Bloggers, and especially beginner bloggers always have a hard time choosing the right web host for their website and it makes sense: there are too many options out there, so which one’s the right fit?
Here at Create Your Start, we get it and we want to help you with that. We know how confusing it can be to choose from so many options, features, and prices. That’s why we wrote a detailed review of Ipage Vs Bluehost to help you choose which one best suits your needs.
Table of Contents
Ipage Vs Bluehost: Security features
I don’t think I need to convince you that your site’s security is important. If you’re planning to turn your blog into a business (which you’re probably are), then keeping your site up running is one of your priorities.
If your sites crashes or goes down for some reason, this means potential customers and money lost, and that’s not good.
Here’s an overview of the security option offered by each one of these web hosts.
Ipage
Here’s a list of the security features offered by Ipage:
- Nightly backups and restores
- Access to website error logs
- Power supply backup
- Firewall
- Human monitoring of threats
- SiteLock
Bluehost
Bluehost has a long list of security features as well. Here’s what you can expect:
- Spam tools: Spam Hammer, Spam Assassin, and Spam Experts
- Cloudflare (to protect your site from DDos attacks which consists of sending huge amounts of bots to your site to crash the server and make your site inaccessible)
- Hotlink protection
- IP address blacklists (blocks certain devices from accessing your site)
- SSH access (usually useful for server admins to configure a server from a distance)
and a bunch of other optional security features you can add.
Ipage Vs Bluehost: Uptime and reliablity
Ipage
According to Pingdom, Ipage had an uptime that ranged from 99.90% to 100% in the last 10 months (at the time of writing this post) but most of the time they have a pretty good uptime of 99%.
You can see their uptime history for yourself here.
Bluehost
Using Pingdom, we can see that their uptime ranges from 99.91% to 100%. Compared to Ipage, their monthly uptimes are significantly better and are more consistent as a whole.
You can checkout their uptimes by going here.
Ipage Vs Bluehost: Upgrading your plan
At a certain point, you’ll eventually upgrade your plan when your website outgrows it because It makes sense: the bigger the website, the more resources it will use.
Let’s see how upgrading your plan works for both of them.
Ipage
They don’t say anything about this.If you want more info, you should contact them and ask about their policy on the matter. However, you should know that most companies charge the difference between the cost of your current plan and the higher-level plan you just bought.
Bluehost
They follow the standard process. For example, When you upgrade for a better plan, they will charge you for the difference between your plan and the other one you chose.
Ipage vs Bluehost: How the 30-day money back guarantee works
Ipage
They will refund all of your hosting costs minus the domain name so When you ask for your money back, you’ll still keep your domain name however so it’s not a total loss.
For instance, can use it to point somewhere else.
In addition, you get an “anytime” money back guarantee and They’ll refund you the portion of your hosting service that you haven’t used yet. For example, if you paid for 3 years and you ask for a refund on the second month, they’ll refund the remaining 34 months.
Bluehost
Similarly, they’ll refund your money minus the domain name and the add-ons and they’ll also refund your money for the unused portion of your hosting service, just like Ipage.
Ipage Vs Bluehost: Website speed and page load time
Also a very important factor you should consider when choosing the right web host. Let’s see how each one of them performs in terms of website loading speed.
Bear in mind that these results were taken from the load time history provided by Pingdom in the last 10 months at the time of writing this article.
Ipage
According to Pingdom, they have an average response time of 723 ms in April 2019 (when we wrote this post). However, when looking at their load time history we found that the response time jumps from 700 to 800 ms.
As you can see, their response time isn’t that great considering that there are many other competitors that offer much better loading times.
Bluehost
Pingdom tells us that Bluehost has an average response time of 266 ms in the same month. Also, when looking at their load time history we found that it can range from 200 to 400 ms on average. That’s pretty good.
I think you can clearly see the difference here: Bluehost is much faster, no dount about it.
Ipage Vs Bluehost: Do they offer helpful customer support?
Even if you’re a tech savvy kind of person, you’ll most likely need the help of a support team someday. Whether it’s your website that goes down or your business email that stops working, bad stuff happens and you want to know that the service provider is there to help you, right?
So are their support team effective? Let’s find out.
Ipage
They offer 24/7/365 support via phone, email and live chat. They also have a knowledge base where you can find hundreds of useful tutorials to help you out.
However, it seems like their customer support isn’t that good. When reading customer reviews, you’ll find that there’s a number of people that complain about their poor customer support. According to those customers, their emails sometimes get ignored and the overall experience is pretty bad so that’s something you should consider.
Bluehost
They also offer 24/7 support via phone or live chat. Their customer support is definitely fast, but they could be more knowledgeable. Again, there are many reviews that complain about their customer support not being able to solve their problems and having to go back and forth with them to address their issues.
It seems like their support team isn’t that great either. The one thing that can compensate for that is their extensive knowledge base where you’ll find tons of resources, and even a Youtube channel where they publish all sorts of tutorials to help you out.
If you’re the type of person who can solve minor tech issues by themselves then you can safely assume that you’ll rarely need their support anyways.
Still, you’re a paying customer and you should get what you pay for, right?
Ipage Vs Bluehost: Hosting plans and pricing comparison
Both of these web hosting companies offer a variety of hosting plans suitable for different people. Basically, we can put them in four different categories: cheap web hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting and WordPress hosting.
Let’s see what these plans have to offer.
Cheap hosting
We’ll start things off with cheap hosting plans. If you’re a newbie blogger, that’s probably the kind of hosting that you’re most interested in. These cheap hosting plans give you the essential features you need as a new blogger, plus some extra features that can be useful like ad credits and other stuff
Bluehost’s cheap hosting
Their basic plan is currently at $2.95. Here’s what they offer:
- 1 website
- 50 GB SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 1 included domain
- 5 parked domains
- 25 subdomains
- 1-click WordPress install
- 30-day money back guarantee
If you’re a blogger who’s just starting out, or a small business that wants to enter the online world, this plan is the perfect fit for you. It has all the features you might need for a very reasonable price.
However, you should know that this price ($2.95/month) is only applicable if you signup for the 36 months plan. If you decide to get the 12 months plan, for example, the price will jump to $4.95/month.
You should also know that these are the promotional prices, which means that they only apply when you first sign up. The hosting price will quickly rise once you renew your hosting plan.
If you take the starter plan, for instance, you’ll pay $7.99/month when you want to renew your plan. You can see that there’s a big difference between the price they advertise and the renewal rate. This is a common marketing tactic used by most hosting providers so you should also take this into consideration.
Bluehost offers four different shared hosting plans. The other ones have more features including spam experts, domain privacy, site backup, dedicated IP and other perks. If you want to check them out, here are the details.
Ipage’s cheap hosting
They only have one starter plan and it’s pretty cheap, even more affordablele than Bluehost hosting. You can get their basic plan for $1.99/month, and here’s are its core features:
- Unlimited disk space
- Scalable bandwidth
- Unlimited domain names
- Unlimited MySQL databases
- Free SSL certificate
- A free domain name for one year
- Professional email account
- 1-click WordPress install
- Site builder
As it is the case with Bluehost, don’t expect the price to stay the same after renewal. The price will jump to $7.99 once you renew your subscription.
WordPress hosting
Bluehost WordPress hosting
They offer 3 main categories of WordPress hosting :
- Shared WordPress hosting: which is very similar to the other cheap web hosting plans, but with some added features like marketing credits.
- WP pro (managed WordPress hosting): this category includes more expensive plans (the cheapest one starting at $19.95/month when you first buy it), it offers many additional features like jetpack site analytics, marketing center, 100 free premium WP themes, daily Scheduled backups, malware detection, and removal, domain privacy protection and a bunch of other features. You can see the full details here if you want.
- E-commerce: this plan offers 1 online store, 100 GB SSD storage, Storefront theme installed, Free SSL, domain privacy, $50 marketing credit and a free setup call. It costs $6.95/month (this is the introductory price)
Ipage WordPress hosting
They have 2 different plans:
- WP starter: it starts at $3.75/month and offers free one-year domain registration, unlimited storage, and bandwidth, pre-installed themes and plugins.
- WP essential: in addition to what the WP starter plan has to offer, you also get WordPress expert support, automatic malware removal, and SiteLock professional security.
VPS hosting
Bluehost VPS hosting
Bluehost offers 3 plans for VPS hosting. The cheapest one costs $18.99 and offers:
- 2 cores
- 30 GB SSD storage
- 2 GB of RAM
- One TB bandwidth
- One included domain
- 1 IP adress
- 30-day money back guarantee
- Free SSL certificate
The other 2 plans offer the same features with more performance.
Ipage VPS hosting
With their basic VPS plan that costs $19.99, you get :
- 1 Core CPU
- 1 GB RAM
- 40 GB disk space
- 1TB bandwidth
- 1 IP address
- Free 1 year domain registration
- cPanel
- CentOS 6.4
Dedicated hosting
Bluehost dedicated hosting
Bluehost offer 3 different plans that vary in price and performance. The cheapest plan ($79.99/month) includes:
- 4 Cores, 8 Threads
- 2.3 Ghz
- 500 GB storage
- 4 GB RAM
- 5 TB bandwidth
- 1 included domain
- 3 IP addresses
- 30-day money back guarantee
- 24/7 support
- Free SSL
Ipage dedicated hosting
They also offer 3 different plans. Their startup plan costs $119.99 and gives you the following:
- 2 Core CPU
- 4 GB of RAM
- 500 GB disk space
- 5 TB of bandwidth
- 3 IP addresses
- 1-year free domain
- cPanel
- CentOS 6.4
Pros and cons for each one
If you’re still unsure, here’s a list of pros and cons that will help you.
Bluehost
Pros:
- Great uptime
- Fast page loading
- Low promotional pricing
- Good security options
- Many integrations, add-ons and e-commerce features
- Endorsed by the WordPress.org team
- Easy to use
Cons:
- Their support isn’t very helpful
- The low pricing only applies to the 36 months plan
- You have to pay for site migration (which is usually free)
- Expensive renewal costs
Ipage
Pros
- Cheap
- Good security features
- They support a lot of other apps (Paypal, Google apps…)
- Good uptime
Cons:
- Relatively slow load times
- Expensive renewal costs
- No cPanel
Conclusion
So who’s the winner? It’s Bluehost, but…there’s something I want to tell you. According to many customer reviews, both Bluehost and Ipage have a bad relationship with their customers.
Basically, sometimes you get crappy customer service and sudden account suspension or things of that nature. What I want to say here is that they don’t seem to value their customers that much.
That’s why, instead of signing up to either one of these, I would strongly recommend Hostinger instead because a part from their pricing and features, they have much better customer feedback which tells you that they value their customers much more.
As I said earlier, you should get what you pay for and Hostinger gives you just that.