5 Best Bluehost Alternatives in 2020

Found in 2001 by former UNIX administrator Bryan Muthig as a hobby, the company was initially called Iniquinet, but was later renamed A2 Hosting. The company started life in 2 rooms in Ann Arbor, Michigan and has now grown to have a full-fledged support team and has data centers located around the world with thousands of customers. 

Since they are independently owned and comparatively small, they are relatively unknown compared with Bluehost hosting. Many point out that this may be because of their lack of marketing and focus on infrastructure. They claim that they know that what their customers care most about is the performance of their website. And for that very purpose, they host their websites on their SwiftServer platform, and offer solid state drives with their hosting packages. In fact, they say that they were the first hosts to offer such hosting and that such sites load 300% faster than traditional hosting services. 

Users also get access to the A2 optimized site accelerator with some plans that allow 1-click caching setup, to get you even faster page loads. Their services such as Memcached, OPcache or APC and turbo cache cut the response time in half and increases the speed even more.

Uptime is probably the most important factor when it comes to hosting. A simple reason for this is that if your website is down, your customers (existing or potential) cannot reach you), or if you are a blogger, your posts will not be seen. A2 says that they use the best business practices and commit to your site being up over 99.9% of the time. However, they do maintain that they are not responsible for circumstances beyond their control and outages. They urge you to read their server maintenance policy for more information.

One of their best features is the anytime money back guarantee. While other hosts, such as Bluehost for example, guarantee a 30-day return policy, which means that once the initial 30 days have passed, you cannot ask for a refund. But under A2’s policy, you can do it even after the first 30 days for a prorated refund for any unused services. And they guarantee no hassles. 

If you go through A2’s plans, you will find that they offer unlimited storage and data transfer in their most basic plan (and other plans as well). With their more premium plans, you will also get unlimited websites and databases. You also get a website transfer for free, meaning you can transfer your existing site from a different host to A2 absolutely worry-free.

When we speak of support, the company is proud of its US-based support and is prompt as well. They also feature a live chat button throughout their website which has proven to be quick and efficient, according to their customer reviews. Apart from this and ticketing support, A2 also has a knowledge base which is very well categorized and is supported by many articles and guides. 

Main Features:

Siteground is based out of Bulgaria and was founded in 2004. It has more than 1,900,000 domains and claims that it processes thousands of ticket, chat and phone call requests every single day. It offers to host your websites on the fastest web servers with extremely fast load times and on the best hardware.

Among shared hosts, SiteGround web host offers one of the best customer support experiences. They claim that there is always someone to pick up the phone so that the customer does not have to wait for more than a few seconds. Customers have often said that they answer their tickets quite fast. 

The company offers proprietary software to boost your server performance and help give you more functionality. They provide highly available networks which are supported by redundant electrical systems that prevent electrical outages by using the latest technology. 

While maintaining a website or even a WordPress blog, speed is of most extreme significance, since it improves the experience and search engine standings. SiteGround claims that their hardware is specially chosen by their system administrators, and additionally, to boost a website’s performance they use the latest in software and hardware. 

SiteGround uses SSD drives and the latest PHP releases with a built-in opcode cache for their cloud and sharing platforms which is very good if you have a WordPress site. They use Nginx in conjunction with their web server software to speed up the delivery of the static content. To provide free CDN to its customers, they have partnered with CloudFlare and that's why they compete as one of the best web hosting service in 2020.

The company also has made available a section of tutorials which cover numerous topics such as Joomla, WordPress, CloudFlare CDN, resellers, staging, SSH and cPanel. They also have a great knowledge base which is neatly divided into many sections and is easy to navigate.

The company has developed the SuperCacher technology, a website optimization technology to improve the performance of websites, and is quite compatible with popular CMS applications such as WordPress and Joomla. 

Main Features

SiteGround provides 3 plans for their shared web hosting; StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek. Here are some main features of these plans: 

InMotion hosting has been operational since 2001 and is considered one of the largest web hosting services in the world. It offers fast and reliable services to millions of customers worldwide and is based in Los Angeles, California. They have offices in both the East and West coasts and an impressive customer base, with over 300,000 customer domains.

InMotion offers several services that include managed hosting, dedicated servers, virtual private servers, reseller hosting and shared business hosting but are they better than Bluehost?

InMotion offers an all-inclusive help section with product guides, website tutorials, billing FAQs, and domain name setup info. It also includes sections on educational channels and community support. Customers can get in touch with the support team via a ticketing system, live chat or email. 

The knowledge base is quite extensive and also features a great community which is active, and while browsing through it, users can find answers to their unique problems. 

For no extra cost, you can migrate to InMotion from any other host. The technicians at this hosting company will provide you with tools that you can use to manually backup your website, but will charge you for frequent data restores and also back up your website’s data on a regular basis for free for up to 10 GB DDoS protection in your hosting plan is also provided at no extra cost and the domain is free for the first year. 

Main Features

InMotion offers reseller hosting, WordPress, dedicated servers and VPS hosting. Let us take a look at some features of their managed WordPress hosting plans: 

Dreamhost was founded by friends Michael Rodriguez, Dallas Bethune, Sage Weil and Josh Jones (while they were still undergraduates) in 1997 in Claremont, California and is one of the oldest hosting companies in existence. It hosts over 1.5 million websites and applications for small businesses, designers and developers and WordPress blogs. They have a customer count of over 400,000. 

Dreamhost offers many support options including trained staff that are available 24/7 to its customers via chat. Existing customers can also raise a ticket request through their control panel, or they can use a form available on the website. 

They have phone support as well, but only in the form of a callback for a small fee.

Their customer forum can be used to find a solution to almost any problem you may face. The forum is active and well-maintained and has been in use for many years. As a result, it has a lot of members and quite a few of them are experts in their fields.

The company has multiple data centers and a number of products and services such as DreamCompute (cloud computing service), DreamPress (one of the few hosts recommended by WordPress), and DreamObjects. Dreamhost also offers 4 types of web servers such as VPS, shared, cloud and dedicated. Dreamhost is an OpenStack Foundation Gold Member and has been a major supporter in the development of OpenStack.

Whether you are a new website owner or a seasoned one, you know the importance of uptime, and the company guarantees it. Dreamhost’s terms of service states that failure to provide a 100% uptime will result in customer compensation of one day of service for each hour the service is down.

Dreamhost has a click-to-edit site builder tool called Remixer for creating ready-to-publish websites in a few simple steps, and the user is not required to have any knowledge of coding.

Dreamhost offers a fully-featured shopping cart, ZenCart, that can be customized to modify the way it looks and various modules can be quickly installed to modify the functionality of the cart. ZenCart is an open-source system that is written in PHP — it’s user friendly and free! 

Features

Dreamhost offers a full refund on shared hosting plans if you cancel your plan within the first 97 days of opening your account. They have 2 plans and here are some features of these plans: