transfer and storage and basic extras of SSL certificate, site migration and SSD.Swift and Turbo hosting plans go for $4.90 and $9.35 per month respectively. You will receive unlimited number of websites upon upgrading to any of these two.
Bluehost offers its customers four different shared hosting plans. These include: Basic, Plus, Choice Plus & Pro. The basic hosting plan that goes for $2.4 per month comes with one website, a free SSL, 50GB of SSD storage and unmetered bandwidth. The other three hosting options range from %5.5 to $14 per month.
The cheapest price for any Godaddy hosting plan is $3.99 per month, giving you a free domain name for the Godaddy Economy plan with comes with a three or two year subscription.
ii) Support
When it comes to technical support and security, A2hosting has got you covered. Some of their outstanding services are messaging, live chats, ticket-based services without mentioning the hundreds of informative articles on their website. It is very easy to get in touch with their technical experts when faced with a problem.
Bluehost makes it easier for users to access technical support when faced with challenges or have queries. A user can get to them through phone calls, email ticketing and live chats. Their website is also well equipped with informative video tutorials, user forums and articles that can help answer basic questions.
Godaddy has a provision where you can get in touch with them via social media. It has it made it very easy for users to contact technical support through phone calls, dedicated social media pages and e-mail ticketing. It takes very little time for your queries to be responded to when using Godaddy.
iii) Speed
If there is anything that makes A2hosting very unique, is likely how fast their performance has been over time. They have set bar very high with a remarkable page load speed of around 330ms. This isn’t a walk in the park considering how competitive the market is for the crown of fastest web host. A2hosting has the advantage of having servers on almost every continent.
Bluehost posts a page load of 400ms on average, a mark good enough to be among the best in web hosting industry. It also has a remarkable track record for uptime, going for 99.99% while the industry averages around 99.93%.
The minimum page load speed or server response time for a Godaddy hosted website is 405ms It has an uptime record of 94.95% and can handle significantly high traffic with a good server response time. So among the three giant web hosting companies, A2hosting posts the highest server response time.
iv) User Friendliness
All of the three companies, A2hosting, Godaddy and Bluehost have made their services easily accessible for users of any skill level. Each one of them offers cPanel with gives the user total control over the website. They also provide a wide variety of plugins to choose from in addition to various content management platforms like Drupal, WordPress and Joomla.
A2hosting provides its own website builder popularly known as the SiteBuilder. This feature allows users customize their website without the need to know a thing about HTML. It also provides Cloudflare CDN that ensures your site maintains the fast speed.