Executive summary:
- Everyone should choose A2 Hosting over Bluehost for better customer service, features, and speed.
- Why choose Bluehost instead of A2 Hosting? If you're already in their ecosystem. There is no obvious advantage.
Both A2 Hosting and Bluehost have very user-friendly shared hosting plans for beginners, making them ideal hosts to compare for beginners.
What we like about A2 Hosting in general is that they have a strong focus on speed and that they have very friendly pricing, with good customer support. Since they are independent (not owned by a conglomerate like EIG which owns Bluehost), they seem to pay more attention to their customers.
Bluehost is a huge host that offers very reasonable rates, but you have to sign up for a 3-year plan to get the best rates. They don't stand out in any particular way, but they get the job done. Historically they've had bad reviews, but they've improved things in the last few years.
Our quick recommendation: A2 Hosting beats Bluehost in most factors. Get 66% discount on A2 hosting here.
Read on for details. Last updated on September 24, 2024
A2 Hosting and Bluehost Price Comparison - Cheapest Shared Hosting Plans
If we look at the cheaper plans first, we can get a good idea of where things stand between these two hosts. I've highlighted some of the most important features that are worth considering, although this is not a complete list of all the features.
| A2 Hosting | Bluehost | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan name | Start | Basic |
| Discount price | 2.99$ | $2.95 |
| Normal price | 8.99$ | 7.99$ |
| Duration of the discount contract | 36 months | 36 months |
| Site migration | Included | 150$ for 5 locations |
| Websites | 1 | 1 |
| Customer support | 24/7/365 Email, Chat, Phone, Ticket. | 24/7 phone and chat. |
| storage | 100GB | 50GB |
| Unlimited Free | 5 | |
| Bandwidth | unlimited | unlimited |
| Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days | 30 days |
| Secure Sockets Layer | Free | Free |
| Staging | Included | No |
| Readiness | 99.9% | 99.9% |
A2 Hosting Pricing and Plans Details
Which A2 hosting plan is best for you? I would say that most people on WordPress who can afford $12 per month should go for their own WordPress hosting. For those on a tight budget, shared is a good place to start. Moreover, VPS plans and dedicated hosting give you more power.
A2 hosting discount alert: 84% is currently discounted
Currently, in September 2024, A2 Hosting is having a great sale with 84% off. This changes daily, so keep an eye on the changes or buy if it looks like a good deal. Click here to apply the discount.
When A2 doesn't have a sale, the pricing usually looks like this:
A2 Hosting Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals
If you want to keep track of A2 Hosting Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals updates, bookmark this page. This is where we'll get the latest information about deals and price fluctuations.
A2 Hosting generally has great prices throughout the year, so if you're ready to buy, you can usually get the latest offers here on their dedicated page.
Most people will choose A2 Hosting's shared hosting option, the question is which tier they want to move to. One thing to keep in mind is that the famous "up to 20x faster" option starts at the Turbo plan.
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But if you want to see A2 Hosting's entire suite of packages, you should know that it has everything from WordPress to VPS and even dedicated hosting:
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Bluehost pricing and plans details
Bluehost has very competitive pricing and is the flagship company of the Endurance International Group. Why does this matter to you as a potential buyer? You can assume that there will be strong stability for the company and that they will keep prices low, if they have had low prices for more than a decade.
However, check out this change. It used to be that Bluehost used to give you the best rates on a 36-month plan. Now the 12-month plan is the best. Why the change? I have to assume they realized that they can go back to charging customers the full price after 12 months (3-5 times the introductory price).
Taking a very quick look at Bluehost's range of hosting plans, we see:
| Joint | WordPress | Virtual Private Server | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sale price | $2.95/month | 19.95 per month | 18.99 dollars per month |
| Normal price | 7.99 per month | 29.99 dollars per month | 29.99 dollars per month |
| Best for | Beginners | WordPress | Companies |
A2 Hosting vs Bluehost Downtime/Uptime
A2 Hosting is not shy about stating that their hosting services are available 99.9% of the time. They provide historical background reports indicating how well their servers have performed since the advent of web hosting. They operate on the premise that providing quality service means not hiding anything. A reliable hosting service takes reliability one step further by offering a rollback tool that allows you to restore the website to a previous service point when you encounter issues. This is very useful if you make any mistakes, which is important for peace of mind.
A2 Hosting has data centers with their servers spread all over the world - in Michigan, Arizona, Amsterdam, and Singapore. Their data center page allows you to download files in each of these data centers to test which ones download faster for you - a very cool tool!
Bluehost stops short of providing an actual percentage of the time its hosting service keeps you up and running. However, current customers indicate that their service is available 99.9% of the time. When you experience a drop in service, the restoration process is quick, and you can be back up and running in no time. You have the opportunity to enhance the reliability of your hosting services with SSL and SSH encryption.
Winner: Tie - It's hard to say for sure what's best overall.
A2 Hosting Features vs. Bluehost
A2 Hosting checks most of the feature boxes you need. Every plan in their service includes unlimited data transfer and RAID-10 storage. You can have as many email accounts as your site needs along with administrative control over multiple domains at once. You can bring an existing domain on another hosting site to your A2 Hosting account for free. The packages have a CPanel control panel available to efficiently control your sites as well.
Some of A2 Hosting's most notable features from their site:
Bluehost has all the basics, but you get the feeling they're trying to cheat you when they get the chance. For example, the basic plan only includes 5 email accounts, while A2 Hosting includes unlimited. They also charge you $150 to migrate 5 websites.
On the upside, with Bluehost, each account has unlimited disk storage, email accounts and FTP accounts available. You also have the opportunity to host several different domain websites as well. Although you only get one website in the basic plan, Bluehost doesn't limit the number of domains you can manage at any given time. There is support for different coding types including PHP, Perl 5, Javascript, and Flash.
Winner: A2 Hosting has better features overall and is more generous for the same price.
A2 hosting vs. Bluehost customer support
In our opinion, customer support is perhaps the most important thing. Because the quality of customer support tells you a lot about the overall quality of the host. If a hosting company provides excellent customer support, it costs them time and money, and they want to minimize support tickets as much as possible, which means they will do everything they can to improve the overall quality of hosting so that you don't. Need to get support in the first place. It's a canary in the coal mine situation, and it's a great guideline to keep in mind when making a decision without analyzing every detail and driving yourself crazy.
Based on feedback from current customers, BlueHost has a lot of work to do in its customer service department. The hosting service claims to be available to its customers 24/7 through live chats, emails, and phone support systems.
Although most customers see things differently. They report that the hosting service is difficult to contact and offers little or no support once you manage to reach a technician.
Customers also receive a little help through video tutorials as well.
A library of video lessons is also available to help solve pressing issues.
A2 Hosting shines in the customer support department. All of our service technicians work out of the United States, making conversations readily available across the four major time zones. The hosting service takes its support one step further by providing you with developers on the other end of your support request. These individuals understand code and other technical languages that can make explaining your issue easier. Support services are available through live chats, email chats, phone calls, and an online ticketing system.
Winner: A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting vs. Bluehost Pricing
BlueHost's pricing structure starts at $2.95 USD per month with a discount (usually $7.99 USD per month) for the base-level shared hosting plan. The remaining shared hosting plans extend up to $13.95 USD per month and include at least 50GB of website space, 100MB of email account storage, and running at least one website domain. Their VPS hosting packages start at $29.99 per month and include 2GB of RAM, up to two IP addresses per account and a CPU core. A noticeably absent price feature in this hosting service is the current money-back guarantee policy. When something goes wrong, or you change your mind about using their service, you lose any money you've paid up to that point.
A2 Hosting offers virtually the same price, although they have historically done a better job in the pricing department. Their shared hosting plans start at $2.99 per month with a discount (normally $8.99 per month) and extend up to $9.31 per month. At these prices, you get unlimited storage and transfer space, a free SSD drive, five databases, and you can easily upgrade the service 20 times faster than competitors. Other packages include VPS hosting starting at $32.99 per month and dedicated server hosting starting at $99.59 per month.
A2 Hosting vs. Bluehost WordPress Hosting
If the statistics are correct, about 30%+ of you are planning to host a WordPress website on A2 Hosting or Bluehost.
A2 Hosting has insane support here because they've dedicated their own time and resources to creating WordPress features optimized for A2. They've configured a caching and speed plugin to make your WordPress experience as fast as possible. Check out our full list of the fastest web hosts if you want to compare speed across multiple hosts.
As explained in our customized A2 Hosting review, we've seen significant benefits in moving to A2 Hosting for speed.
Bluehost offers some WordPress features, and makes it easy to set up a WordPress site, but we don't see them going beyond that. It feels like a cash-in opportunity for them, not any real dedication. For some reason, the WordPress host is officially recommended, but that's likely from an old partnership, not for any recent reason.
Final recommendation
A2 Hosting and Bluehost are both excellent hosting companies that offer a lot of great features to customers. Both hosting services are affordable and dependable in terms of the amount of time your website will be up and running.
The final winner: A2 Hosting is ultimately the best choice because of its attention to detail and high-quality customer service features.
If you're looking to compare A2 Hosting and Bluehost with a few other hosts, check out some of our other posts:
Which is the best web hosting service, AWS or A2 Hosting? Find out by reading our AWS vs A2 Hosting comparison post. Also read our Bluehost vs GoDaddy post to see which of these major marketing hosting services comes out on top.
Updating the registry
- September 24, 2024 - Added executive summary and price updates.
- February 11, 2024 - Latest price updates, new screenshots and price verification
- 2020 - New updates and main image, new price update
Last updated on September 24, 2024 by Joe
