If you are looking for a reliable and affordable hosting provider, Bluehost and A2 hosting are two of the best options available. Both offer reliable performance and offer affordable hosting plans that are well-suited for both newbies and experienced website owners.
In this comparion, we’ll take a look at both, and see how they fare against each other in different areas such as performance, support and more. Below is a quick comparison of their shared hosting plans.
Bluehost vs A2 Hosting Comparison Chart
| Host | Bluehost | A2 Hosting |
| Â |  |  |
| Price | Check Price at Bluehost.com | Check Price at A2Hosting.com |
| Websites | Basic: 1 Plus: Unlimited Choice Plus: Unlimited Pro: Unlimited | Startup: 1 Drive: Unlimited Turbo Boost: Unlimited Turbo Max: Unlimited |
| Storage | Basic: 50GB Plus: Unlimited Choice Plus: Unlimited Pro: Unlimited | Startup: 100GB Drive: Unlimited Turbo Boost: Unlimited Turbo Max: Unlimited |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Free Domain | Yes (1 year) | No |
| Free SSL | Yes | Yes |
| CDN | Yes | Yes |
| Support | 24/7 chat, phone, email/tickets | 24/7 chat, phone, email/tickets |
| Free Site Migration | No | Yes |
| Uptime Guarantee | None | 99.9% |
| Money Back | 30 days | Anytime |
Plans
Both Bluehost and A2 hosting offer cheap shared hosting plans.
Bluehost and A2 hosting offer several hosting services such as shared, VPS, dedicated and WordPress hosting. Their prices are also very similar. To compare them, we’ll take a look at their shared hosting plans and prices.
Both offer four shared hosting plans to choose from. For A2 hosting, their shared plans are the following: Startup, Drive, Turbo Boost and Turbo Max. Startup is the cheapest plan and it is the most limited when it comes to features. Turbo Boost and Turbo Max are the more expensive options, and they come with features such as A2’s Turbo Servers, more RAM, A2 Optimized Site Caching and more. Turbo Boost offers the best value.
As for Bluehost, their shared plans are the following: Basic, Plus, Choice Plus and Pro. The Basic plan is the cheapest and most limited when it comes to features. You can only build one website with it and storage is limited to 50GB. Plus, Choice Plus and Pro comes with unlimited websites, unlimited storage and many more features. Choice Plus is the best choice when it comes to overall value.
Features
A2 hosting offers more useful features than Bluehost.
Both A2 hosting and Bluehost offer exclusive features, however, A2 hosting’s offerings are simply better and more useful for website owners. Here are some of the features that you will get with A2 hosting.
- Turbo Servers – A2 hosting’s Turbo servers come equipped with AMD EPYC CPUs and NVME drives that can really help improve your site’s performance. Note: access to A2 hosting’s turbo servers is not available on the cheaper shared hosting plans.
- Perpetual Security – You will get A2 hosting’s proprietary security on all plans, including the cheaper hosting plans. Perpetual security includes basic and advance security features for your site such as, DDoS protection, a virus scanner, a firewall, brute force defense and more.
- Free Site Migration – Transferring your site to a new host can be a long and frustrating process if you are not used to doing it. Free site migration that is handled by your new host is a major plus when transferring your site.
- Anytime Money Back – You can get a full refund within 30 days and a prorated refund after 30 days.
In contrast, here are some of the features offered by Bluehost
- Free Domain (1 year) – Getting a free domain for one year is a nice feature that webmasters on a budget should definitely take advantage of.
- Microsoft and Google Ad Credits – Having free advertising credits can jumpstart your website’s search engine performance.
- Drag and Drop Site Builder – Bluehost’s drag n’ drop site builder can be very helpful for both experienced and first time site owners.
Both Bluehost and A2 hosting offer SSD storage, a free SSL certificate, cPanel, free email accounts, free CDN and 24/7 customer support.
Performance
Bluehost and A2 hosting are very similar when it comes to uptime and load times.
Page loading speed and uptime are very important when choosing a host. Uptime is the time that your website is accessible to your visitors, while page load speed is the speed at which your website loads for your visitors. Needless to say, slow load times and a host that has frequent downtimes are not good for your website.
For uptime, both Bluehost and A2 hosting perform in-line with industry standards, achieving an uptime of 99.95%. Load times are also very close between the two, with Bluehost having an average of 600ms to A2 hosting’s 750-800ms load times.
Performance-wise, they are very similar, with Bluehost having a small advantage when it comes to load times. Both hosts offer SSD storage, so they are similar in that area as well. Overall, there’s not much difference between the two when it comes to performance.
Support
A2 hosting and Bluehost perform similarly when it comes to customer support.
Customer support is very important when choosing a host because even if you do everthing perfectly, you will face some issues at some point. Both newbies and experts can benefit from a hosting provider that can give proper customer support.
A2 hosting and Bluehost both offer 24/7 support via chat, phone and email/tickets. Both are responsive, however, we found that Bluehost had the faster response time. As for dealing with issues regarding our account/sites on both hosting providers, they both perform well enough. Aside from their 24/7 support, both also have extensive knowledge bases that are useful.
Verdict
A2 hosting and Bluehost are very similar when it comes to performance, however, A2 hosting offers more useful features.
If you are looking for an affordable host, A2 hosting is one of the best. Their plans are very affordable and they are feature-packed. Features such as free site migration, Turbo Servers, free security and the ability to choose your data center are very useful for both newbies and experienced webmasters. Some of these features also help improve your site’s performance when it comes to search engine ranking and conversions.
As for Bluehost, they are still a good choice, especially for first time website owners or those on a budget. Their customer support is good, they offer a free domain for the first year, and their drag and drop site builder is very useful for users that want an easy way to build and design their site.
FAQs
It will depend entirely on what hosting features you need. Overall, A2 hosting provides better value but for some, Bluehost’s feature might be more appealing.
Yes, Bluehost is one of the best hosts for beginners as they have affordable shared hosting plans that come with a user friendly site builder.
A2 hosting is a very popular host, especially their shared hosting plans. Their plans are on the cheap side and they come with some very useful features such as free site migration, SSD storage, perpetual security and more.
Yes, A2 hosting uses cPanel, just like Bluehost.
