WP Engine vs Bluehost: Which provider truly has the best managed WordPress hosting services? Bluehost and WP Engine are both leading WordPress hosting providers on the market, but it’s time to choose the real champion.
While WP Engine is a WordPress-centric managed hosting solution, Bluehost provides you with a wide variety of hosting options, including managed WordPress hosting.
In our unbiased WordPress hosting comparison between Bluehost and WP Engine, we’ll explain how they differ from each other. We’ll also help you decide which one is the best solution for your needs.
Bluehost vs WP Engine – Overview
Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting providers on the market. It’s also an officially recommended WordPress hosting service by WordPress.org.
Bluehost offers a wide variety of WordPress-centric hosting plans, such as shared WordPress hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and WooCommerce hosting. On top of WordPress-centric options, they also provide shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting services.
WP Engine, on the other hand, is focused solely on providing managed WordPress hosting solutions. Whether you’re starting a blog or running an enterprise-level business with off-the-chart growth, you’ll find the right hosting solution to meet your needs.
Aside from WordPress hosting, you’ll also get premium access to 35+ StudioPress themes for free. They also equip you with a suite of performance and integration solutions to build and grow your business.
Uptime and availability
WP Engine shows a slightly superior performance in terms of reliability and speed. Both hosting services have impressive uptimes, with WP Engine slightly edging out Bluehost with a 99.99% uptime over a 30-day period compared to Bluehost’s 99.63%.
This difference in uptime is reflected in the number and duration of outages, where WP Engine experienced proactive security measures and 24/7 uptime monitoring.
WP Engine’s advantage is more pronounced in terms of server response time. It boasted an average response time of 489ms, which is significantly lower than the shared hosting industry standard and faster than Bluehost’s average server response times just under one second.
This suggests that WP Engine is not only more reliable in maintaining uptime but also in delivering faster website loading speeds, making it a preferable option for users prioritizing performance.
- Also, read: WP Review
Which one has better hosting performance?
When it comes to general performance, both Bluehost and WP Engine offer commendable hosting options. Bluehost provides SSD storage across all plans, ensuring quicker access times, while its built-in CDN enhances global speed through image optimization and edge caching. Bluehost also boasts a global data center network.
WP Engine, known for its fast page load times, employs EverCache® technology to handle high traffic efficiently. Their fully-managed CDN with over 200 points of presence ensures fast global delivery. Data centers are spread across key regions, providing low latency for international users.
Website speed
Bluehost delivers top-tier speed for WordPress sites with its SSD storage and optimized infrastructure, increasing CPU frequency for better performance.
On the other hand, WP Engine leverages EverCache® and the latest PHP versions to improve speed and handle numerous requests per second. WP Engine’s optimization for Core Web Vitals and comprehensive real-time monitoring ensures consistently fast load times, critical for both user experience and SEO.
Scalability
Bluehost offers various hosting plans, including dedicated servers, to scale resources, and the process involves upgrading to higher plans. With WP Engine, scalability is built into its architecture, handling traffic spikes efficiently without manual upgrades. The isolated resources ensure stable performance, but specific details about the costs to scale were not provided.
Bluehost vs WP Engine – Ease of Use
Bluehost constantly revamps their onboarding experience to ensure anyone can easily launch a website without prior experience. They offer a free domain name, free SSL, 1-click WordPress installs, and everything else you need to get your site up and running.
Conversely, WP Engine is focused on high-traffic websites and enterprise-level businesses. They handle all the technicalities of optimizing your server for improved performance. You get a fine-tuned hosting setup that’s built specifically to operate WordPress sites. They don’t allow you to install any plugins for boosting your site speed, like CDN or caching plugins.
While you can run a WordPress website on WP Engine without having to worry about optimization and WordPress security, the reality is that it’s not the right solution for everyone. Additionally, there’s a bit of learning curve to tackle if you host your site on WP Engine.
Bluehost vs WP Engine – Features
Bluehost hosting is primarily geared towards beginner-level users, so you can expect all beginner-level features to start a blog or website, including unmetered bandwidth, SSD storage, free SSL, 1-click installers, etc.
With a slightly more expensive plan, you’ll get unlimited email accounts, unlimited SSD storage, site backups, and more.
Being a managed WordPress hosting solution, WP Engine promises high availability, powered by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.
Their hosting plans come with a wide variety of built-in tools to help you build, test, and migrate your site. With every hosting plan, you’ll get premium access to 35+ StudioPress themes for free. On top of that, you’ll also have 1-click tools to set up development, staging, and production environments.
Price
Winner WP Engine: Superior managed WordPress hosting with a strong focus on performance and support.
Evaluating the pricing of plans among various hosting providers can be complex due to their differing pricing and renewal strategies. Additionally, certain plans require annual commitments, which adds to the difficulty of making comparisons.
The prices listed are based on monthly commitments; plans requiring annual commitments are indicated. Additionally, although some providers offer identical plans for WordPress and shared hosting, we have created separate tables for each to enhance clarity.
Bluehost offers a diverse range of hosting plans including shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, and WooCommerce hosting. Their shared hosting plans start as low as $2.99 monthly with key features like free CDN, SSL, and daily backups.
WP Engine specializes in managed WordPress hosting with plans beginning at $20 monthly, offering enhanced security, automated backups, and premium themes. Bluehost’s shared hosting plans are feature-rich, but WP Engine’s managed WordPress plans offer superior performance and support tailored for WordPress sites, making it the preferred choice for businesses focused on their WordPress ecosystem.
Customer support
When comparing Bluehost and WP Engine, both provide extensive customer support options, but WP Engine stands out with its higher customer satisfaction and advanced features.
WP Engine offers 24/7 support via phone and live chat, while Bluehost also provides 24/7 support through live chat and limited phone support hours. Both companies have comprehensive knowledge bases, but WP Engine has additional premium support options, giving access to experienced staff for those who opt for higher-tier plans.
WP Engine provides specialized tools, such as access to PHP/Apache error logs, and enhanced security features, including DDoS protection and managed WAF. Bluehost has eliminated ticket-based support in favor of live chat and phone support, offering expedited support for dedicated hosting issues and multi-server management.
WP Engine further impresses with a 60-day money-back guarantee, compared to Bluehost’s 30-day policy. Overall, WP Engine’s combination of specialized tools, security features, and higher customer satisfaction sets it apart.
Recap: Bluehost vs WP Engine
For beginners, Bluehost is the best choice as it comes with a wide variety of WordPress hosting plans. When starting out, you can choose their WordPress hosting plan, which costs just $1.99 per month.
WP Engine, on the other hand, is one of the best managed WordPress hosting solutions available on the market. If you don’t want to optimize your WordPress hosting on your own, then you might want to consider WP Engine for hosting your site.
