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A2 Hosting vs BlueHost – Similar Pricing, Which is Better?
Updated: 2022-03-23 / Article by: Jerry Low
About BlueHost
BlueHost is more than hosting today – the company also offers professional website design and marketing services.
BlueHost is one of the older shared hosting service providers in the business and today has grown into a highly commercial giant. Acquired by Endurance International Group (EIG) in 2020, the company also has become the proverbial octopus, with tentacles in almost every aspect of the web development and marketing business.
A2 Hosting, on the other hand, doesn’t have such a distinctive history but instead has come across my attention time and again as an excellent host with a sterling reputation.
Pitting the two together plan to plan, it doesn’t really come to the fore that there is anything remarkably different. BlueHost shared hosting plans start out at a modest $2.95 per month with 50 GB SSD storage and a free one-year domain. A2 Hosting, on the other hand, starts off at $2.99 per month with 100GB SSD storage without the free domain.
With a paltry dollar or so as a difference in sign-up pricing, A2 further pulls ahead with its Anytime Money-back Guarantee; while BlueHost edges off with slightly lower renewal prices at the end of contract ($9.99 vs $10.99 per month for basic shared hosting).
Both A2 and BlueHost offer a rock-solid combination of powerful performance and flexibility in very competitively priced packages. The performance of sites on their plans regularly clock in at sub-600ms speeds with a good uptime track record.
Feature-wise, there are a lot of similarities between A2 Hosting and BlueHost at similar price points. Yet the devil, as they say, is in the details. There are some critical shortcomings in BlueHost plans that unfortunately makes it fall behind in performance compared to A2 Hosting.
The first reason for A2 Hosting’s speed advantage is its Turbo server option which it claims can help sites load pages up to 20x faster. It also has unique customized in-house optimization and lets its users have flexibility in server locations. This can make another big difference, especially for sites that are regional-specific or targeted.
These are major features in an industry that must compete neck to neck on technology points. You might say one has NVMe storage and another has not for example, but there no real way to overcome a tried and tested feature such as custom optimization on Turbo A2 Hosting servers.
A2 Hosting Speed Features
Features
Startup
Drive
Turbo Boost
Turbo Max
SSD Storage
100 GB
Unlimited
N/A
N/A
NVMe Storage (3x Faster)
N/A
N/A
Unlimited
Unlimited
Physical Memory
700 MB
1 GB
2 GB
4 GB
Core
1
2
2
4
Server Locations
4
4
4
4
HTTP/3 (30% faster)
No
No
Yes
Yes
A2 Optimized
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Server Rewind Backups
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Signup Price
$2.99/mo
$5.99/mo
$6.99/mo
$12.99/mo
Final Thoughts
Personally, I feel that if you aren’t too fussy with performance and are only seeking some form of simple online presence, then either one of the affordable shared plans by BlueHost or A2 Hosting can be considered.
For anything else I would strongly recommend you look at A2 Hosting.
This is not to say that BlueHost is a terrible provider, especially since it’s officially still an officially recommended WordPress.org host. However, when it comes to a comparison between these two big names in the business, I can find no option but to recommend A2 Hosting.
Founder of WebHostingSecretRevealed.net (WHSR) - a hosting review trusted and used by 100,000's users. More than 15 years experience in web hosting, affiliate marketing, and SEO. Contributor to ProBlogger.net, Business.com, SocialMediaToday.com, and more.