You may have done a quick Google search on web hosting and have realized that there are many different types of web hosting available. If you have WordPress, you are probably watching a battle between WP Engine and Bluehost unfold. That’s great! These two services are some of the best in the business.
Bluehost offers a wide variety of plans along with WordPress based hosting plans, such as shared hosting, vps, and dedicated hosting. On the other hand, WP Engine is mainly focused on providing managed WordPress hosting solutions.
I wanted to make this guide for you so you can make the best decision for yourself. I have analyzed some factors that affect my conclusions on the issue of Bluehost vs WP Engine .
What is important to me is the uptime, speeds and costs of these services. Let’s dive into the comparison.
Table of Contents
Activity time report – You never want downtime
You want a reliable service that gives you results. You do not want your customers to see your website because that will discourage them. Most web hosting services guarantee up to 95% uptime. However, those small percentages of potential downtime can still make a big difference. When looking at WP Engine vs Bluehost, this small difference in uptime should be important.
WP Engine
WP Engine offers an uptime of 99.9%. They do this with very impressive technology and techniques:
- Great upgrade paths
- Daily backups
- Preparation area: you can try themes, plug-ins and web pages without affecting your live site
- History snapshots: with a single click you can restore the histories of the entire website
- Unlimited data storage and transfer
- EverCache – helps increase the speed of large files
All these factors help keep WP Engine uptime at a rate of 99.9%. This means that the WP Engine is only idle for up to 10 hours a year. That is quite amazing. It is almost impossible for your website visitors to experience some downtime.
Bluehost
Bluehost guarantees an uptime of 99%. It tends to be slightly lower (0.9%) compared to WP Engine.
Bluehost redirects your network through a global network called CDN. They support it with Cloudflare. It makes your connection very secure and fast. They have multiple servers worldwide and are located in a perfect environment for servers to run smoothly. All your servers are backed by a power supply that is not cut or interrupted.
Bluehost has a diesel generator that works even without electricity. Finally, they also have backups, so when a system fails, they can immediately use the backup. However, your system has not yet failed, so you have not had to use it.
The downtime of Bluehost is a maximum of 20 hours per year, which is not much.
Winner: WP Engine
As you can see, WP Engine vs Bluehost has a clear winner of uptime. Bluehost’s uptime is worse than Bluehost’s.
Bluehost vs WP Engine: Speed
Connection speed is important in the debate between Bluehost and WP Engine. When a visitor clicks on your website, you want the messages between your website and the server to be as fast as possible. In this way, your customers will not have to wait for the pages to load. This is most obvious when a user is uploading an image, video or other data that has a great loading time.
WP Engine
WP Engine focuses on sending information with WordPress. This means that if you are using WordPress, your connection is the best. There are no distractions from other websites. Its average running speed is said to be just over a second.
Bluehost
Bluehost is a web hosting service for all types of websites. Compared to WordPress, they are slower than WP Engine. There are many more systems and software in Bluehost that are flexible and do not depend so much on creating the best speeds for WordPress.
Bluehost also executes a CPU throttling scheme. This means that when a website seems to be loading too many resources, they will try to slow it down. This is to protect Bluehost from hackers and scammers. They don’t run it on all websites, only on websites that Bluehost finds suspicious or thinks is a potential threat.
In general, the average speed of Bluehost is approximately half a second slower than that of WP Engine when connected to WordPress. That is still impressive.
Winner: WP Engine
The speed in the WP Engine vs Bluehost for WordPress has a clear winner. WP Engine is faster and is designed specifically for WordPress.
WP Engine vs Bluehost: Price
You want to buy something that is cheap. However, cheap things can mean that quality is much worse. Therefore, it is good to consider how the costs match the quality when choosing WP Engine vs Bluehost.
WP Engine
WP Engine is much more expensive and much less flexible. Your cheapest plan costs $ 29 per month. If you buy the annual plan, you can get 2 months of free hosting service to try it and see if you like it.
The plan itself is not fantastic. You only get very limited space and domain names. Your basic plan only allows you to store 10 GB with an allowed domain. You can see that this is mainly used for WordPress websites, since people do not use WordPress to create massive websites. Simply create a very attractive blog with many entries, images and videos.
Your most expensive plan is only a small update, but the price is $ 100 per month. Updates include 10 domain names and 20 GB of storage.
Bluehost
The basic Bluehost plan is also designed for a single website. However, it is much cheaper. At a cost of $ 2.95, you can use many of the features of the Bluehost hosting service.
The most expensive plans cost money but are much cheaper than the WP Engine prices. Your plus Choice Plus plan is $ 5.45 per month and the professional plan is $ 13.95. However, for Bluehost, you need to buy your services for one year and cannot sign up month by month.
Their more advanced plans also have much more space and domain name registration. You can even get unlimited space and domain names in certain plans.
Winner – Bluehost
It is quite obvious that Bluehost is cheaper and is designed for larger websites and companies that own different brands. When it comes to WP Engine vs Bluehost, you can see the two services aimed at different audiences and it is reflected in your pricing scheme.
Conclusion
Bluehost takes everything.
Bluehost is designed for web hosting. While WP Engine may have benefits, its narrow design makes them inflexible. This will come to haunt you in the future or if you plan to have your website running for a long time. If you are really looking for a WordPress blog, you can consider WP Engine but it is still much more expensive than what you get with Bluehost. I don’t think it’s worth the cost at all.
If you want to see how WordPress works with WP Engine, you can watch this video for more information.
